The Gardens - Emile Verhaeren

The landscape now reveals a change;

A stair—that twinèd elm-boughs hold

Enclosed 'mid hedges mystic, strange—

Inaugurates a green and gold

Vision of gardens, range on range.

Each step's a hope, that doth ascend

Stairwise to expectation's height;

A weary way it is to wend

While noonday suns are burning bright.

But rest waits at the evening's end.

Streams, that wash white from sin, flow deep,

And round about the fresh lawns twine;

While there, beneath the green banks steep,

Beside his cross, the Lamb Divine

Lies tranquilly in peaceful sleep.

The daisied grass is glad, and gay

With crystal butterflies the hedge.

Where globes of fruit shine blue; here stray

Peacocks beside the box-trees' edge:

A shining lion bars the way.

Flowers, upright as the ecstasies

And ardours of white spirits pure,

With branches springing fountain-wise,

Burst upward, and by impulse sure

To their own soaring splendour rise.

Gently and very slowly swayed.

The wind a wordless rhapsody

Sings—and the shimm'ring air doth braid

An aureole of filigree

Round every disk with emerald laid.

Even the shade is but a flight

Toward flickering radiances, that slip

From space to space; and now the light

Sleeps, with calmed rays, upon the lip

Of lilac-blossoms golden-white.

---

Emile Verhaeren (1855 - 1916) Belgium

Translated by Alma Strettell

Source: Poems of Emile Verhaeren selected and rendered into English by Alma Strettell, The Bodley Head, 1915 (on Project Gutenberg)