A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields/Les Hurleurs (Leconte de Lisle)
LES HURLEURS.
The sun in the billows had extinguished its flame,
Under mountains fog-covered, slept peaceful the town,
On the huge boulders, washed by a foam-cloud, low down,
Dashed the ocean in thunder, its power to proclaim.
Night multiplied the long hollow tumult of sound!
Not a star shone forth in the immensity blue,
Only a moon mournful, its cloud-bars breaking through,
Like a pale lamp, swung sad in the welkin profound.
Silent globe with a sign on its forehead of wrath!
Débris of a world dead, flung at hazard in space!
It shed from its orb frozen of faint light a trace
Sepulchral, on the south ocean's limitless path.
Afar, towards the north, where the vapours hung deep,
Africa, sheltering herself in the night's sombre bands,
Her gaunt lions famished on the smoking dull sands,
And her herds of elephants, by lakes lulled to sleep.
On the shores arid, amid insalubrious smells
Of bones of oxen and steeds all scattered about,
Lean dogs here and there lengthened their fierce muzzles out
And joined in lugubrious demoniac yells.
The tail in a circle concealed under the form,
The eyes wide dilated, the feet febrile, they stood,
Or crouched down as they howled in that drear solitude,
While o'er them a shudder swept at times like a storm.
The sea-foam, in showers, glued to their spines and their hips
Long tangles, and made salient the vertebrae bare,
And when the waves to attack them bounded in air
Their white teeth gnashed under their red slavering lips.
In the gleams faint and ghastly of the moon on her range,
What an anguish unknown by the billows dim-seen,
Made a soul shriek and lament in your figures unclean?
Why howled you thus, spectres, frighted, frightful and strange?
I know not; but, O dogs that howled wild on the shore!
Though suns after suns, in the seas, since have been cast,
I hear still resounding from the depths of my past
Your cry of despair, and it shall ring evermore.