To Belgium

Poem by Emile Verhaeren Period 19th century

Alas, since the days of the supreme combats,
Your companions are fright and misfortune;
You have no homeland left but shreds of dunes
And plains ablaze on the horizon, over there.

Antwerp and Ghent and Liège and Brussels and Bruges
Were torn from you and groan far away
Without your still-valiant eyes being their witnesses
Nor your still-armed arms being their refuge.

You are she in deepest mourning who lives with the sea
To learn from it to resist beneath the storms
And you dream and you weep, but you persist
In the terror and in the pride of your reverses.

You feel immensely great, though vanquished,
You were loyal and clear and firm, as in the time
When honor beneath the skies affirmed itself dazzling
When glory was truly worth being lived.

Your poor corner of soil where still stands upright,
Facing the storm, a king with his armed faith,
You still people it with cannons and with armies,
To hold it tragically unto the end.

You raise yourself so high that you are solitary
In glory, in beauty, in sorrow
And each one exalts you and admires you in his heart,
As never a people was on earth.

What does the anguish of your fate matter to that love
And that Ypres be a desert, and Dixmude, a ruin,
And that as empty and hollow as a dark chest,
There rise in the depths of evening the immense dead belfry.

At the hour when this ash is still the Fatherland
We love it on our knees with such an impulse
That from each of the ransacked and tottering walls,
We would kiss the shattered and bruised stone.

And if tomorrow the German man, sly and mad,
Should finish biting you in his pallid grasp,
Sweet beloved Belgium, hope and believe all the same:
Your country put to death is immortal, in us.

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-to-belgium-emile-verhaeren/