Poems of Emile Verhaeren Part 3

Silent, and crumbling in corruption now.

The grave-digger watches them come into sight, The long, slow roads.

Marching towards him, with all their loads Of coffins white.

Here are his keenest thoughts, that one by one 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 p.r.o.ne, 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.

Since ages longer than he can tell.

Here is his dream--born in the radiant glow.

Of joy and young oblivion, long ago-- That in black fields of science he let go, That he hath clothed with flame and embers bright, --Red wings plucked off from Folly in her flight-- That he hath launched toward inaccessible s.p.a.ces afar, toward the distance there, The golden conquest of the Impossible, And that the limitless, refractory sky, Sends back to him again, or it has ere So much as touched the immobile mystery.

The grave-digger turneth it round and round-- With arms by toil so weary made, With arms so thin, and strokes of spade-- Since what long times?--the dried-up ground.

Here, for his anguish and remorse, there throng Pardons denied to creatures in the wrong; And here, the tears, the prayers, the silent cries, He would not list to in his brothers' eyes.

The insults to the gentle, and the jeer What time the humble bent their knees, are here; Gloomy denials, and a bitter store Of arid sarcasms, oft poured out before Devotedness that in the shadow stands With outstretched hands.

The grave-digger, weary, yet eager as well.

Hiding his pain to the sound of the knell, With strokes of the spade turns round and round The weary sods of the dried-up ground.

Then--fear-struck dallyings with suicide; Delays, that conquer hours that would decide: Again--the terrors of dark crime and sin Furtively felt with frenzied fingers thin: The fierce craze and the fervent rage to be The man who lives of the extremity Of his own fear: And then, too, doubt immense and wild affright.

And madness, with its eyes of marble white, These all are here.

His head a prey to the dull knell's sound, In terror the grave-digger turns the ground With strokes of the spade, and doth ceaseless cast The dried-up earth upon his past.

The slain days, and the present, he doth see, Quelling each quivering thrill of life to be.

And drop by drop, through fists whose fingers start.

Pressing the future blood of his red heart; Chewing with teeth that grind and crush, each part Of that his future's body, limb by limb, Till there is but a carcase left to him; And shewing him, in coffins prisoned, Or ever they be born, his longings dead.

The grave-digger yonder doth hear the knell, More heavy yet, of the pa.s.sing bell.

That up through the mourning horizons doth swell What if the bells, with their haunting swing, Would stop on a day that heart-breaking ring!

And the endless procession of corse after corse.

Choke the highways no more of his long remorse But the biers, with the prayers and the tears, Immensely yet follow the biers; They halt by crucifix now, and by shrine, Then take up once more their mournful line; On the backs of men, upon trestles borne.

They follow their uniform march forlorn; Skirting each field and each garden-wall.

Pa.s.sing beneath the sign-posts tall, Skirting along by the vast Unknown, Where terror points horns from the corner-stone.

The old man, broken and propless quite.

Watches them still from the infinite Coming towards him--and hath beside Nothing to do, but in earth to hide His multiple death, thus bit by bit, And, with fingers irresolute, plant on it Crosses so hastily, day by day, Since what long times--he cannot say.

THE WIND

Crossing the infinite length of the moorland, Here comes the wind, The wind with his trumpet that Heralds November; Endless and infinite, crossing the downs, Here comes the wind That teareth himself and doth fiercely dismember; Which heavy breaths turbulent smiting the towns, The savage wind comes, the fierce wind of November!

Each bucket of iron at the wells of the farmyards, 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.

From each miserable shed The patched garret-windows wave wild overhead Their foolish, poor tatters of paper and gla.s.s.

As the savage, fierce wind of November doth pa.s.s!

And there on its hill Of dingy and dun-coloured turf, the black mill, Swift up from below, through the empty air slashing, Swift down from above, like a lightning-stroke flashing, The black mill so sinister moweth the wind.

The savage, fierce wind of November!

The old, ragged thatches that squat round their steeple, Are raised on their roof-poles, and fall with a clap, In the wind the old thatches and pent-houses flap, In the wind of November, so savage and hard.

The crosses--and they are the arms of dead people-- The crosses that stand in the narrow churchyard Fall p.r.o.ne on the sod Like some great flight of black, in the acre of G.o.d.

The wind of November!

Have you met him, the savage wind, do you remember?

Did he pa.s.s you so fleet, --Where, yon at the cross, the three hundred roads meet-- With distressfulness panting, and wailing with cold?

Yea, he who breeds fears and puts all things to flight, Did you see him, that night When the moon he o'erthrew--when the villages, old In their rot and decay, past endurance and spent, Cried, wailing like beasts, 'neath the hurricane bent?

Here comes the wind howling, that heralds dark weather, The wind blowing infinite over the heather.

The wind with his trumpet that heralds November!

THE FISHERMEN

The spot is flaked with mist, that fills, Thickening into rolls more dank, The thresholds and the window-sills, And smokes on every bank.

The river stagnates, pestilent With carrion by the current sent This way and that--and yonder lies The moon, just like a woman dead, That they have smothered overhead, Deep in the skies.

In a few boats alone there gleam Lamps that light up and magnify The backs, bent over stubbornly, Of the old fishers of the stream, Who since last evening, steadily, --For G.o.d knows what night-fishery-- Have let their black nets downward slow Into the silent water go.

The noisome water there below.