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So, old plaintive past, you will always come back
Crying to us: — Why then are we so far off? Ingrates!
What have you become? Tell us, with the abyss
What pact have you made? What outrage? What crime? —
Questioning us, dark and foaming with rage,
Furious.
We have walked, quite simply.
Whoever walks murders you, O good pale old past.
But what do you want? I am of my century, and I love it!
I have already told you. No, it is no longer at all
The era when nature was in bad taste,
When Bouhours, old Jesuit, and Batteux, old dunce,
Spectacles on nose and pen in fist, daubed with ink
The swan with gilded beak, the green wood, the blue sky;
When man corrected the manuscript of God.
No, it is no longer the time when Le Nôtre at Versailles
Crossed out the bush, the bramble, the thicket;
Century in which one saw in the frantic fields
Only powdered men under shorn trees.
Everything is free now. On its nape
The tree has more hair, man has less wig.
The old idea is dead with the old brain.
The revolution is a new world.
Our ear, in changing, has changed the music.
When Hernán Cortés arrived from Mexico,
He returned with a full hand, and, from the young universe,
He brought back gold; we bring back verses.
We bring back mysterious songs. We are
Other eyes, other brows, other hearts, other men.
Brave pedants, calm your good old wrath.
We tear from the human soul its bolts.
All brothers, and mingled in the mountains, in the plains,
We freely let our breaths go
Through the great woods and the blue firmaments.
We have demolished the old compartments.
No, we are no longer either peasant or noble,
Nor lout in his meadow, nor rustic in his vineyard,
Nor baron in his tower, nor reiter at his cannons;
We break this shell, and we become again
Man; man finally out of the twilight times;
Man equal to himself in all his copies;
Neither tyrant, nor convict, nor master, nor valet;
Humanity finally shows itself as it is,
Each morning freer and each evening wiser;
And the old worn mask lets the face be seen.
With Ezekiel we mingle Spinoza.
Nature takes us, nature has us;
In her deep den, gentle, she draws us;
She drives out for us her ancient satyr,
And shows us there a new sphinx that says: think.
For us the little cries uttered deep in the nests,
Are august; for us all the monarchies
That you salute, you, with your whitened heads,
All the royal armchairs with crimson backs,
Are little compared to a bindweed of the meadows.
To reign! Is that worth dreaming under an old alder?
We watch Charles V pass on his throne,
Julius II under his canopy, Caesar amid clarions,
And we feel pity when we compare
To the dawn of the heavens that false gilding.
When we contemplate, through a tear
Of the clouds, the bird flying in its pride,
We feel our wing tremble, O liberty!
In the matter of gold, at court we prefer the sheaf.
Nature is for us the one and sacred word,
And our art of poetry knows nothing of Despréaux.
Our most excellent, most powerful and most high kings,
Are the rock in the waves, the oak in the woods.
May, which breaks winter, that is to say the chain,
Pleases us. The true holds us. I am sometimes tempted
To say to Mont Blanc: — Sire! And: — Your majesty
To the virgin who passes and carries, rustic and beautiful,
Her pitcher on her brow and God in her eye.
For us, dreamers, bandits, romantics, demons,
Red caps, the grumbling waves, the eagle, the mountains,
The north wind, when evening opens its black portico,
The storm terrifying the apocalyptic wave,
Surpass in music, in mystery, in dread,
The four violins of the king’s chamber.
Each century, one must resign oneself, follows its course.
The men of former times were great no doubt;
We no longer turn toward the same lights.
Formerly, with curls on his brow, having at his sides
A heap of abbés without robes and women without wimples,
Among godlike princes, under Olympian ceilings,
Ready in his doublet to pose for Audran,
Lace at his neck, grave, and his eye on a dial,
In the Salon of Mars or in the gallery
Of Apollo, submerged in grand lordship,
In the flood of Rohan, of Sourdis, of Elbeuf,
And of proud golden clothes rolling toward the Œil-de-Bœuf,
The poet, were he Corneille, or you, Molière,
— While in the chapel or else in the aviary,
The singers tuned the theorbo and the lute,
And while Lully trembling cried: watch out for the C! —
Waited until in the midst of the clear fanfare
And of inclined brows there appeared, like a beacon,
The page, in small barrels of fine silver brocade,
Who carried the candlestick of monsieur the dauphin.
Today, for Versailles and for the Salon of Hercules,
Having the shadow and the brass of the red twilight,
Tawny, and little jostled by Guiche or Brissac,
Face to the wind, fists in a sack coat,
Alone, in the immensity that the hurricane shakes,
He listens to the noise made by the dark prow
Of the earth, and pensive, on the pale horizon,
At the hour when, in the anxious orchestra of the thicket,
Of the tree and the spring, a quivering passes,
When the oak whispers and takes up its double bass,
The water its flute and the wind its Stradivarius,
He watches the frightful Sirius rise.
For the muse in paniers, warmed by Dorat,
He is an orangutan; for the woods, he is Orpheus.
Nature says to him: my son. This lout,
O great century! Writes better than Ablancourt and Patru.
Is he ferocious? No. This affable troglodyte
Makes the elm by the road recite its fable;
He says to the gentle kid: well bleated, my child!
When the flower, in the morning, adorning itself with pearls,
Mirrors itself in the waves, coquettish and exquisite prude,
He passes and says: Good day, madame la marquise.
And then he suffers, he weeps, he is a man; fate
Comes out in painful rays from his sad brow.
For, here below, however strong one be, however little one be worth,
All, whoever we are, destiny works us
To adorn in the azure the tiara of God.
The same arm makes us pass through the same fire;
And, over humanity, whether it uses its file,
Trying all hearts on its sublime grindstone,
Scrutinizing all the flaws of transparent man,
Somber worker of heaven, black goldsmith, drawing
From the sage a spark and from the just a flame,
Misfortune bends over, lapidary of the soul.
Yes, such is the poet today. Great, small,
All in startled Pan we are swallowed up.
And these surprised secrets, these contemplated splendors,
These pages of night and day spelled out,
What Newton affirms, what Mesmer perceives,
The great freedom of breaths on the sea,
The forest that fears God in the shadow and names him,
The waters, the flowers, the fields, give birth in us to a man
Mysterious, like the depths he sees.
Nature shows the heavens to dreamers with her finger.
The cedar with enormous torso, athlete of storms,
On wild Lebanon counseled the prophets,
And it was its austere example that impelled
Nahum against Nineveh, Amos against Gaza.
The spheres in rolling throw us justice.
Yes, the soul rises to good as the star to the solstice;
And the balanced world has made man a duty.
When the soul sees God badly, the dawn makes him see better.
At night, when Aquilo blows his trumpet,
What he says, our quivering heart repeats.
We live free, proud, trembling, prostrate,
Dazzled by the great formidable God; and, turned
Toward all ideals and toward all possibles,
We gather in the azure the invisible roses.
The shadow is our palace. We are messmates
Of the bee, of the rush nourished by the streams,
Of the butterfly that drinks in the watered flower.
Our souls dispute the dew with the birds.
Leaving the dead past in the deceased centuries,
We live on rays, on sighs, on perfumes,
And we drink our fill of the immense ambrosia
That Homer calls love and Plato poetry.
Under the black branches of destiny, we wander,
Pure and grave, with breaths on our brows.
Our adoration, our altar, our Louvre,
Is virtue that bleeds or the morning that opens;
The great risings that we never miss,
Is Venus of the black mountains whitening the summits;
Is the lily flowering, chaste, charming, severe;
Is Jesus rising, pale, on Calvary.
November 22, 1854.
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-literature-victor-hugo/