Français
Español
Italiano
Deutsch
Português
VIII
TO M. THE D. OF ***
Jules, your castle, old tower and new house,
Is mirrored in the Loire, at the spot where the river,
Below Blois, widening its splendid basin,
Like a mother pressing a child to her breast
Speaking to him softly in a hushed voice,
Clasps a charming island in its folded arms.
You have all the goods that man can hold.
Already you smile, seeing summer come,
And soon you will listen beneath the foliage
To the bursting laughter rising from the village.
You live! April passes, and now here is
May, the month of love, May rosy and radiant,
May whose green robe is each day fuller,
Like a child levite charged with adorning the temple,
Hangs on the black branches, which it swells as it touches them,
The flowers from which incense comes, the nests from which song comes.
And then you write me that your fireplace
Is now overloading its emblazoned frieze
With a heap of ancient debris once triumphant,
Swords, crests tried out by children,
That soil the white fingers of your beautiful duchesses;
And that at last—and this is where your riches come from—
Your peasants, pricking the oxen with the goad,
Have opened a sepulcher while digging a furrow.
Your camp of Caesar has suffered their cut.
For you have for yourself a whole battlefield,
And your tough woodcutters, all tanned by the wind,
With the noise of their axe have often disturbed,
Along with the black ravens fleeing in flocks,
The shadows of heroes mingled with your oaks.
Friend, you know it, serious spectator,
I have dreamed many times in these glorious fields,
Which, forced by the plow, they, old witnesses of wars,
To give harvests like ordinary fields,
Like the fallen king who, fearing awakening,
Sees his glory again in dreams in the hours of sleep,
By day, let the oxherd walk through their rye,
And receive, by night, the visit of eagles!
Oh! respect, child of a century where everything is sold,
Rome dead beside a living village!
May your piety, which wants to descend on everything,
Leave in peace this earth or rather this ash!
Live content! from dawn, on your secret paths,
Wander with a woman’s hand in your hands;
Contemplate, from the midst of so many sweet things,
God who rejoices in the season of roses;
And then, in the evening, at the bottom of a worm-eaten chest,
Take this old Virgil where I have read so many times!
Seek the shade, and, while in the gallery
Chatters and laughs at random the mad conversation,
You, lighting your soul by the antique clarities,
Read my sweet Virgil, O Jules, and meditate!
For the times have come that the poet foretold.
Today, in these fields, vast silent plain,
Sometimes the plowman, bent over the furrow,
Finds a black javelin he believes fallen from the skies,
Then strikes pell-mell, at the bottom of the soil he digs,
Empty helmets, old spears that rust amalgamates,
And, reopening tombs full of human debris,
Pales at the grandeur of Roman bones!
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-m-the-duke-of-star-victor-hugo/