Tel qu'en Lui-même enfin l'éternité le change,

Le Poëte suscite avec un glaive nu

Son siècle épouvanté de n'avoir pas connu

Que la mort triomphait dans cette voix étrange !

Eux, comme un vil sursaut d'hydre oyant jadis l'Ange

Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu

Proclamèrent très haut le sortilège bu

Dans le flot sans honneur de quelque noir mélange.

Du sol et de la nue hostiles, ô grief !

Si notre idée avec ne sculpte un bas-relief

Dont la tombe de Poe éblouissante s'orne

Calme bloc ici-bas chu d'un désastre obscur,

Que ce granit du moins montre à jamais sa borne

Aux noirs vols du Blasphème épars dans le futur.

Even as eternity his soul reclaimed,

The poet's song ascended in a strain

So pure, the astonished age that had defamed,

Saw death transformed in that divine refrain.

While writhing coils of hydra-headed wrong,

Listening, and wondering at that heavenly song,

Deemed they had drunk of some foul mixture brewed

In Circe's maddening cup, with sorcery imbued.

Alas ! if from an alien to his clime,

No bas-relief may grace thy front sublime,

Stern block, in some obscure disaster hurled

From the rent heart of a primeval world,

Through storied centuries thou shalt proudly stand

In the memorial city of his land,

A silend monitor, austere and gray,

To warn the clamorous prood of harpies from their prey.

Imitation libre de Mrs Sarah Helen Whitman

Into himself resolved by Death's great change,

The poet rouses with his clear, free tone,

His century too frightened to have known

That Death itself would praise in voice so strange.

'Twas like some hydra, who an Angel heard

Breathe strains too pure fort tongues less pure to tell,

And thought the shining one had drunk the spell

Of some black wave, all noisome and perturbed, -

Oh struggle that the earth with Heaven maintains!

If my belief may not be sculptured there,

To make the tomb above the poet's dust more fair, -

That block which ever dark disaster stains, -

At least that granite should in future stay

Poe's old blasphemers from their evil way.

Traduction de Mrs Louise Chandler Moulton