Miseries

Poem by Théodore Agrippa D'Aubigné Period 16th century

… Every lodging is exile; the rustic villages,
Without doors and floors, without doors and windows,
Wear a frightful look, just as a dead body
Shows, in showing its bones, that someone does it wrong.
Wolves and foxes and wild beasts
Take the place of humans, possess the villages,
So that in the very place where, in peace, care was taken
To store up bread, there one gathers hay.
If the rustic can steal from himself
Some grain hidden away through extreme hardship,
Hoping without hope for the end of his misfortunes,
Then one can see a troop of plowmen coupled,
And with an attached plowshare make room in the earth
To sow there wheat, the support of war;
And then, the following year, the wretched eyes
That, laborious, were wet with the sweat of the brow,
When, bearing the yoke of the most servile beasts,
Bound like oxen, they were coupled head by head,
Seeing a stranger’s ravishing hand
That draws from them life and hope and grain.
Then, bathed in tears, back to the woods they return;
In the blind rocks the afflicted dwell;
They go suffering hunger, which they bear gently,
Compared with the displeasure and infernal torment
They felt long ago, when their houses filled
With relentless demons, sepulchers of their lives,
Served them as stocks, or hanged by the fingers
From cutting cords, or attached to wood
And laid in fire, or with flaming fats
The naked bodies torn with pincers, or the pressing cries
Of their children hanged by the feet, torn
From the breast they clutched, from the dried-up nipples;
Or else, when the soldier’s hunger, whetted,
Drew, instead of bread, his host’s life,
Avenged but not sated, father and mother bruised
Left in cradles children so small
That, enclosed in swaddling clothes, prisoners in their bed,
They died of hunger: from the innocent mouth
The plaintive soul went to a happier place
To cry out its clamor at the great throne of God,
While the Kings, adorned with their substance,
In pomp and feasts deceived their conscience,
Stuffed their greatness with the ruins of others,
Fat with innocent juice, amusing themselves with sorrow,
Stupid, tasting neither pity nor wonders,
For tears and cries without eyes and without ears…

Théodore Agrippa d’Aubigné

Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.

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