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The whole infinite shines through the veils
That the fingers of radiant winters weave for it
And the dark and deep forest of the heavens
Lets fall toward us its foliage of stars.
The winged sea, with its waves of shadow and moiré,
Traverses, under golden fires, its pale immensity;
The moon is clear and its diamonded rays
Calmly bathe the brow of the promontories.
There, far off, making and unmaking their knots,
Go the great rivers of silver, through the translucent night;
And one thinks one sees marvelous acids gleam
In the cup the lake holds out toward the blue mountains.
Light, everywhere, bursts into bloomings
That the shore fixes or the wave sways;
The islands are nests where silence falls asleep,
And ardent halos float on the horizons.
All is haloed and gleams from zenith to nadir.
Long ago, those exalted by faith and its mysteries
Perceived, in the authoritative cloud,
The hand of Jehovah passing and resplendent.
But today the eyes that see, scan up there,
No longer some ancient god who exiles himself,
But the tangled growth of marvelous problems
That veil from us the force, in its red cradle.
O these brewings of life where boils in scattered fires
Through the infinite fecund matter!
These fluxes and refluxes of worlds toward worlds,
In a swaying from always to never!
These tumults burned with speed and noise
Whose violence we do not hear roaring
And from which there nonetheless falls this colossal silence
That makes the peace, the calm and the beauty of nights!
And these spheres of flame and gold, ever farther,
Ever higher, from abyss to abyss and
From shadow to shadow,
So high, so far, that all calculation fails and sinks
If it would seize their mad numbers between its fists!
The whole infinite shines through the veils
That the fingers of radiant winters weave for it
And the dark and deep forest of the heavens
Lets fall toward us its foliage of stars.
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-the-glory-of-the-heavens-emile-verhaeren/