The Volokh Conspiracy

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Literature

Poetry Monday!: "Chanson d'automne" by Oscar Milosz

"Écoutez la voix du vent dans la nuit..."

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Here's "Chanson d'automne" (1899) by the French-Lithuanian poet Oscar Milosz (1879-1939):

Écoutez la voix du vent dans la nuit,
La vieille voix du vent, la lugubre voix du vent,
Malédiction des morts, berceuse des vivants…
Écoutez la voix du vent.
Il n'y a plus de feuilles, il n'y a plus de fruits
Dans les vergers détruits.
Les souvenirs sont moins que rien, les espoirs sont très loin.
Écoutez la voix du vent….

For the rest of my "Sasha Reads" playlist, click here. Past poems are:

  1. "Ulysses" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
  2. "The Pulley" by George Herbert
  3. "Harmonie du soir" by Charles Baudelaire
  4. "Dirge Without Music" by Edna St. Vincent Millay
  5. "Clancy of the Overflow" by A.B. "Banjo" Paterson
  6. "Лотова жена" ("Lotova zhena", "Lot's wife") by Anna Akhmatova
  7. "The Jumblies" by Edward Lear
  8. "The Conqueror Worm" by Edgar Allan Poe
  9. "Les Djinns" by Victor Hugo
  10. "I Have a Rendezvous with Death" by Alan Seeger
  11. "When I Was One-and-Twenty" by A.E. Housman
  12. "Узник" ("Uznik", "The Prisoner" or "The Captive") by Aleksandr Pushkin
  13. "God's Grandeur" by Gerard Manley Hopkins
  14. "The Song of Wandering Aengus" by William Butler Yeats
  15. "Je crains pas ça tellment" by Raymond Queneau
  16. "The Naming of Cats" by T.S. Eliot
  17. "The reticent volcano keeps…" by Emily Dickinson
  18. "Она" ("Ona", "She") by Zinaida Gippius
  19. "Would I Be Shrived?" by John D. Swain
  20. "Evolution" by Langdon Smith