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As long as my poor heart, still full of youth,
Has not yet bid farewell to its illusions,
I would like to hold to the ancient wisdom,
Which made sober Epicurus a demigod.
I would like to live, to love, to grow used to men,
To seek a little joy and not count on it too much,
To do what has been done, to be what we are,
And to look at the sky without worrying about it.
I cannot; — in spite of myself the infinite torments me.
I could not think of it without fear and without hope;
And, whatever has been said of it, my reason is appalled
At not understanding it and yet seeing it.
What then is this world, and what have we come to do in it,
If, for one to live in peace, the heavens must be veiled?
To pass like a herd with eyes fixed on the ground,
And to deny the rest, is that then to be happy?
No, that is to cease being a man and to degrade one’s soul.
Into creation chance has cast me;
Happy or unhappy, I was born of a woman,
And I cannot flee outside humanity.
What then should be done? “Enjoy, says pagan reason;
Enjoy and die; the gods only think of sleeping.
— Only hope, answers the Christian faith;
Heaven watches without ceasing, and you cannot die.”
Between these two paths I hesitate and stop.
I would like, apart, to follow a gentler path.
There is none, says a secret voice;
In the presence of heaven, one must believe or deny.
I think so indeed; tormented souls
Throw themselves into one excess and then the other,
But the indifferent are only atheists;
They would no longer sleep if they doubted for a single day.
I resign myself therefore, and, since matter
Leaves in my heart a desire full of dread,
My knees will bend; I want to believe and I hope.
What will become of me, and what is wanted of me?
Here I am in the hands of a God more redoubtable
Than all the ills of this world at once;
Here I am alone, wandering, fragile and miserable,
Under the eyes of a witness who never leaves me.
He observes me, he follows me. If my heart beats too fast,
I offend his greatness and his divinity.
A gulf is beneath my steps if I throw myself into it,
To expiate one hour eternity is needed.
My judge is an executioner who deceives his victim.
For me, everything becomes a trap and everything changes its name.
Love is a sin, happiness is a crime,
And the work of the seven days is only temptation.
I no longer keep anything of human nature;
There exists for me neither virtue nor remorse.
I await the reward and I avoid the punishment;
My only guide is fear, and my only goal, death.
Yet I am told that an infinite joy
Awaits a few elect. — Where are they, those happy ones?
If you have deceived me, will you give me back my life?
If you have told me the truth, will you open the heavens to me?
Alas! that beautiful country of which your prophets spoke,
If it exists up there, it must be a desert.
You want them too pure, the happy ones you make,
And when their joy arrives, they have suffered too much for it.
I am only a man, and I do not wish to be less,
Nor to attempt more. — To what then should I hold?
Since I cannot believe the promises of the priest,
Is it the indifferent one that I am going to consult?
If my heart, weary of the dream that obsesses it,
Returns to reality to be satisfied,
At the bottom of the vain pleasures that I call to my aid
I find such disgust that I feel myself dying.
Even on the days when thought is impious,
When one would like to deny in order to cease doubting,
When I might possess all that in this life
In its vast desires man can covet;
Give me power, health, wealth,
Love itself, love, the only good here below!
Let blond Astarte, whom Greece idolized,
Come forth from her azure isles opening her arms to me;
When I might seize in the bosom of the earth
The secret elements of its fecundity,
Transform living matter as I please
And create for myself alone a unique beauty;
When Horace, Lucretius and old Epicurus,
Seated at my side would call me happy
And when those great lovers of ancient nature
Would sing to me the joy and the contempt of the gods,
I would say to them all: “Whatever we may do,
I suffer, it is too late; the world has grown old.
An immense hope has passed through the earth;
In spite of ourselves we must lift our eyes to heaven!”
What then remains to me? My revolted reason
Tries in vain to believe and my heart to doubt.
The Christian appalls me, and what the atheist says,
In spite of my senses, I cannot listen to.
The truly religious will find me impious,
And the indifferent will think me mad.
To whom shall I address myself, and what friendly voice
Will console this heart that doubt has wounded?
There exists, they say, a philosophy
That explains everything to us without revelation,
And that can guide us through this life
Between indifference and religion.
I consent to it. — Where are they, those makers of systems,
Who know, without faith, how to find the truth,
Impotent sophists who believe only in themselves?
What are their arguments and their authority?
One shows me here below two principles at war,
Which, vanquished in turn, are both immortal;
Another discovers in the distance, in the solitary sky,
A useless God who wants no altars.
I see Plato dreaming and Aristotle thinking;
I listen, I applaud, and I continue on my way.
