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He dreams. He has sat down musing under a maple.
Does he hear the venerable forest murmur?
Is he looking at the flowers? Is he looking at the heavens?
He dreams. Nature with the mysterious brow
Does all she can to soothe men;
From the hillside full of vines to the orchard full of apples
Flies come, go, come back; the birds
Cast their little wandering shadow on the waters;
The mill takes the spring and stops it in its course;
The pond is a mirror where the cool landscape
Turns over and changes into a vague vision;
Everything in the depths performs a function;
No atom without its task; everything stirs;
The grain in the furrow, the beast in its den,
Have a purpose; matter obeys the magnet;
The immense infinite grass is a swarming;
Everywhere movement without respite and without truce,
In what pushes, grows, climbs, descends, rises,
In the nest, in the dog harrying the herds,
In the star; and the surface is vast repose;
Beneath, everything strives, above everything sleeps;
One would say that the dark vermilion immensity
That rocks the sea to lull the halcyon,
And that we call Life and Creation,
Charming, pretends to sleep, and caresses
Universal labor with laziness. What dazzlement for the contemplating eye!
From everywhere, from the valley, from the meadow, from the height,
From the wood that thickens and from the sky that reddens,
Comes this shadow, peace, and this ray, joy.
And now, while through the ravines,
A little girl with divine eyes
And nimble bare feet worthy of Praxiteles,
Drives her goat before her with strokes of a switch,
Here is what stirs in the soul of the banished man:
– Alas! all is not said and all is not finished
Because a ditch has been dug in the street,
Because a leader designates a wall where
Poor people are placed before the firing squads’ flames,
Because they execute at random, gropingly,
Without choice, under machine-gun and rifle fire,
Fathers, mothers, the madman, the brigand, the sick,
And because they hastily consume with lime
Bodies of bloody men and children still warm!
Victor Hugo
Text published on Poésies 123: https://www.poesies123.com/en/poem-at-vianden-victor-hugo/