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I have death within me, not the distant death,
The one we suppose and that must come,
But death already fixed and near,
And I know the point from which I shall perish.
It is there, I feel its peaceful work
Which until now has not been painful,
But in a few months will become terrible;
I have seen some die, I shall die like them!
It is a little weight, tension, discomfort,
A brief pain, a tugging,
A little dull and subterranean pain,
Followed at once by drowsiness;
It is little, it is nothing, not even a hindrance,
Yet this pain has I know not what
Of dominance, of vitality, of gravity,
In which the great distress presses;
A deadly tool does its work in me,
And I know the time it takes to finish
The hand that holds it and operates it;
I have four or five months still to die;
I have four or five months still to be able
To hear laughter and human words;
I could count what each dawn
Leaves me of living days in my hands.
Already the Universe draws away and recedes,
I see it confused like a sea bottom;
It is I who spread the heavy twilight
Where the immensity of things is lost.
I carry within myself a deep night,
Which will be endless, and in a short time
Overflowing from me will cover the world;
I feel it filling my being: I wait!
Not without revolt and without bitterness
I shall die; I loved light, art,
Men to whom the heart grows accustomed,
The ever-new feasts of the gaze;
I had tried to make myself a soul
From a little goodness, a little knowledge;
It was, I grant, a poor flame
But in which the brightness of Duty was purified.
Dreadful moment! To fall from the height
Where the I knows itself, and creates a will
Like a crystal, into the ignoble abyss
Of the unconscious and black nothingness!
Above all, I feel the dark anger
Of the crime by which perishes carried away
The being consecrated by the august mystery,
The sublime effort of having existed!
I still suffer only through the thought
Of the approaching farewell that will be accomplished;
But in a few days will be begun
The dreadful agony in which I must end.
I know what it is; it is frightful;
The longest torture and the most cruel
Beside it is sweet; I am guilty
Only of being born man and being mortal.
I shall try nevertheless to have courage,
To clench my teeth, to keep my cries,
I shall follow death to its dark task,
Hiding my defeat with my contempt.
If I die as I wish,
I shall have on my lip a rictus of pride,
When the carpenter nails on my head
The dark and heavy lid of the coffin.
Auguste Angellier
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-die-auguste-angellier/