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The earth at moments doubts; we no longer understand.
Man before his eyes has mist, an ebbing back,
Some pale and twilight thing we cannot name;
We have no more gladness, we have no more wrath;
Disappearance brings bewilderment.
The tawny eye of the owl stares dreadfully.
All sorts of inexplicable lightnings flash.
The altar tilts, and graveworms teem upon it.
All is mingled; Irmensul resembles Jehovah;
The stupefied sage stammers and goes away;
Evil seems identical with good in the half-light;
We see only the foot of the ladder of Number
And we dare not climb toward the dark infinite.
Dodona vaguely speaks to Gethsemane,
Oeta smokes not far from Sinai that thunders;
We dig, we dream, we deny, we quarrel, we are astonished;
Blind men show one another the way;
The divine heaven is wrong before the human mind;
The thinker is a believer, the scientist is an atheist;
Conscience listens, tries, and, bewildered,
Takes the false for the true in these gropings.
Where one sees Vedas, another sees novels.
The things once called virtues lose their forms.
Monstrosities cast enormous shadows
Even onto the human soul and the firmament.
No more honor, no more faith, nothing left, no more oaths.
We still see the summit, we no longer see the beacon.
A torch’s glow empurples the tiara.
We try to see, we prowl, we go, necks outstretched.
Love in the depths of hearts beats its wing in panic as if it were no longer safe within man.
The road is black; we cry out, we call, we name each other.
Who then is there? Speak. We grope for our neighbor.
The scattered crowd drifts with a swarm’s hum;
We touch, we see each other, but we are no longer together.
Evil is emperor, night is queen. We tremble.
A throne of shadow is there. The wretched form
Frightful groups in the deep abyss;
We think we see ice floes that the gulfs carry along;
All is confused and wan; and the darkness laughs.
The depths of the sky are troubled, horrible, and rainy;
And the little child who passes seems old.
It seems that eternal life is waning.
The soul then is sinister, and sees with anguish
These dread occultations of God.
Are we born? Do we die? What is time? What is place?
The peoples are haggard; these blades of grass shudder;
We hear tocsin bells and clarions sounding;
The wind is heavy, space is cold, the globe is bare;
The smiling demon says: I am unrecognized.
May 6, 1870.
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-eclipse-victor-hugo/