The Fall of the Leaves - Charles-Hubert Millevoye

With the spoils of the wood,
Autumn had littered the earth;
The groves without mystery,
The nightingale without voice.
Sadly, and dying with his dawn,
A youth, afflicted, paced slowly
Across, as in earlier years,
This wood of delight, once more.

"Wood that I love, farewell! I succumb;
Your mourning has warned of my fate
And, in each leaf that falls
I see a presage of death.
Oracle of Epidaurus,
You have told me: 'The leaves of the wood,
Will turn yellow again before your eyes,
But that for the very last time.
The cypress of eternity sways
Bending long branches, already,
In silence over your head:
Your youth will have withered
Before the grass on the field,
Before the vine on the slopes'.

"And I die! With their cold breath,
The dark southerly winds have touched me;
And I have seen my beautiful spring
Vanish like a flimsy shadow.
Fall, fall, ephemeral leaf!
Cover, alas, this sad path;
Hide from the despair of my mother
The place where I shall be tomorrow.
But if my lover should come in her veil
To the bend of this darkened way
To weep when the day has flown,
May my shade awaken, briefly consoled,
By the softest of sounds".

He spoke from afar… and without returning…
The last leaf that falls
Has signalled the day as his last.
Beneath the oak, they dug his grave…
But his lover did not come
To visit this lonely stone;
And only the shepherd in the valley
Has disrupted, with the sound of his step,
The silence of the mausoleum.

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Charles-Hubert Millevoye (1782 - 1816) France
Translated by David Paley
Source: Poems Without Frontiers