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You speak to me from the depths of a dream
As a soul speaks to the living.
Like the foam of the shore,
Your dress flutters in the winds.
I am the seaweed of countless waves,
The captive of victorious destiny;
I am the one whom all shadow
Covers without extinguishing his heart.
My spirit resembles that island,
And my fate that ocean;
And I am the tranquil inhabitant
Of lightning and hurricane.
I am the outlaw who veils himself,
Who dreams and sings, far from noise,
With the owl and the star,
The dark song of the night.
You, are you not, like myself,
A torch in this harsh and vile world,
A soul, that is to say a problem,
And a woman, that is to say an exile?
Come out of the cloud, charming shadow.
O phantom, let yourself be seen!
Be a beacon in my torment,
Be a gaze in my black sky!
Seek me among the seagulls!
Cast a ray upon my reef,
And, in my silent depths,
The whiteness of the pensive angel!
Be the wing that passes and mingles
With the great angry waves.
Oh, come! you must be very beautiful,
For your distant song is very sweet;
For the night gives birth to dawn;
It is perhaps a law of the heavens
That my dark destiny should hatch
Your mysterious smile!
In this shadowy world where I wander,
We must perceive each other,
You, all made of light,
I, all composed of duty!
You tell me from afar that you love me,
And that, at night, on the horizon,
You come to see on the pale shores
The white specter of my house.
There, meditating beneath the great dome,
Near the ceaselessly agitated flood,
Surprised to find the atom
Resembling immensity,
You compare, without knowing me,
The wave to man, the shadow to the banished,
My lamp starring my window
To the star starring infinity!
Sometimes, as at the bottom of a tomb,
I feel you on my fatal brow,
Mouth of the Unknown from which falls
The pure kiss of the Ideal.
At your breath, pushed toward God,
I feel within me, sweet fright,
All my thoughts shuddering,
Leaves of the inner tree.
But you do not want to be seen;
You come and you flee in turn;
You do not want to call yourself joy,
Having said: My name is love.
Oh! take one more step! Come, enter,
If no duty forbids it;
Come see my soul in its den,
The spirit a lion, the heart a child;
Come see the desert where I dwell
Alone beneath my frightful ceiling;
Be the angel with the cenobite,
Be the light with the seer.
Change into pearls in my ruins
All my drops of sweat!
Come place upon my dark works
Your finger from which a gleam emerges!
From the edge of sinister ravines
Of dream and vision,
I glimpse divine things… —
Complete the apparition!
Come see the dreamer who kindles
As he destroys himself,
And, from day to day, in his soul
Has more death and less night!
Come! come into my haggard mist,
Where faith is born, from which the spirit emerges,
Where confusedly I gaze at
The obscure forms of fate.
Everything is illuminated by funeral gleams;
God, for the saddened thinker,
Always opens in the darkness
Sudden gulfs of clarity.
Before being on this earth,
I feel that once I soared;
I was the solitary archangel,
And my misfortune is to have been born.
Upon my soul, which was a dove,
Come, you who bear the seal of the heavens.
Sometimes a feather falls
Upon the corpse of a bird.
Yes, my irreparable misfortune,
Is to hang between two elements,
Is to have in me, wretched,
Both mire and firmaments!
Alas! alas! it is to be a man;
It is to dream that I was beautiful,
To ignore how I am named,
To be a sky and to be a tomb!
It is to be a convict who walks
His vile labor under the blue sky;
It is to carry the human basket
Where I had your wings, my God!
It is to drag matter;
It is to be full, I, son of the day,
Of the earth of the cemetery,
Even when I cry out: Love!
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-to-her-who-is-veiled-victor-hugo/