Emile Verhaeren

“ Each bucket and pulley, it creaks and it wails;
By cisterns of farmyards, the pulleys and pails
They creak and they cry,
The whole of sad death in their melancholy.
The wind, it sends scudding dead leaves from the birches
Along o'er the water, the wind of November,
The savage, fierce wind;
The boughs of the trees for the birds' nests it searches,
To bite them and grind.
The wind, as though rasping down iron, grates past,
And, furious and fast, from afar combs the cold
And white avalanches of winter the old.
The savage wind combs them so furious and fast.
The wind of November. ”

“ Crystal brilliance to the air;
We hear the sounds of water and the brush of wings.
Oh! how your eyes are beauteous at this hour
When our silver lake is gleaming in the sight
Of the day arising;
Your forehead radiant and your heart-beat light.
Intensity of life, its goodness and its power,
Like to a mighty blessedness
Of your soul are part,
So that to contain the anguish and the stress,
Suddenly your hands have clasped my own,
Laying them, as though with fear,
Against your heart. ”

“ But now are the days when heather-bloom is seen,
Remember these, and let the rustling wind
Bring you the fragrance of the starved Campine.
IV
Draw your chair to mine
And stretch your hands to the hearth',
That I may see between your fingers
Shine
The ancient flame;
And look upon the fire
Quietly, with your eyes
That have no fear of any light,
So that for me they be the same,
Yet franker when the blaze leaps higher
Making them as from deep within you, bright.
Ah, how fair still is our life and fain! ”

“ The quiet footfalls of our Dream.
XXVII
The gift of body, when the soul is given,
Is naught but harmony
Of two tendernesses driven
One to the other, fervidly.
Glory in thyself thou findest sweet.
So fair in thy fresh purity,
Only to offer me
The wondrous gift complete.
I come to thee, and know
Exaltation in this gift of thine;
Always the truer, the more pure I grow
Since thy dear body gave itself to mine.
Love! oh, may it overflow
Our hearts and be the reason in our lives,
Whose maddest happiness is one that strives
Toward the madness of a trust divine. ”

“ I look at you and I discover you each day, so intimate is your gentleness or your pride: time indeed obscures the eyes of your beauty, but it exalts your heart, whose golden depths peep open.
Artlessly, you allow yourself to be probed and known, and your soul always appears fresh and new; with gleaming masts, like an eager caravel, our happiness covers the seas of our desires.
It is in us alone that we anchor our faith, to naked sincerity and simple goodness; we move and live in the brightness of a joyous and translucent trust. ”

“ Because the tempest and wind and wet
Vex them with ceaseless scourge and fret.
The ground is nothing but pits and cones,
Deep graves in every corner yawn;
The frost in the winter cracks the stones,
And when the summer in June is born
One hears, 'mid the silence that pants for breath,
The germinating and life of Death
Below, among the lifeless bones.
Since ages longer than he can know,
The grave-digger brings his human woe,
That never wears out, and lays its head
Slowly down in that earthy bed. ”

“ To every movement of its thousand hands
Of palms and leaves.
And the good shade where it accepts,
After long journeyings,
Our steps,
Pours on the weary limb
A force of life and sweetness like
Its mosses dim.
When the lake is playing with the wind and sun,
It seems a crimson heart
Within, all ardent, has begun
To throb with the moving wave;
The gladiolus and the fervent rose,
Which in their splendour move unshadowèd,
Upon their vital stems expose
Their cups of gold and red.
Within the garden there is healthfulness. ”

“ And the flowers of my eyes, pale yet bold,
Before they close, shall render back its light.
Sun, I loved your strength and clarity, indeed!
My sweet and fiery poems at their height
Have held you captive in the heart of them;
Like field of wheat that surges in the might
Of summer wind my words exalted you.
Oh sun, who bring to birth and flower the stem,
Oh immense friend, of whom our pride has need,
In that so grave, imperious hour and new,
When my old heart sadly endures the test,
Be you still its witness and its guest! ”

“ The million laws of nature's realm
Are stirring about thee.
The silver tides from all the universe o'erwhelm
Thy heart, but thou hast naught of fear or strife,
For thy soul knows—it is that love may be,
The love that is the work of life
And its mystery in thee.
Take then this peace the skies have sent,
And lay it to thy soul, since fear has gone,
This peace that floats, like some strange dawn,
Across the midnight of the firmament.
XI
How swiftly is she caught in ecstasy,
With her clear eyes of leaping flame;
She, so sweet with clarity,
Meek before life's sternest claim. ”

“ Gently, more gently still, kiss my lips, and say to me those words that are sweeter at each dawn when your voice repeats them, and you have surrendered, and I love you still.
The day rises sullen and heavy; the night was crossed by monstrous dreams; the rain and its long hair whip our casement, and the horizon is black with clouds of grief.
Gently, more gently still, cradle my head in your arms, my fevered brow and my weary eyes; you are my hopeful dawn, with its caress in your hands and its light in your sweet words ”

