C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
I Am So Sad, O God!
By Juliusz Słowacki (1809–1849)
I
Spread a bright rainbow in the western skies,
But thou hast quenched in darkness cold and stormy
The brighter stars that rise;
Clear grows the heaven ’neath thy transforming rod:
Still I am sad, O God!
Have I delighted stood amid the crowd,
My face the while to stranger eyes reflected
The calm of summer’s cloud;
But thou dost know the ways that I have trod,
And why I grieve, O God!
Whene’er its mother leaves it for a while:
And grieving watch the sun, whose light in setting
Throws back a parting smile;
Though it will bathe anew the morning sod,
Still I am sad, O God!
Hundreds of miles away from shore or rock,
I saw the cranes fly on, together keeping
In one unbroken flock;
Their feet with soil from Poland’s hills were shod,
And I was sad, O God!
Since, grown a stranger to my native ways,
I walk a pilgrim through a desert dreary,
Lit but by lightning’s blaze,
Knowing not where shall fall the burial clod
Upon my bier, O God!
Somewhere on strangers’ soil, I know not where:
I envy those whose dying hours are lightened,
Fanned by their native air;
But flowers of some strange land will spring and nod
Above my grave, O God!
To pray each day for home restored, I found
My bark was steering—how the thought dismayed me—
The whole wide world around!
Those prayers unanswered, wearily I plod
Through rugged ways, O God!
Thy angels rear above us in the sky,
Others will look a hundred years hereafter,
And pass away as I;
Exiled and hopeless ’neath thy chastening rod,
And sad as I, O God!