Shepherds and Flocks

The valley where I walk most days looks, though abandoned,
calm, as if content under the vast sky in its loneliness,
with blackberry bushes in flower, like a sad smile making
a man forget what else if anything exists. Out of earshot
of the workers in the fields nearby, who could tell
from here if any world but this were still alive!
A shadow soothes me like a lover’s hand. The bullfinch
and the greenfinch wrangle. The warbler, barking,
tips his head. Hawthorne and broom flowers open.
Under the edges of black granite soft with mosses
God has made a poem with variations, often like old Homer
repeating himself, but in God’s case with wildflowers,
hillsides, streams, and woods! That little pond there
wrinkling (I would say, with inner cheerfulness)
into a kind of smile, looms like a vast flood
over the ant, oblivious in the thick of the grass
to the Atlantic roaring on the horizon. I see here
sometimes on a monstrous rock a girl about fifteen,
with blue eyes, barefoot, tending her goats. She lives
at the floor of a dark ravine, under a sagging thatch
with gaps where stars shine through. Her sisters
stay home days to spin the mohair. Now she wipes
her muddy feet clean on the rushes. Goats, and ewes
and rams, graze. Gloomy apparition that I am, alas,
she fears me, but she smiles, and I bid her my best
good day, she being innocent. Her lambs, in a field
of flowers that incense them, buck and skitter, each
in the briars under the purpled sun leaving a little
of its fleece to shine in the dry gust like a tuft of foam.
I go. The child, her flock, lost to me in the mist.
Le crépuscule étend sur les longs sillons gris
Ses ailes de fantôme et de chauve-souris;
J’entends encore au loin dans la plaine ouvrière
Chanter derrière moi la douce chevrière,
Et, là-bas, devant moi, le vieux gardien pensif
De l’écume, du flot, de l’algue, du récif,
Et des vagues sans trêve et sans fin remuées,
Le pâtre promontoire au chapeau de nuées,
S’accoude et rêve au bruit de tous les infinis,
Et, dans l’ascension des nuages bénis,
Regarde se lever la lune triomphale,
Pendant que l’ombre tremble, et que l’âpre rafale
Disperse à tous les vents avec son souffle amer
La laine des moutons sinistres de la mer.
Jersey, Grouville, avril 1855.

Twilight spreads in the long gray furrows softly
under the wings of phantom bats. Still I can hear,
over the open fields behind me, that sweet song
the goat girl sings going home. Far ahead, over the mists,
over the tides and seaweed, reefs, and waves oncoming
without respite, with no end, her ancient guardian,
the headland, brooding under a herdsman’s cap of clouds,
leans like a god on his elbow and dreams into the tumult
of infinity, while watching in the ascension of the clouds
this triumphal moonrise, under which the dark
is trembling, and the squall bears down to scatter
on bleak winds the wool of the deadly flock of the sea.