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I watch. Fear nothing. I wait for you to fall asleep.
The angels will come and lay their mouths upon your brow.
I do not want any dream to have shapes
Fierce upon you;
I want, seeing you there, your hand in mine,
The wind to change its stormy noise into the sound of a lyre.
And upon your sleep the sinister night to come
Smiling.
The poet leans over the trembling cradles;
He speaks to them, he tells them tender things in a low voice,
He is their lover, and his songs resemble
Roses.
He is purer than April scenting the lawn
And than May whose bird comes to plunder the basket;
His voice is a shiver of the soul, enough to make jealous
The bee;
He adores these nests of silk and lace;
His heart has gaieties in the cool dwelling
That make one laugh aloud with such sweetness
That one weeps;
He is the good sower of fresh joys;
He laughs. But if kings and their countless valets
Come, if he sees tigerish eyes gleaming
In the shadows,
If he sees from the Vatican, from Berlin or from Vienna
Come a trap, a horde, a bible,
He rises, it takes no more than that for him to become
Terrible.
If he sees that basilisk, Rome, or that spider,
Ignatius, or that vulture, Bismarck, commit their crime,
He growls, he feels rising in his indignant strophe
The abyss.
It is settled. No more songs. The future he demands,
The peoples and their right, the kings and their bravado,
Are like a whirlwind of tempest in which this soul
Escapes.
He hastens. Return, France, to your former pride!
Deliverance! And one sees this man who rises
Having God in his heart and in his eye the light
Of the sword.
And his thought, then wandering like prows
In the wave and banners in the dark melees,
Is an immense chariot of dawn with wheels
Winged.
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-song-over-the-cradle-victor-hugo/