All the Early Ages Are Scattered, Poem by Victor Hugo

Poem by Victor Hugo Themes ChildhoodPeriod 19th century

All the early ages are scattered beneath these great trees.
Indeed, the alignment of vases and marbles,
This trim parterre, this resigned cedar,
This oak that Monsieur Despréaux would have signed off on,
These black bars crossed over the fragrant flower,
Do honor to Buffon who was one of the Forty
And mingled, in a way to fulfill all our wishes,
The comb of Le Nôtre with the frightful hair
Of Pan, god of thickets, rocks, and plains;
That does not prevent the roses from being full
Of perfumes, desires, love, and light;
That does not prevent summer from being summer;
That takes no confidence from life;
That does not prevent the dawn in good conscience
From appearing at the zenith that seems to widen,
The children from playing, the monsters from roaring.

A good joyful terror fills these sweet heads.
Listen to these charming cries. — Come see the beasts!
They run. What ecstasy! We stop before
Cages where we see blue birds dreaming
As if they awaited the month when one migrates.
— Look at this big cat. — This big cat is the tiger.
The grown-ups make the little ones venerate the monkeys,
The pythons, the jackals, and call by their names
The old bears who, they say, carry their wicked humor
So far as to sometimes eat soldiers of the line.

Monstrous spectacle! The muzzles, the gazes
Of dragons, tawny glow deep in wild woods,
The scales, the stings, the claw that lengthens,
An apparition of abyss, the dreadful dream
Real that the troubled eye of bitter prophets
Sees beneath the frightful transparency of the seas
And that drags itself scattered in unheard-of horror,
The enormous yawning of the gulf that is bored,
The jaws of the hydra opened mournfully,
Some pale, obscure, inclement chaos we know not,
An attempt at existing, a sketch of life
From which comes the furious stammering of envy.
That is the animal; and that is what the child
Looks at, admires and fears, vaguely triumphant;
It is from the night that he comes to contemplate, he the dawn.
This black swarming lows, howls, devours;
One is a rosy cherub, frail and trembling; One goes to see this one whom winter makes all white,
That other whose eye casts a flash from the tropics;
All that growls, hates, threatens, hisses, stings,
Bites; but by his nurse one feels protected;
How amusing it is to be afraid without danger!
What man contemplates, he believes he discovers.
To see a king in his den, a tiger in his Louvre,
That pleases childhood. — He is jolly ugly!
Come see! — Strange instinct! Thanks to which horror pleases!
One comes to seek above all those whom one must avoid.
— This way! — No, that way! — Look, see! — Come quick!
— Throw them your cake. — Not all. — Throw anyway.
— I like wolves. — I prefer bears.
And the brows are laughing, and the sun gilds them,
And those who, born yesterday, do not yet speak
During these clamors beneath the green branches,
Are there, mysterious, eyes wide open,
And meditate.

Africa with impassable folds,
O gulf of sinister horizons, sea of sands,
Sahara, Dahomey, Lake Nagain, Darfur,
You, America, and you, India, harsh crossroads
Where Zoroaster meets Homer,
Moon landscapes where the chimera roams,
Where the orangutan walks with a stick in his hand,
Where nature is mad and has nothing human left,
Jungles dreamed by the sleeps of fever,
Plains where suddenly one sees arrivals
Of rivers suddenly swollen and unleashed,
Where one hears the astonished lions roar
That the rising water encloses in sudden islands,
Deserts whose gavials are the black cenobites,
Where the boa, without breath and without trembling,
Seems a tree trunk on the ground and sleeps frightfully,
Land of baobabs, of bamboos, of lianas,
Remember that we have Georges and Jeannes,
Create monsters; lakes, forests, with your mounts
Your darkness and your noises, compose mammons;
Abysses, condense in them all your glories,
Give them your rocks for teeth and for jaws, For voice your hurricane, for gaze your horror;
Give them aspects of pope and emperor,
And make, above the thickets, their stable
And their palace, leap their appalling joy.
Indeed, the cassowary is a good senator,
The goose looks like a bishop and pleases by its height,
God when he made the monkey dreamed of Scaramouche,
The hummingbird enchants me and I love the fly-bird;
But what from your verve, O nature, I await
Are the Behemoths and the Leviathans.
The newborn who comes out of shadow and mystery
Would not be content to see nothing on earth;
An immense need for wonder, that is
All childhood, and it is thinking of that
That I applaud, nature, the giants you form;
The blue eye of the innocent wants enormous beasts;
Work, frightful gods! Be limitless
And fruitful, we cling to your deformities
As much as to your perfumes, as much as to your remedies,
O deserts, seeing that the hippopotamuses,
That the rhinoceroses and that the elephants
Are obviously made for little children.

Victor Hugo

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