Konstantin Balmont
Water

From droplets of dew that aquiver are throwing
The lustre of jewels around,
To the pallor of spaces, where, distantly flowing,
The wave of the ocean its foam-wreath is strowing
O'er seas that no plummet can sound,
Thou art everywhere, ever, life changelessly glowing,
Now emerald-tinted, now azurely showing,
Now in ruby and amber the waters abound,
In orange, white, green, and in dusky-blue splendour,
And in such as the deserts alone can engender
In the heaving and chanting of tides without bound,
In tints only seen by the choicest of gazes,
As they tremble and sparkle and dazzle, their mazes
No words can be culled to reflect:
Though the word has its tints with unquenchable gleaming,
Though the word that is comely with bloom ever teeming,
A spring-tide of hues has bedecked.

The water has guises of infinite seeming
In zones that are boundlessly deep;
Its multiple billows are cradled in dreaming,
The spirit with muteness and tune of its streaming,
It answers and lulls into sleep.
Rich of old have they been, and rich still are the spaces
Where deserts stretch onward in azure-green traces,
And islands have birth in their shoals.
And Ocean, still Ocean, unfettered it ranges,
But man ever sees how it changes and changes,
And billowy visions unrolls.

Wherever I wander,
Or hither, or yonder,
I have harkened to lays of the storm,
And I know how diversely I ponder.

The Indian Ocean has azure-clad form
Where blue is the wave in its dancing,
And then the Red Sea with its coral display,
Where billows are tossing in pinkish array;
Yellow Sea, — fields of water advancing.
And the Persian Gulf that is verdantly dyed,
And in the Black Sea, how boistrous the tide,
And the White Sea, — what phantoms entrancing.
And ever I mused, ever here, ever there,
Upon Water so endlessly fair.

Translated by Paul Selver