When you close my eyes to the light,
Kiss them lingeringly, for they will have given you 
All that can remain of passionate love
In the last glance of their last fervor.

In the motionless glare of the funeral torch,
Lean toward their farewell your beautiful, sad face
To impress lastingly upon them the only image 
That they will hold on to in the grave.

And let me feel, before the coffin is nailed shut,
Our hands joined together on the pure white bed
And, beside my brow on the pale cushions,
Let your cheek rest one final time.

And let me then go far away with my heart, 
Which will keep for you a flame so strong
That even through the packed and lifeless earth
The other dead will feel its burning!

The mill slowly turns in the depth of the evening
Against a sky of sadness and melancholy,
It turns and turns, and its sail the color of wine lees
Is sad and weak and heavy and weary, unendingly.

Since dawn its arms, like arms of lamentation,
Have stretched out and have dropped, and see now
How they drop once more, there, in the darkened air
And the utter silence of extinguished nature.

A day afflicted by winter is falling asleep over the hamlets,
The clouds are weary from their bleak travels,
And along the thickets that gather their shadows,
The ruts run towards a dead horizon.

Around an old pond, a few beechwood huts
Are sitting quite wretchedly in a circle;
A brass lantern illuminates their ceilings
And slips a glow into the corners of their windows.

And on the vast plain, on the bank of the drowsing stream, 
Those torpid houses, beneath the louring sky, gaze,
With the slitted eyes of their gaunt windows, 
At the old mill that turns and, weary, turns and dies.