The Axe? No. Never..., Poem by Victor Hugo

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

The axe? No. Never. I want it for no one.
Not even for that czar before whom I shudder,
Not even for that monster fatal to himself,
Who abolishes White-Hall by suppressing Tyburn;
And when death, opening its disastrous register,
Says to me: — What do you throw into this sinister basket?
Either the head of the people, or the head of the king?
I say: — Neither this one nor that one. — My law
Is life; and my joy, O God, is the pure dawn.
I am not one of those who create rot;
I am not one of those who give food
To the sepulcher, where one sees crawling and stretching out
The dreadful sarcoptes hatched from noxious miasma;
I am not one of those toward whom the earthworms,
Gaping, turn their blind heads in the night. …

Victor Hugo

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