Under absolute kings I find a despotic God;
Today we are told of a republican God.
Pythagoras and Leibniz transfigure my being.
Descartes abandons me in the midst of vortices.
Montaigne examines himself, and cannot know himself.
Pascal flees trembling from his own visions.
Pyrrho makes me blind, and Zeno insensible.
Voltaire throws down all that he sees standing.
Spinoza, weary of attempting the impossible,
Seeking his God in vain, believes he finds him everywhere.
For the English sophist man is a machine.
At last out of the mists comes a German rhetorician
Who, completing the ruin of philosophism,
Declares the sky empty, and concludes in nothingness.
There then are the debris of human science!
And, for five thousand years that one has always doubted,
After so much fatigue and perseverance,
That is the last word that has remained to us from it.
Ah! poor fools, miserable brains,
Who in so many ways have explained everything,
To go up to the heavens you needed wings;
You had the desire, faith was lacking in you.
I pity you; your pride comes from a wounded soul,
You felt the torments with which my heart is filled
And you knew it, that bitter thought
That makes man shudder when he sees the infinite.
Well then, let us pray together, — let us abjure the misery
Of your childish calculations, of so many vain labors!
Now that your bodies are reduced to dust
I will go kneel for you upon your tombs.
Come, pagan rhetoricians, masters of science,
Christians of past times and dreamers of today;
Believe me, prayer is a cry of hope!
So that God may answer us, let us address ourselves to him.
He is just, he is good; doubtless he pardons you.
You have all suffered, the rest is forgotten.
If the sky is deserted, we offend no one;
If someone hears us, may he take pity on us!
O you whom no one has been able to know,
And has not denied without lying,
Answer me, you who made me be born,
And tomorrow will make me die!
Since you let yourself be understood,
Why do you make us doubt you?
What sad pleasure can you take
In testing our good faith?
As soon as man lifts his head,
He believes he glimpses you in the heavens;
Creation, his conquest,
Is only a vast temple in his eyes.
As soon as he descends into himself,
He finds you there; you live in him.
If he suffers, if he weeps, if he loves,
It is his God who wills it so.
Of the noblest intelligence
The most sublime ambition
Is to prove your existence,
And to make your name spelled out.
However one may call you,
Brahma, Jupiter or Jesus,
Truth, eternal Justice,
Toward you all arms are outstretched.
The last of the sons of the earth
Gives you thanks from the bottom of his heart,
As soon as there mingles with his misery
An appearance of happiness.
The whole world glorifies you:
The bird sings to you on its nest;
And for a drop of rain
Thousands of beings have blessed you.
You have done nothing that is not admired;
Nothing of you is lost for us;
Everything prays, and you cannot smile
Without our falling to our knees.
Why then, O supreme Master,
Have you created evil so great,
That reason, virtue itself
Are appalled in seeing it?
When so many things on earth
Proclaim the Divinity,
And seem to attest from a father
Love, strength and goodness,
How, under the holy light,
Does one see acts so hideous,
That they make prayer expire
On the lips of the unhappy?
Why, in your celestial work,
So many elements so little in accord?
What is the good of crime and plague?
O just God! why death?
Your pity must have been deep
When with its goods and its ills,
This admirable and poor world
Came forth weeping from chaos!
Since you wanted to subject it
To the sorrows with which it is filled,
You should not have allowed it
To glimpse you in the infinite.
Why let our misery
Dream and guess at a God?
Doubt has laid waste the earth;
We see too much or too little of it.
If your puny creature
Is unworthy to approach you,
You should have let nature
Envelop you and hide you.
Your power would remain to you,
And we would feel its blows;
But rest and ignorance
Would have made our ills sweeter.
If suffering and prayer
Do not reach your majesty,
Keep your solitary grandeur,
Forever close the immensity.
But if our mortal anguish
Can reach as far as you;
If, in the eternal plains,
Sometimes you hear us groan,
Break this deep vault
That covers creation;
Lift the veils of the world,
And show yourself, just and good God!
You will perceive on the earth
Only an ardent love of faith,
And all humanity
Will prostrate itself before you.
The tears that have exhausted it
And that stream from its eyes,
Like a light dew
Will vanish into the heavens.
You will hear only your praises,
Only a concert of joy and love
Like that with which your angels
Fill the eternal dwelling;
And in that supreme hosanna,
You will see, at the sound of our songs,
Doubt and blasphemy flee,
While Death itself
Will join its last accents to them.
Alfred De Musset
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-hope-in-god-alfred-de-musset/