If you have naught to say to me,
\nWhy come to my side?
\nWhy do you smile that way to me—
\nSmile no king has denied?
\nIf you have naught to say to me,
\nWhy come to my side?
If you don’t want me to render,
\nWhy do you press my hand?
\nThat dreamy, angelic, tender
\nThought as you walk the strand—
\nIf you don’t want me to render,
\nWhy do you press my hand?
If you want me to depart,
\nWhy do you come so near?
\nWhen I see you, I up-start:
\nYou’re my joy, you’re my care.
\nIf you want me to depart,
\nWhy do you come so near?
May 18…
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-25T10:29:33+00:00", "url": "https://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/25/victor-hugo-contemplations-song.html" }, { "id": "http://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/24/victor-hugo-contemplations-omphales-spinning.html", "title": "Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 2:3 Omphale’s Spinning Wheel", "content_html": "\nIn the hall a fine ivory spinning wheel is set.
\nThe nimble wheel is white, the distaff black as jet—
\nAn ebony distaff with lapis inlay snug.
\nIt rests in the atrium upon a gorgeous rug.
An artisan from Aegina has carved, at its base
\nEuropa, and a god who does not heed her pleas.
\nThe white bull abducts her; Europa, forlorn,
\nCries out, shrinks in terror, casts her eyes down,
\nSees monstrous Ocean kissing her rosy feet.
Needles and thread, half-closed boxes and pleats
\nAnd Miletan purple- and gold-dyed wool,
\nFill up a basket by the dormant spinning wheel.
Yet, loathsome, frightful, and immense, they come
\nFrom deep in the palace, twenty foul phantoms—
\nTwenty blood-stained monsters, only half-seen—
\nTeem round the slumbering wheel: the Nemean
\nLion, the hideous Hydra of Lerna,
\nCacus, dark brigand of dark cavern inner,
\nThree-bodied Geryon, the typhoons of the seas
\nThat, at nightfall, blow with clamour through the reeds;
\nEach bears on his brow a club’s mark, ghastly bruising,
\nAll—lingering at a distance, menacing—
\nFix their dark, humbled eyes on the wheel, splendid,
\nWhere a supple, knotted thread hangs suspended.
June 18…
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-24T10:15:55+00:00", "url": "https://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/24/victor-hugo-contemplations-omphales-spinning.html" }, { "id": "http://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/23/victor-hugo-contemplations.html", "title": "Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 2:2", "content_html": " \n.2.\nMy verses would fly, sweet weaklings,
\nTo your beautiful garden world,
\nIf only my verses had wings,
\nWings like a bird.
And they would fly, like leaping flames,
\nTo your laughing heaped hearth-coal,
\nIf only my verses had wings,
\nWings like the soul.
They’d near you, as pure faithful things,
\nDrop night and day quick from above,
\nIf only my verses had wings,
\nWings like love.
Paris, March 18…
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-23T07:46:32+00:00", "url": "https://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/23/victor-hugo-contemplations.html" }, { "id": "http://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/22/victor-hugo-contemplations-the-first.html", "title": "Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 2:1 The First of May", "content_html": "\nIt all conjugates the verb “to love.” Look—roses!
\nI speak of nothing else in all my poetries.
\nFirst of May! Love—joyful, hot, jealous, high—
\nMakes the woods, nests, the flowers, even wolves, sigh;
\nThe tree with its motto which, last autumn, I incised,
\nRepeats it as its own, as if just improvised;
\nOld, pensive caves—where the mocking jay laughs—
\nTwitch heavy brows, purse lips, shaping a heart;
\nThe atmosphere, tender and aromatic, sings
\nWith declarations the land offers to Spring,
\nWhich lovestruck grass whispers to enchanting sky.
\nAcross the blue firmament Day passes by,
\nThe countryside, deeper in love, at crosstrees,
\nLavishes odours, and, on the mild breeze,
\nSends its fragrant kisses to the returning season.
\nThese bouquets—azure, carmine, saffron, crimson—
\nWhose breath drifts away, murmuring: “I love you!”
\nAcross the ravine, pond, field, even the furrow,
\nScattering splashes of every colour;
\nAnd, gifting perfumes, earth has kept the flower—
\nAs if her sighs and tender epistolaries—
\nSent to May-month, laughing amid languid trees—
\nAnd all the love notes of her garrulous heart,
\nHad imprinted on a blotting pad its mark!
In the woods, the birds—their voices soft and low—
\nSing to the fairies: triolets and rondeaux;
\nEverything confides sweet secrets to the shade;
\nEverything loves, whisper-confessing. It could be said
\nThat north, hot south, west to sunset, at the dawn
\nThe flowering hedge, the ivy, and the murmuring spring,
\nThe mountains, the fields, the lakes, and the oaks swaying
\nRepeat the four winds’ composed quatrain.
