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It is you, denatured! Yes, there you are, it is you
Who silenced your heart to listen to your faith,
Who, to win your heaven of larva and owl,
Trampled your soul underfoot, deaf-mute mother,
And who, when your son lay across
Your threshold, weeping with both arms open,
Walked over your child to enter the cloister.
When love decreased, you thought you felt God grow;
Ah! Fool! And there you are, face of austerity!
Go, cold sanctity is false sanctity.
To believe one pleases the God of light and glory
Because from a white soul one makes a black soul,
Because one has first blown out one’s torch,
Because one comes to Him, being no more than a tomb
Where those who loved you beforehand had to descend,
And that one is its marble and they are its ashes!
O bleak vision! Evil dream dreamed
By those who desert God in the deep convent!
God is reason; God is love; God is being;
It is the duty to live after the right to be born;
It is the immense light on the immense combat.
He willed that man should love, conquer, fall,
And not be phantom and mourning. The coarse frock
Does not give man a good curvature;
To become shadow is to darken the holy place;
By approaching the specter, one moves away from God.
No cloister; life. A veil covers a dream.
The merit is not, when one rises toward God,
To reject, like a garment taken off,
One’s parents, one’s homeland and one’s humanity;
To flee from one’s heart as from a mire;
To say: — Tear me away, Christ, so that I may be an angel,
My father, this rag, my mother, this tatter! —
To put a gag on startled nature;
To cry: — My children in whom all my blood mingles,
My son in his cradle, my daughter at the breast,
All that is night, for God alone is day. —
To cross out in oneself family and love
Like misprints that hide the text from you;
And to lose the human form, under pretext
That one rises and goes off into the blue firmament.
Let us, while fixing our gaze on God,
Fulfill all our duties as son or brother or father.
Let us be the bending being, even when it hopes.
By the spirit toward good, by the flesh toward evil;
Without leaving the real, let us conquer the ideal;
Let us remain man, rising toward the austere sepulcher.
One must go to heaven while walking on the earth.
March 9, 1855.
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-on-a-portrait-of-a-saint-victor-hugo/