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I
Why exile yourself, O poet,
From the crowd where we see you?
What are, for your restless soul,
The factions, a chaos without rays?
In their polluted atmosphere
Your shed-leaved poetry dies;
Their breath scatters your incense;
Your heart, in their servile struggles,
Is like those city lawns
Gnawed by the feet of passers-by.
In the misty capitals
Do you not hear with dread,
Like two fateful powers,
People and king colliding?
From these hatreds that everything awakens,
What is the good of filling your ear,
O poet, O master, O sower?
Wholly given to the God you name,
Do not mingle with these men
Who live in a clamor!
Go resound, purified soul,
In the peaceful concert!
Go bloom, sacred flower,
Under the wide skies of the desert!
O dreamer, seek the retreats,
The shelters, the discreet grottoes,
And oblivion to find love,
And silence in order to hear
The voice from on high, severe and tender,
And shadow in order to see the day!
Go into the woods! go onto the shores!
Compose your inspired songs
With the song of the foliage
And the hymn of the purified waves!
God awaits you in solitudes;
God is not in multitudes;
Man is small, ungrateful and vain.
In the fields all vibrates and sighs.
Nature is the great lyre,
The poet is the divine bow!
Leave our storms, O sage!
May for you the empire in labor,
Which makes its perilous passage
Without compass and without rudder,
Be like a vessel that in December
The fisherman, from the bottom of his room
Where his dried nets hang,
Hears passing in the night, in the shadow,
With a sinister and somber sound
Of shuddering, leaning masts!
II
Alas! alas! says the poet,
I have love for waters and woods;
My best thought is made
Of what their voice murmurs.
Creation is without hatred.
There, no obstacle and no chain.
The meadows, the mountains, are beneficent;
The suns explain the roses to me,
In the serenity of things
My soul radiates in all directions.
I love you, O holy nature!
I would like to absorb myself in you;
But in this age of adventure
Everyone, alas! owes himself to all!
Every thought is a force.
God made the sap for the bark,
For the bird the flowering branches,
The stream for the grass of the plains,
For mouths the full cups,
And the thinker for minds!
God wills it, in contrary times,
Each one works and each one serves.
Woe to him who says to his brothers:
I am returning to the desert!
Woe to him who takes his sandals
When hatreds and scandals
Torment the agitated people!
Shame on the thinker who mutilates himself
And goes away, a useless singer,
Through the gate of the city!
The poet in impious days
Comes to prepare better days.
He is the man of utopias.
His feet here, his eyes elsewhere.
It is he who over all heads,
In every time, like the prophets,
In his hand, where all can be held,
Must, whether insulted or praised,
Like a torch that he shakes,
Make the future flame up!
He sees, when peoples vegetate,
His dreams, always full of love,
Are made of the shadows cast upon him
By the things that will one day be.
They mock him. What does it matter! he thinks.
More than one soul silently inscribes
What the crowd does not hear.
He pities his frivolous scorners;
And many a false sage at his words
Laughs aloud and muses inwardly!
———
Crowd that pours upon our dreams
Doubt and irony in floods,
As the ocean upon the shores
Pours its rattle and its sobs,
The august idea that delights you
At this hour still stammers;
But it bears the seal of life!
Eve contains the human race,
An egg the eaglet, an acorn the oak!
A utopia is a cradle!
From this cradle, when the hour comes,
You will see emerge, dazzled,
A better society
For hearts more fully opened,
Duty that right gives birth to,
Holy order, triumphant faith,
And manners, that moving group
Which always, joyful or morose,
Sows in its steps something
That the law harvests while dreaming!
But, to brood these powerful seeds,
All inspired hearts are needed,
All pure hearts, all firm hearts,
Penetrated by divine rays.
Without sailors the ship capsizes;
And, as on the two sides of a vessel,
God must, understood by all,
To cleave the senseless crowd,
On the two sides of his thought
Make great minds row!
———
Far from you, holy theories,
Codes promised to the future,
This rhetorician with withered lips,
Without hope and without memory,
Who once followed your star,
But who, since then, casting off the veil
Where illusion takes shelter,
Has let his soul be violated
By all that is most base in
Avarice and ambition!
Giant of pride with a dwarf soul,
Squanderer of the true treasure,
Who, glutted with human knowledge,
Wished to feast on gold,
And, bringing from servants to master
His false smile of an ancient priest
Who sold his divinity,
Gets drunk, at the hour when others think,
In that impure orgy where dance
The abuses with shameless laughter!
Far from you these scribes with sordid hearts
Who in the shadow have said without dread
To splendid corruption:
Courtesan, caress me!
