Oh! How Greedy They Are!

Poem by Victor Hugo Period 19th century

— Oh! how greedy they are! the mother sometimes says.
You must give them everything, the wild cherries,
The apples from the orchard, the cakes from the table;
If they hear the voice of the cows in the stable—
Milk! quick! and their cries are like a forest
Of Bondy when a bag of candy appears.
Now there they are demanding the moon!

Why not? The nothingness of giants annoys me;
I admire, dazzled, the greatness of the little ones.
Ah! the soul of children has strong appetites,
Indeed, and I am pensive before this greedy one
Who sees a universe in the shadows, and asks for it.
The moon! Why not? I tell you. Well, what then?
By Jove! if I had it, I would give it to them.

It’s true, without quite knowing what they might do with it,
Yes, I would give them, moon, your dark sphere,
Your sky, from which Swedenborg never returned,
Your enigma, your bottomless well, your unknown!
Yes, I would give them, saying: Be good!
Your dark mask that keeps watch in the clouds,
Your craters twisted by black north winds,
Your solitudes of shadow and oblivion, your valleys,
Perhaps happy, perhaps dreadful, edens or penal colonies,
Moon, and the vision of your pale mountains.
Yes, I believe that after all, kneeling children
Would know better how to use the moon than we;
They would put their vows, their hope, their prayer into it;
They would let themselves be led by this adventuress
Their little pensive hearts toward the great deep God.
At night, when the child sleeps, when his dreams go off,
Indeed, they go farther and higher than ours. I believe in children as people believed in apostles;
And when I see these dear little beings without gall
And without fear, desiring something from the sky,
I would give it to them, if I had it. The sphere
That the child wants must be his, if he prefers it.
Besides, do you have nothing beyond your rights?
Oh! I would love to see, for example, kings
Be astonished that dwarfs can have a world!
Yes, I would give you, blond-headed angels,
If I could, to you who reign through love,
These universes bathed in a mysterious light,
Led by spirits whose ministers are shadows,
And the enormous roundness of sinister planets.
Why not? I trust you, for I see you,
And you have never done harm. Yes, sometimes,
When thinking how great the innocent soul is,
When my thought absents itself in the depths of the infinite,
I say to myself, in ecstasy and sacred dread,
That perhaps, up there, there is, in the Unknown,
A god superior to the gods we dreamed of,
Capable of giving stars to souls.

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-oh-how-greedy-they-are-victor-hugo/