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What are you? What, you come down from up there, wretch!
What! you, lead, fire, death, the inexorable,
Reptile of war with tortuous furrow,
What! you, the cynical and monstrous assassination
That princes from the depths of night hurl at men,
You, crime, you, ruin and mourning, you who call yourself
Hatred, dread, ambush, carnage, horror, wrath,
It is through the azure that you swoop down on us!
Awful fall of iron, infamous hatching,
Flower of bronze burst into petals of flame,
O vile human thunderbolt, O you by whom are great
The bandits, and by whom are divine the tyrants,
Servant of royal crimes, prostitute,
By what prodigy have you sprung from the cloud?
What sinister usurpation of the lightning!
How do you come from heaven, you who come out of hell!
The man whom just now your bite grazed,
Had sat down pensive in the corner of a hovel.
His eyes sought in the shadow a dream that shone;
He was musing; he had, quite small, played there;
The past before him, full of childish voices,
Appeared; it was there that the Feuillantines were;
Your idiot thunderbolt strikes down a paradise.
Oh! how charming it was! how we laughed in those days!
To grow old is to watch a dwindled light.
A garden was green where this street passes.
The shell finishes, alas, what the pavement has done. Here the sparrows pillaged the mustard,
And the little birds picked quarrels with each other;
The gleams of this wood were supernatural;
So many trees! what pure air in the trembling branches!
We were a blond head, we have white hair;
We were a hope and we are a ghost.
Oh! how young we were in the shadow of the old dome!
Now we are old like it. There it is.
This passerby dreams. Here his soul took flight
Singing, and it is here that to his vague pupils
Appeared flowers that seemed eternal.
Here life was light; here
Walked, under the foliage thickened in April,
His mother whom he held by a piece of her dress.
Memories! how everything suddenly slips away!
The dawn opening its corolla to his gaze shone
In that sky where flames at this moment upon him
The frightful blossoming of bombs.
O the ineffable dawn where doves flew!
This man, who here is gloomy, was joyful.
A thousand dazzlements marveled his eyes.
Spring! in this garden abounded periwinkles,
Roses, and heaps of white daisies
That all seemed to laugh in the warming sun,
And he himself was a flower, since he was a child.
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-a-bomb-at-the-feuillantines-victor-hugo/