J. Neruda

“ Perhaps our underworld is here, the dusk beneath the lake.
Through summer twilight once I gazed towards the hills
And saw, along the forest side, some figures strange
Like troops, descending to a cavern deep in rocks.
They seemed no human shapes but rather wisps of cloud,
Through trunks they moved, from branch to branch among the brake,
Before the eye could catch them, drawing near and low
And then, like greyish cloud, dissolving in the lake.
Each day death sends them forth, from living tables haled,
And night-time is too short for all to pass below. ”

“ That pool unfathomed, what does it hide below?
Some old Bohemian legend, banished from the land?
Hides here that glassy wall some ring of ancient gods?
Rests here perhaps our great Bohemian hero band?
Noble and heroic, like the gods were you,
Forgotten by Bohemia’s land forlorn,
Forgotten quite by all this generation new.
If they should weep for all their nation’s grief,
Then that dark lake would swell into a darkling sea.
If they, from living breast, should sigh, their sobbing breath
Would send the lake in flooding deluge past its banks. ”

“ Below the water’s edge, uneasy is the dream
And ruffled by the breath of them that lie below.
But now their breath is quiet—the breathing of the dead,
Across the lake like chilling breeze it seems to blow. ”