“ Your dear hands that still are sweet
Have somehow suffered from the loss
Of light about their finger-tips
That touched my forehead, like the dawn-kissed moss.
Your body that was fair and young
That I did with my thoughts endow,
No longer now is fresh as dew,
Your arm no longer like the white, clean bough.
All falls, alas, and fades away,
All changes now: your voice once smooth,
Your body, lowered like a shield
To spill the precious victories of youth.
And yet my heart says still with fervent stress:
What matter that the years grow heavier? ”

“ Abyss to abyss still floating, onward from shade to shade!
So far, so high, all reck'ning the wisdom of man has made,
Before those giddy numbers must shrink in his hands and die!
Shining in dim transparence, the whole of infinity lies
Behind the veils that the finger of radiant winter weaves;
And down on us falls the foliage of star in glittering sheaves,
From out the depths of the forest, the forest obscure of the skies.
LIFE
To see beauty in all, is to lift our own Soul
Up to loftier heights than do chose who aspire
Through culpable suffering, vanquished desire. ”

“ It was June in the garden, our hour and our day, and our eyes looked upon all things with so great a love that the roses seemed to us to open gently, and to see and love us.
The sky was purer than it had ever been: the insects and birds floated in the gold and gladness of an air as frail as silk, and our kisses were so exquisite that they gave an added beauty to the sunshine and the birds.
It was as though our happiness had suddenly become azure, and required the whole sky wherein to shine; through gentle openings, all life entered our being, to expand it. ”

“ His lukewarm soul hath tainted and undone;
And his white loves of simple days of yore,
in lewd and tempting mirrors sullied o'er;
The proud, mute vows that to himself he made
Are here—for he hath scored and cancelled them,
As one may cut and notch a diadem;
And here, inert and prone, his will is laid,
Whose gestures flashed like lightning keen before.
But that he now can raise in strength no more.
The grave-digger digs to the sound of the knell
'Mid the yews and the deaths in yonder dell. ”

“ Bursts out in all its clarity
Upon our wistful words and sight,
And bathes them deep in purity.
The wind and the slender lips of the flowers,
Trembling, scatter abroad in showers
Their syllables of light.
But the soul of us will not be caught
Within the chains that language wrought;
One simple flight of spirit doth enshrine,
Better than word or fitful thought,
Our joy in its abiding place divine,—
That heaven of thine wherein thy soul
Kneels gently down to mine,
And that where wistfully my soul
Kneels humbly there to thine. ”

“ Be kind and comforting to us, oh light!
And bathe our foreheads now, oh wintry ray!
When we two issue forth this afternoon
To breathe together the last warmth of day.
We loved you formerly with such a pride,
With such a love as our two souls could lend,
That a supreme and sweet and friendly flame
Is due us now that we await the end.
You are that which no man may forget,
From dawn that smites his arm unconquered
To evening when you sleep within his eyes
Your strength abolished and your splendour dead. ”

“ But before the flames of the golden hearth of memory, we will both crouch and warm our hands and knees.
To guard against the sorrows hidden in the future, against time that makes an end of all ardour, against our terror and even against ourselves, we will both crouch near the hearth that our memory has lit up in us.
And if autumn involves the woods, the lawns and the ponds in great banks of shadow and soaring storms, at least its pain shall not disturb the inner quiet garden where the equal footsteps of our thoughts walk together in the light. ”

“ With its familiar things that people coign and shade,
Where we two live alone with only witnesses
The roses gazing through the window from the glade;
There are some days so filled with reassuring peace,
Hours of the radiant summer with silence made so fair,
I sometimes bring to stillness the balancing of time
Within the great oak clock that stands close by the stair.
Then is the hour, the day, the night so part of us
That happiness which breathes upon us hears no thing
Except the ardent throbbing of your heart and mine
When quick embraces heart to yearning heart do bring. ”

“ The boughs of those long larches, bending low
Where the marsh-water lies,
In which Its vacant eyes
Gaze at themselves unceasing, stubbornly.
Only sometimes, as on their way they move,
The noiseless shadows of the clouds above.
Or of some great bird's hov'ring flight on high,
Brush It in passing by.
Since the last bolt that scored the earth aslant,
Nothing has pierced the Silence dominant.
Of those who cross Its vast immensity,
Whether at twilight or at dawn it be,
There is not one but feels
The dread of the Unknown that It instils ”

“ But, dumb, I listen, hear their footfalls reach
The shadows where the aged eve
Holds the black night in leash.
XXI
In those hours when we seem shut out
From all that is not part of us,
What cleansing flood is it, so nebulous,
That bathes and circles our two hearts about?
Joining our hands, without a prayer,
Arm to arm, without a cry,
Seeking we know not what nor where,
Something far off, more pure than thou or I—
Thou fervent soul, oh say
How does one live in this yearned-for day?
In those high hours how deep doth grow our will
In front of life's supremacies! ”

“ To love with our eyes, let us lave our gaze of the gaze of those whose glances we have crossed, by thousands, in life that is evil and enthralled.
The dawn is of flowers and dew and the mildest sifted light; soft plumes of silver and sun seem through the mists to brush and caress the mosses in the garden.
Our blue and marvellous ponds quiver and come to life with shimmering gold; emerald wings pass under the trees; and the brightness sweeps from the roads, the garths and the hedges the damp ashen fog in which the twilight still lingers. ”