Lightning, Poem by Victor Hugo

Poem by Victor Hugo Collection The Four Winds of the SpiritThemes NaturePeriod 19th century

The ocean said to me: O poet, righteous man,
I too sometimes have this august surprise
That from the heavens an immense redness descends on me;
And I am suddenly pierced through, O dreamer,
By the sublime thunderbolt, angered and hated
As you are by the sinister spirit of Isaiah;
Lightnings are my cries, thunderbolts are my voice;
I roar at the reef as you do at kings;
I am the abrupt warner, horrible and celestial.
The enormous arm of fire joins me to its gesture
When it threatens the darkness and the infernal galley.
One is beautiful through Virgil and great through Juvenal,
And my gulf knows it as well as your soul;
I have, like you, the azure, a woman’s gentleness,
A child’s gaiety, waves full of eyes,
Dawns where the prodigious sky laughs,
Foams sometimes white as swans;
The stars above my waves make signs to each other,
And say: Come then and mirror yourself in the sea.
I am the pure level, the clear precipice;
I offer my water drops night and day to blades of grass.
But I make little account of all this superb blue,
Of this vast smile blossoming over everything,
Of this grace in which shadow dissolves into light,
Of these waves of crystal, of these shimmering waters;
And the dreadful passage of thunder is my glory.

Victor Hugo

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