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VII
What are you doing, Lord? What purpose does your work serve?
What is the river’s water for, and the lightning of the storm?
Why the meadows? the pure brooks that wash the grass?
And, on the green hillsides that fill the horizon,
The immense flocks with their fertile breath
That the barking of dogs drives across the plains?
Why, in this sweet month when the air seems warmed,
When a calyx opens to the breezes of noon,
Do you plunge there, O Lord, the foraging bee,
And change every flower into a humming bell?
Why the golden mist that rises from the hamlets?
Why the shadow and peace that fall from the branches?
Why the azure lake strewn with soft islands?
Why the deep woods, the grottoes, the refuges?
What is the good, each evening, when vermilion summer shines,
Like a burning coal laying down the sun
Amid the vapors stirred by the winds,
Of lighting in the west a brasier of clouds?
Why redden the vine and cast upon old walls
The ray that returns to swell the ripe grapes?
What is the good of tilting on its moving axes
This monstrous globe with all its cities,
And its mountains and its seas that float around,
What is the good, O Lord, of tilting it in turn,
So that shadow may extinguish it or day gild it,
Now toward dark night and now toward dawn?
What use to you is the wave, the cloud, the sound
That in secret in the flower the germ of the fruit makes?
What is the good of fertilizing the ethers and the waves,
Making for all suns belts of worlds,
Peopling with wandering stars the enormous ark of the heavens,
Lord! and on our brows, from which our eyes radiate,
Heaping in every direction millions of leagues
And setting the blue plains of the vague infinite?
Why on the heights and in the depths
This frightful mass of shadows and splendors?
What is the good of perfuming, warming, nourishing and shining,
Loving all, and, good God! ceaselessly translating,
For the inner eye as for the carnal eye,
The eternal thought into an eternal spectacle?
If it is so that in this century where law falls to ashes
Man passes without seeing, without believing, without understanding,
Without seeking anything in the shadow, and without raising his eyes
Toward the divine counsels that float in the heavens,
Under the sacred form or under the dazzling veil
Now of a cloud and now of a star!
If it is so that this age may make, in its dreary ennui,
Of yesterday’s oppressed the oppressor of today;
So that people tear each other apart over a hundred dreams;So that the people, a crowd where so many saps sleep,
As well as kings, — grave and lofty lesson! —
May have brutality as their final reason,
And answer, a flock that is killed or that stones,
To the blind cannonball with the stupid pavement!
If it is so that riot shakes the city!
So that everything is tyrant, even liberty!
If it is so that the honor of the old gentlemen
Is harnessed sadly to the projects of parties;
If it is so that to one’s hatred one adds an oath
As to one’s old dagger one puts back a blade;
If it is so that the prince, a man born of a woman,
Born to shine very quickly and to live very little,
Imagines himself king as you are God!
If it is so that joy is snatched from the just;
So that iniquity reigns, so that envy,
Filling so many brows with devouring fires,
May make small hearts that love would make great!
If it is so that the priest, infirm and sad apostle,
Walks with his two eyes, opening one and closing the other,
Insults nature in the name of the written word,
And does not understand that here everything is spirit,
That God places his breath in the clay as in us,
And that the tree and the flower comment on the Gospel!
If it is so that finally no one, great or small,
Not even the old man whom age weighs down,
No one, sounding the avenues of the tomb,
May have the austere concern for unknown things,
And that, like the ox lulled by instinct,
Each traces a furrow without thinking of the ear of grain!
For humanity, gloomy and lacking prophets,
Loses the admiration of the works you do;
Man no longer feels shining in his triumphant heart
Neither the dawn, nor the lily, nor the angel, nor the child,
Nor the soul, that ray made of pure light,
Nor creation, that immense figure!
Hence it is that often I dream and say:
— Are we condemned and accursed?
Are these living beings, wretchedly prosperous,
Disinherited of the breath of their fathers?
O God! consider the men of this time,
Blind, far from you, floating under so much shadow.
Extinguish your suns, or rekindle their flame!
Take back your world, or give them a soul!
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-world-and-the-century-victor-hugo/