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XIV
The crowd of the living laughs and follows its folly,
Now for its pleasure, now for its torment;
But by the mute dead, by the dead whom we forget,
I, dreamer, feel myself watched fixedly.
They know that I am the man of solitudes,
The pensive walker beneath the thick trees,
The spirit that finds, having its sorrows as studies,
At the threshold of all trouble, at the bottom of all, peace!
They know the attentive and bowed attitude
That I have among the boxwoods, the graves and the crosses;
They hear me walking on the dried leaf;
They have seen me contemplate shadows in the woods,
They understand my voice poured out over the world,
Better than you, O noisy and quarrelsome living!
The hymns of the lyre hidden in my soul,
For you they are songs, for them they are tears.
I, it is there that I live! — gathering the white roses,
Consoling the tombs too long abandoned,
I pass and I return, I disturb the branches,
I make a noise in the grass, and the dead are content.
There I dream! and, roaming in the lethargic field,
I see, with eyes opened within my thought,
My soul transform itself into a magic world,
Mysterious mirror of the visible universe.
Watching without seeing them vague beetles,
Indistinct branches, forms, colors,
There, in the shadow, seated on fallen stones, I have
Dazzlements of rays and of flowers.
There, the ideal dream that fills my eyelid
Floats, luminous veil, between the earth and us;
There, my ungrateful doubts melt into prayer;
I begin standing and I finish on my knees.
As in the hollow of the rock flies the humble dove,
Seeking the drop of water that falls before day,
My thirsty spirit, in the shadow of the tomb,
Goes to drink a little faith, hope and love!
March 13, 1840.
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-in-the-cemetery-of-star-victor-hugo/