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Home  »  library  »  prose  »  The Windmill

C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.

The Windmill

By Emile Verhaeren (1855–1916)

From ‘Six French Poets’: Translation of Amy Lowell

THE WINDMILL turns in the depths of the evening, very slowly it turns, against a sad and melancholy sky. It turns, and turns, and its wine-colored sail is infinitely sad, and feeble, and heavy, and tired.

Since dawn its arms—pleading, reproachful—have stretched out and fallen; and now again they fall, far off in the darkening air and absolute silence of extinguished nature.

Sick with winter, the day drowses to sleep upon the villages; the clouds are weary of their gloomy travels; and along the copses where shadows are gathering, the wheel-tracks fade away to a dead horizon. Some cabins of beech logs squat miserably in a circle about a colorless pond; a copper lamp hangs from the ceiling and throws a patina of fire over wall and window. And in the immense plain, by the side of the sleeping stream—wretched, miserable hovels!—they fix, with the poor eyes of their ragged window-panes, the old windmill which turns, and—weary—turns and dies.