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)

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.

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