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Tell me, what is the step
Of the thousand steps that come and go
On the great roads of space,
Tell me, what is the step
That gently, one evening, before my low door
Will stop?
It is humble, my door,
And poor, my house.
But these things do not matter.
I watch the whole horizon return to my home
At every hour of the day, opening my window;
And light and shadow and the wind of seasons
Are the joy and the strength and the impulse of my being.
If I no longer have in me that anguish of God
That made saints and martyrs die in Rome,
My heart, which has changed only in bonds and vows,
Feels within it the love and the anguish of man.
Tell me, what is the step
Of the thousand steps that come and go
On the great roads of space,
Tell me, what is the step
That gently, one evening, before my low door
Will stop?
I will seize the hands, in my two outstretched hands,
Of this man who will come
From the ends of the earth, with his step;
And before the shadow and its hundred suspended flames
Up there, in the firmament,
We will be silent for a long time
Letting the benevolent silence work
To soothe the emotion and the double cadence
Of our two beating hearts.
It does not matter from where he comes to me
If he is someone who loves and believes
And who raises and sustains
The same ardor that rises in me.
Then how moved we both will be to be
Ardent and brotherly, for one another, suddenly,
And how proud our two hearts will be to be human
And clear and trusting without yet knowing each other!
We will tell each other our life with the mad desire
To be sincere and true to the depths of one’s soul,
To merge in one flow: errors, pardons, and blames,
And to weep together on bended knees.
Oh! beautiful and sudden joy! Oh! rare and harsh rapture!
Oh! sharing of strength and daring and emotion,
Oh! gazes descended to the depths of oneself
That rise again laden with an immense tenderness,
You will so well unite our double fervor
Of men who, all at once, are exalted by themselves
That you will lift to the supreme plane
Their pathetic love and their total happiness!
And now
That we are here at the window
Before the firmament,
Having learned to know each other
And loving each other,
We watch, tell me, with what attraction,
The universe that speaks to us through its silence.
We hear it also confess to us
With its stars and its forests and its mountains
And its breeze that comes and goes through the fields
Brushing at the same time both the rose and the holly.
We listen to the spring babbling through the grass
And the supple branches singing around the flowers;
We understand their hymn and surprise their word
And our love fills with new ardors.
We change each other, feeling ourselves together
Live and burn with an intensely human fire,
And in our being where the future hopes and trembles,
We sketch the heart of the man of tomorrow.
Tell me, what is the step
Of the thousand steps that come and go
On the great roads of space,
Tell me, what is the step
That gently, one evening, before my door
Will stop?
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-passerby-of-an-evening-emile-verhaeren/