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The wisteria is faded and the hawthorn is dead;
But here comes the season of the flowering heather
And on this evening so calm and sweet, the brushing wind
Brings you the scents of the poor Campine.
Love them and breathe them in, thinking of its fate—
Its land is bare and harsh and the wind wages war there;
The pond makes its holes, the sand makes it its prey,
And the little that is left to it, it gives still.
In autumn, long ago, we lived on it,
On its plain and its woods, on its rain and its sky,
Until December when the angels of Christmas
Crossed its legend with their great wingbeats.
Your heart grew more sure, more simple and more human there;
We loved there the people of the old villages,
And the women who spoke to us of their great age
And of fallen spinning wheels their hands had worn.
Our calm house in the misty moor
Was bright to the eyes and easy to welcome,
Its roof was dear to us and its door and its threshold
And its hearth blackened by the smoky peat.
When night spread its total splendor
Over the countless and pale and vast drowsiness,
We received there lessons from silence
Whose ardor our soul has never forgotten.
Feeling ourselves more alone in the deep plain,
The dawns and the evenings penetrated us more;
Our eyes were more open, our hearts were more gentle
And filled to the brim with the fervor of the world.
We found happiness by not demanding it,
The sadness of the days was even good to us
And the little sunlight of this late autumn
Charmed us all the more because it seemed weak and weary.
The wisteria is faded, and the hawthorn is dead;
But here comes the season of the flowering heather.
Remember, this evening, and let the brushing wind
Bring you the scents of the poor Campine.
Emile Verhaeren
Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.
Text published on Poésies 123: https://www.poesies123.com/en/poem-the-wisteria-is-faded-and-the-hawthorn-is-dead-emile-verhaeren/