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When I dream on the cliff,
Or in the woods, on summer evenings,
Knowing that life is bad,
I contemplate eternity.
Through my fate mixed with shadows,
I distinctly perceive God,
As through dark branches
One glimpses the firmament!
The firmament! where false sages
Seek counsel as we do!
The firmament full of clouds,
The firmament full of suns!
A breath purifies our mire.
The world belongs to God, I feel it.
Every flower is a praise,
And every perfume is an incense.
At night one thinks one feels God himself
Leaning over palpitating man.
The earth prays and the sky loves.
Someone speaks and someone hears.
Yet, always from our ecstasy,
O Lord, you have hidden yourself;
Alas! you place the vessel up there,
And you leave the lip below!
But one day your profound work,
We shall know it, dreaded God!
We shall go from world to world to see
Your unity unfold;
Seeking in these heavens you rule
The shadow of those we love,
Like a troop of great eagles
That flies away across the mountains!
For, when death claims us,
The spirit breaks the seal of the senses.
For the tomb is a nest where the soul
Takes wings like the bird!
O dream! O serene vision!
We shall know the secret of all,
And that ray that trails over us,
We shall be able to see its other end!
O Lord! the humble creature
Will finally see in turn
The other side of nature
On which your day falls!
We shall be able to compare, poets,
Thinkers believing in our reasons,
To all the worlds you make
All the dreams we make!
In the meantime, on this earth,
We wander, a scattered flock,
Bearing within us this great mystery:
Bounded eye, infinite gaze.
Man chooses his path at random;
And always, whatever we do,
Like a goat on the grass it grazes,
Lives bent over its passions.
We wander, and in the darkness,
Going where others have come,
We hear funeral voices
That speak unknown words.
In these shadows where everything is forgotten,
Virtue, wisdom, hope, honor,
One goes crying: Elijah! Elijah!
The other calling: Lord! Lord!
Alas! every thinker seems eager
To terrify orphaned man;
The scientist says: The sky is empty!
The priest says: Hell is full!
O mourning! physicians without remedies,
Vain prophets with deceived eyes,
One gives Satan to our souls,
The other takes Jesus from them!
Humanity, without law, without ark,
Following its dried-up path,
Is like a traveler who walks
After the day has set.
He goes! the mist is on the plain.
The wind twists the convulsive tree.
The things he barely distinguishes
Have a sinister and pensive air.
Thus, amid black ruins,
In this century the human race
Passes and sees dark figures
Leaning over its path.
We, dreamers, under a crumbling roof,
Weary, we take shelter,
And we watch that crowd
Plunge into the shadows groping!
And we seek, morose worry!
Alas! to guess for all
The problem proposed to us
By all this shadow around us!
While, with head bowed,
We lose ourselves in sad wishes,
The breath of destiny
Shivers through our hair.
We hear, an enslaved race,
This breath passing in the night
From the obscure book of our life
Turning the pages with noise!
What to do? — To this wind of the tomb,
Join your hands, lower your eyes,
And try that a glimmer fall
On the mysterious book!
— From where will the glimmer come, O father?
God says: — From you, in truth.
Light, so that it may enlighten you,
Your heart from some side!
When the heart burns, one can without fear
Read what the Lord writes.
Virtue, under this holy clarity,
Is the same word as Happiness.
One must love! the shadow in vain covers
The eye of our spirit, whatever it may be.
Believe, and the eyelid opens!
Love, and the pupil sees!
From the heights of the heavens their flame fills,
The too distant truths
Cannot to the book of the soul
Throw but vague gleams.
At night, no gaze can read
By the sole fires of vermilion stars;
But love near us comes to shine,
A lamp helps the suns.
So that, in the shadow where God leads us,
We may read at all moments,
Love joins its human light
To the celestial radiances!
Love then! for everything proclaims it,
For the spirit alone enlightens little,
And often the heart of a woman
Is the explanation of God!
Thus I dream, thus I muse,
While in the eyes of sailors
The dark night at every moment plunges
Groups of stars into the waves!
I, whom God holds under his empire,
I admire, humble and religious,
And through all my pores I breathe in
This prodigious spectacle!
Between the wave, rocked by winds,
And the sky, dazzling abyss,
Always, for the eye of thought,
Something rises or descends.
Drop of pure water or jet of flame,
This intimate and unwritten word
Comes to condense in my soul
Or shine in my spirit;
And the idea to my unveiled heart,
Through the wave or the ether,
From the depths of the heavens arrives star,
Or pearl from the bottom of the sea!
March 25, 1839.
Victor Hugo
Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.
Text published on Poésies 123: https://www.poesies123.com/en/poem-caeruleum-mare-victor-hugo/