If you forget friends, if you, you grateful ones, revile
All your own, your poets,
   May God forgive it, but you should honour
  Only the soul of those who love.

For oh tell, where does human life live otherwise,
When anxiety, the oppressor, now coerces everything?
  Therefore the god, too, walks
  Unconcernedly over our heads for a long time already.

Yet, however cold the year be and songless
At the allotted time, yet from the white field
  Green grass blades sprout after all,
  Often a solitary bird sings,

When the forest gradually expands, the river stirs,
Already the milder air is quietly blown from noon
  At the selected hour,
  Thus a sign of a more beautiful time,

In which we believe, Love still grows
Solely austere, solely noble and pious
  over the immutable, wild terrain,
  God’s daughter, from him alone.

Be blessed, oh be, heavenly plant, nurtured
For me with song, when the powers
  Of the ethereal nectar are your sustenance
  And the creative beam causes you to ripen.

Grow and become a forest! a more soulful
Fully-blossoming world! May the language of lovers
  Be the language of the land,
  Its soul the sound of the people!