Nightfall in the Tropics

^{translated from the Spanish by Thomas Walsh}

There is twilight grey and gloomy
    Where the sea its velvet trails;
Out across the heavens roomy
    Draw the veils.

Bitter and sonorous rises
    The complaint from out the deeps,
And the wave the wind surprises
    Weeps.

Viols there amid the gloaming
    Hail the sun that dies,
And the white spray in its foaming
    “Miserere” sighs.

Harmony the heavens embraces,
    And the breeze is lifting free
To the chanting of the races
    Of the sea.

Clarions of horizons calling
    Strike a symphony most rare,
As if mountain voices calling
    Vibrate there.

As though dread, unseen, were walking,
    As though awesome echoes bore
On the distant breeze’s quaking
    The lion’s roar.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on October 6, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“Nightfall in the Tropics” appeared in Hispanic Anthology: Poems Translated from the Spanish by English and North American Poets (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1920), edited by Thomas Walsh. In the fall 1972 issue of Latin American Literary Review, scholar Marcel Chabot reflected on the opus of Rubén Darío and wrote, “Cantos de vida y esperanza (1905), Darío’s songs of life and hope, has long been recognized as his greatest book. At this point in his career, Darío was universally hailed as the most important poet in the Spanish language, and in certain poems, such as ‘To Roosevelt’ and ‘Salutation of the Optimist,’ he seemed to assume the task of poetic spokesman for the Hispanic world. […] In Cantos, Darío begins to see poetry in a somewhat different light; in answer to his own question as to the nature of art itself, he replies that poetry constitutes a probe into the absolute, into the nature of man and the universe.”