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All kinds of children, blond, luminous, ruddy,
Whose sleep the blue paradise visits
When their eyes are closed at night in their alcoves,
Are there, gathered before the cage of the wild beasts;
They look.
They have before their eyes the element,
The abyss, the serpent twisted like a torment,
The frightful dragon, the inept wild ass, the panther,
The jackal abhorred by the specters, which he unearths,
The gorilla, phantom and tiger, and those bandits,
The wolves, and the great lynxes that once were on familiar terms
With the holy prophets leaning upon bibles;
And, while that heap of terrible prisoners
Growls, one a vile convict, another an arrogant outlaw,
What does the pink and charming group do? It smiles.
The abyss is there, roaring, and the children smile.
They admire. The dreadful voices cry out
While that swarm of brows full of rays,
Almost winged, moves us as if we saw
The dawn blossoming in a georgic,
While those children sing, a tragic noise
Goes, laden with wrath and rebellions
From the dungeon of the vultures to the hulks of the lions.
And the fresh smile of the children continues.
Before this supreme sweetness, humble, ingenuous,
Obstinate, one is astonished, and the stupefied mind
Dreams, as in the old days of Orpheus and Japheth,
And one feels oneself sliding into the obscure spiral
Of vertigo, where Job, Thales, Epicurus fell,
Where one gropes for someone, dark well
Where the soul says: Answer! where God says: I cannot!
Oh! if the ancient conjecture were founded,
If the troubled dream of the magi of Chaldea,
The hypothesis that Hermes and Pythagoras make,
If that fierce dream were the deep truth;
The beast among us, if that were Tantalus!
If the dreadful and fatal reality
Were this: the wolves, the boas, the mammons
Dark masks, hiding invisible demons!
Oh! those frightful beings whose shadow is the lair,
Those flattened skulls of tiger and viper,
Those vile brows crushed by the divine heel,
The bear, black dreamer, the monkey, frightful sylvan,
Those convulsive grimaces, those senseless faces,
Those stupid instincts threatening our thoughts,
Some full of the nocturnal horror of the forests,
Others, fleeting aspects, floating, confused, secret,
On which the sea spreads its moires and its nacres,
Those larvae, those passers-by of the woods, those simulacra,
Those living beings swallowed in the animal tomb,
Those phantoms having appetite for law,
Blue sky! if it were true that this is what we call
The damned, expiating ancient crimes among men,
Who, come out of a former life, having
In their eyes the terror of a thunderstruck past,
Come, stammering with fright and hatred, To speak among us the words of gehenna,
And who try in vain to express their torment
In our speech with a dull roaring;
Heap of convicts that grinds and growls, barks and bellows;
Mute howlers lit by a blind flashing;
Oh! if they were there, naked beneath the iron fate,
Vaguely meditating on the eternal hell;
If these gloomy vanquished of immense nature
Believed themselves forever banished from clemency;
If they saw the suns going out by degrees,
And if they were nothing more than desperate ones;
Oh! in the bottomless overwhelm, when everything breaks,
When everything goes away, refuses and flees, what a surprise,
For these beings wicked and trembling at once,
To hear suddenly come these young voices!
Someone is there! Who then? Someone is speaking! O dark problem!
A whiteness appears on the pallid wall
Where the obscure and gloomy vision wavers.
The leviathan sees the halcyon come running!
What! the deluge sees the dove arrive!
The brightness of cradles filters through the tomb
And pierces with a clement day the condemned!
Specters are not hated by the newborn!
What! the immense spider opens its dark webs!
What a ray is a child’s glance, holy stars!
But since one can enter, one can therefore leave!
All is therefore not finished! The azure comes to speak to us!
The sky is more celestial in those sweet pupils!
It is when God, to come from the eternal vaults
Down to the earth, sad and fatal midst,
Passes through the child that he is altogether God!
What! the deformed ceiling would have a window!
One would see impossible hope be reborn!
What! one could no longer bite, no longer gnash!
Do we picture to ourselves what may be passing
In the fearful brains of the formidable beasts?
Light at the bottom of unfathomable gulfs!
An intervention of divine faces!
The torsion of evil in the burning ravines
Of miserable hell is suddenly appeased
By innocent glances pure as the dew!
What! one sees eyes shine and one hears steps!
Do we know whether they do not begin,
These monsters, to dream, as soon as night falls,
Calling to one another, stupefied by this unknown dawn
That rises on the harsh and severe horizon?
They have the holy shudder of venerable pardon;
It seems to them they feel their chains leaving them;
The tangled manes meditate;
Hell, that ruin, is less troubled and less black;
And the almost softened eye of these captives believes it sees
In a pure half-light that a distant sky makes azure
The shadow of a temple grow at the threshold of the hovel.
What! hell would end! the shadow would listen to reason!
O clemency! O glimmer in the enormous prison!
One knows not what expectation stirs these strange hearts.
What a promise at the bottom of the smile of angels!
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-all-kinds-of-children-victor-hugo/