Saint-Germain, May 1st, 18..,
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-22T11:52:43+00:00", "url": "https://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/22/victor-hugo-contemplations-the-first.html" }, { "id": "http://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/20/victor-hugo-contemplations-a-halt.html", "title": "Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1:29. A Halt on the Way", "content_html": "\nA mist once veiled the horizon; but now
\nBright noon comes up with her radiant brow;
\nOn the branch fog distils into pearls flecked, as
\nGleaming diamonds on periwinkles’ necklace.
\nThe wind blows between trees and over the roofs
\nOf a dark hamlet, hidden thatched eaves in the woods,
\nAnd one can see—scattered amidst leafy oaks—
\nThe faint, drifting wisps of up-trembling smoke;
\nBetween high banks a rivulet runs through meadows,
\nUnder the restless sway of long-haired willows;
\nElm and Beech—ancient denizens of the vale—
\nBrother trees on opposite shores join hands in hail—
\nSeeming to say, under blue sky, “here’s good faith!”
\nA bird pours out song, filled with both love and grace,
\nA flutter of leaves and wingbeats; the pond brimming
\nAnd glistening under green dragonflies skimming;
\nA hut is revealing there—nestled in thyme and sage—
\nAmidst pewter mugs, smiling, sits an old saint.
\nWith sunlight like this, beside banks flower-patterned,
\nIt might be a temple, or maybe a tavern.
\nWhether it’s lips that thirst, or it’s our hearts,
\nWe praise Good God, for His cup as we depart!
\nWe go in. — “What have you?” — “fresh eggs and cool drink.” —
\nIt resembles a manger whose roof starts to sink.
\nAt meadow’s spring, sheltered by foliage’s green bar,
\nA blonde child has come to fill the water jar—
\nJoyful, lifting the hem of her fustian skirt,
\nDipping her pitcher in the fountain’s spurt,
\nThe water was gazing with soft, murmuring awe
\nAt this lovely little girl with eyes of azure.
\nAnd beside a great bed draped in old serge, I watch
\nPensive, an image: Christ scourged by the lash.
What do they matter, martyrs suffering abuse?—
\nInsults from all sides, from each age spittle-sluiced,
\nThe blind man’s futile clamour, eternal jeering
\nIn which the mob’s always blindly careering?
In time, the scourged wanderer comes to be God;
\nHis bruises high-sky-blue, him dark, bleeding-browed,
\nIn shadows—church, palace, hut come into view—
\nThe crucifix whitens, Christ acquires heaven’s hue.
\nOne day, crowds will follow; go forth now, blood-gushed,
\nSuffer, O thinkers—by your tormentors’ tears washed!
\nSorrow consecrates saints, sages, thinkers of breadth;
\nA halo blooms trembling amongst shame’s dark depths,
\nAnd over this vile swamp—a glimmer from above—
\nIs an eternal flame, ghostly, in quagmires of blood.
\nThe selfsame fate leads all toward the same story.
\nDeep in the fabric of our human history,
\nLies an abyss of sorts, where, one’s by one’s,
\nAll who belong to life and to light plunge—
\nThe good, the pure, great, divine, the famous;
\nLike torches tossed wild in the breath of the dimness.
\nThere, we see Dante is swallowed up—in go
\nSocrates, Milton, Thomas More and Scipio
\nAeschylus, holding his trembling leaf palms.
\nA night from which their soaring memory comes!
\nTheir complete all in their sacrifice for us.
\nFrom Aristides’ exile to the stake of Jan Hus,
\nMankind—in its so frequent pensive state—
\nDazzled, at the abyss, dreams of the great.
\nThey are—it’s law for high, descending ones—yet
\nLike you, O Sun! Most glorious at sunset;
\nAnd, O proud Niagara, whose waters roar-brawl,
\nThey’re like you: their finest quality is their fall.
A man who once bound Jesus Christ to the rack,
\nWho cast a vile cloak across His bare back,
\nTore from that tranquil brow a grasp of hair
\nDrenched in the sweat of His resignation there,
\nSaying, ‘Oh, I shall show Caiaphas this!’
\nThen walked away, clenching his dusky fist;
\nAs night fell, the street becoming shadow-locked;
\nThe man walked in darkness—then suddenly stopped,
\nStunned, pale, as if overwhelmed by insight,
\nTrembling!—in his hand he held—rays of light.
Forest of Compiègne, June 1837.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-20T15:25:00+00:00", "url": "https://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/20/victor-hugo-contemplations-a-halt.html" }, { "id": "http://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/19/victor-hugo-contemplations.html", "title": "Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1:28", "content_html": "\nThe poet must, as he loves shade and azure,
\nGentle, grand spirit, whose radiance is pure,
\nWho walks before all, enlightening the uncertain,
\nMysterious singer to whom, trembling, hearken
\nWomen and dreamers and sages and lovers —
\nMust at some moments grow stronger, grow tougher.
