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

Le Rossignol

Translation of Gertrude Hall

LIKE to a swarm of birds, with jarring cries

Descend on me my swarming memories;

Light ’mid the yellow leaves, that shake and sigh,

Of the bowed alder—that is even I!—

Brooding its shadow in the violet

Unprofitable river of Regret,

They settle screaming. Then the evil sound,

By the moist wind’s impatient hushing drowned,

Dies by degrees, till nothing more is heard

Save the long singing of a single bird,

Save the clear voice—O singer, sweetly done!—

Warbling the praises of the Absent One.

And in the silence of a summer night

Sultry and splendid, by a late moon’s light

That sad and sallow peers above the hill,

The humid hushing wind that ranges still

Rocks to a whispered sleep-song languidly

The bird lamenting and the shivering tree.