And who sometimes, in their drunkenness,
To the temple where their youth dreamed
Dare to take the roads again,
And, their faces still painted,
Approach the chaste ideas,
The smell of debauchery on their hands!
Far from you these doctors whom
The sage distrusts, severe though reluctant!
Who make of philosophy
A stall for their own interest!
Vile merchants sheltered by a church!
Whom one sees, black hypocritical brood,
Swell their cloak with bags of gold,
Disturb the priest who contemplates,
And on the columns of the temple
Nail their filthy sign!
Far from you these infamous young men
Whose days, counted by the night,
Are spent withering women
Whom hunger leads to the dens!
Cowards to whom, in their delirium,
A secret voice must say:
This woman whom gold sullies,
Whom the orgy where you fall defiles,
Had to choose only between two tombs,
The hideous morgue or your bed!
Far from you the vain angers
That stir at the crossroads!
Far from you these popular cats
That will be tigers some day!
The flatterers of people or of throne!
The egoist who makes of his zone
His center and his middle!
And all those who, firebrands without flame,
Have not in their breast a soul,
And have not in their soul a God!
———
If we had only such men,
Just God! how with sorrow
The poet in the age where we are
Would go crying: Woe! woe!
He would be seen veiling his face;
And, weeping for the day that fades,
Standing at the threshold of his house,
Before the night ready to descend,
Sinister, casting ashes
To the four points of the horizon!
Like the goshawk in the clouds,
One would hear laughing, victorious,
The black poets of jeering,
The mocking Aristophanes.
To wither our countless shames,
Petronius awakened in the shadow
Would seize his Roman stylus.
Around our infamous epoch
The limping iambus of Archilochus
Would leap, whip in hand!
But God never withdraws!
No! — Never, hidden by the mountains,
That sun toward which all aspires
Has completely set!
Always, for the gloomy valleys,
For souls blinded by shadow,
For hearts that pride corrupts,
He leaves, above the abyss,
Some ray! on a summit,
Some truths on a brow!
———
Courage then, spirit, thoughts,
Brains gnawed by anxieties,
Sick hearts, wounded souls,
You who pray, you who dream!
O generations! courage!
You who come as if reluctantly,
With the noise the storm makes
In the trees of the forest!
Doubters wandering without aim or truce,
Who believe, extending the hand,
To see the forms of your dream
In the darkness of the road!
Philosophers whose spirit suffers,
And who, full of a divine dread,
Cling to the edge of the gulf,
Hanging on the brambles of the ravine!
Shipwrecks of all systems,
Who from this sad and conquering flood
Emerge trembling, and of yourselves
Have saved only your heart!
Sages who see the dawn break
Every morning among the flowers,
And who return from the dawn
Drenched in celestial gleams!
Wrestlers who, to wash your limbs,
Are on your feet before day!
Dreamers who dream in your rooms,
Eye lost in the shadow of everything!
You, men of perseverance,
Who always will happiness,
And still hold hope,
That panel of the Lord’s cloak!
Seekers accompanied by a lamp!
Shepherds armed with the goad!
Courage to all on the mountain!
Courage to all in the valley!
Provided that each of you follows
A path or else a furrow;
That, somber wave, he has God for shore,
And, cloud, for north wind;
Provided that he has his faith and keeps it;
And that in his joy or his sorrow
Sometimes gently he looks at
A child, a star, a flower;
Provided that he feels, slave or free,
Bound to all by one side,
Vibrate within him through some fiber
Universal humanity;
Courage! — In shadow and foam
The goal will appear soon!
The human race in a mist
Is the riddle and not the word!
Enough of night and tempest
Has passed over your bowed heads.
Lift your eyes! lift your head!
The light is on high! march!
———
Peoples! listen to the poet!
Listen to the sacred dreamer!
In your night, without him complete,
He alone has an illumined brow.
Piercing the shadows of future times,
He alone distinguishes in their dark flanks
The germ that has not yet hatched.
Man, he is gentle as a woman.
God speaks in a low voice to his soul
As to the forests and as to the waves.
It is he who, despite the thorns,
Envy and derision,
Walks, bowed among your ruins,
Gathering tradition.
From fertile tradition
Comes all that covers the world,
All that heaven can bless.
Every idea, human or divine,
That takes the past for root
Has the future for foliage.
He radiates! he casts his flame
Upon eternal truth!
He makes it shine for the soul
With a marvelous clarity.
He floods with his light
City and desert, Louvre and cottage,
And the plains and the heights;
To all from on high he unveils it;
For poetry is the star
That leads kings and shepherds to God!
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-the-poets-function-victor-hugo/