\nSometimes, when a book first provokes its dreams,
\nAs all soothes, beguiles, dazzles, caresses and calms
\nWhere the soul, at each step, finds sustenance, where
\nThe darkest recesses are lit by sky’s glare,
\nIn the midst of this humble and lofty verse,
\nWhere the chosen flower grows in its sacred peace,
\nWhere the flowing of springs and of tears are heard,
\nWhere the stanza, like a thousand-coloured bird,
\nFlies singing of love, hope, jollity,
\nOne must, from time to time, shiver to see
\nSuddenly, dark, grave, terrifying those who are nearing,
\nA tawny verse emerge from the shadows roaring!
\nThe poet with his fertile seeds must be
\nLike the deep forest, fresh and green,
\nFull of songs, love of the wind and the sunrays shine on,
\nCharming, where suddenly, one encounters a lion.
Paris, May 1842.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-19T08:44:40+01:00", "url": "https://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/19/victor-hugo-contemplations.html" }, { "id": "http://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/18/victor-hugo-contemplations.html", "title": "Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1:27", "content_html": "\nYes, I am the dreamer; I am companionable
\nTo the tiny golden flowers on a crumbling wall,
\nAnd I hold discourse with the trees and the breeze.
\nAll these things know me, as anyone sees.
\nIn May, when the branches are heavy with perfume,
\nI engage in conversation with the wallflowers’ bloom;
\nI take counsel from cornflower and ivy at root.
\nThat mysterious being you deem to be mute
\nLeans over me, and uses my pen to write.
\nI hear what Rabelais heard; I see, some cried
\nSome laughed; and I hear what Orpheus heard.
\nDo not be surprised by all I am told
\nBy ineffable Nature’s sighs. I’m he who converses
\nWith all the voices of metempsychosis.
\nBefore the great sacred concert begins,
\nThe sparrow, the bush, the meadow’s living springs,
\nThe forest—that vast bass—flowers, birds flying free,
\nAll these gentle instruments speak to me.
\nI often attend this divine orchestra to hear it.
\nIf not a dreamer, I might have been a sylvan spirit.
\nThrough the calm in which I gather my beliefs,
\nAnd by dint of speaking softly to the leaf,
\nTo the raindrop, to the feather, to light’s rays shone,
\nI have descended so deeply into Creation—
\nThat abyss where wild, primal tremors strike—
\nThat I no longer even startle a fly into flight!
\nThe grass-blade quivering with an eternal glee,
\nGrows tame and becomes familiar with me;
\nAnd, quite unaware that I am even there,
\nThe roses and bumblebees carry on their affair;
\nSometimes, amidst the boughs, soft and blessed,
\nI lean in close to gaze upon the nests;
\nAnd the little bird—that anxious, holy mother—
\nFears me no more than we would if we discovered
\nThe eye of God peering into our own retreats.
\nThe modest lily watches my approach without fright
\nAs the violet unfolds to the day’s kiss
\nBashful, tends to its toilette before I wash;
\nTo these fair things, I am a discreet and trusted ally.
\nAnd the sprightly butterfly—that libertine of the azure sky—
\nWho playfully ruffles the petals of a half-unveiled bloom,
\nDoes not pause even when I pass through the gloom;
\nAnd if the flower hides itself in the grass,
\nHe says to her: “Don’t be silly! He’s here—he belongs to us.”
Les Roches, August 1835.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-18T13:13:59+01:00", "url": "https://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/18/victor-hugo-contemplations.html" }, { "id": "http://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/17/victor-hugo-contemplations-a-few.html", "title": "Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1: 26. A Few Words to Another", "content_html": "\nWe return to the subject; I can’t float above it:
\nWhat’s attacked in me is my era, and I love it.
\nSurely, I’d be left in peace, passerby, obscure,
\nDid I not hold—an atom of the azure—
\nA fragment of the great ray by which our age is made.
Yesterday the citizen, today the bard.
\nThe ‘Romantic’ follows the ‘Liberal.’ — Come on!
\nGo! Snap at my heels as I trundle along.
\nI am the dark figure through whom all things grow rank.
\nHurl your next thunderbolt at my other flank.
You, too, saw me when I was young, and now
\nYou denounce me—oh my good fellow, you too—
\nTearing me apart with the greatest cheer,
\nMoved by memories childhood, my hair fair.
\nYou cry out: “What, Sir! What is this cast before it?
\nStanzas go barefoot! Drama has no corset!
\nThe Muse throws her innocence-robe to the wind!
\nAnd Art shatters rules as: ‘we are growing’!” —
\nLiterary Gerousia with your plaintive jeers,
\nYou marvel—in your ‘retrospective’ verse—
\nThat my voice disturbs the order, that this Romantic
\nLives on, this little one—to whom ‘Art Poetic’
\nSo kindly gave water and bread and cheese—
\nHas grown such a burden on Boileau’s knees!
\nYou gaze at my verses, at its talons and wings,
\nIts refusal to march behind old modelings
\nAs junior clerks trail after their deans;
\nYou see, flashing from them, sinister gleams;
\nHorror! And you, shrieking with hyena bray
\nPeer through the bars of the Ev-er-y-day.
You exhaust your whole notebook on me and mine,
\nCiting Father Bouhours and Father Rapin;
\nAnd, crushing me with names, all nobiliary,
\nYou unleash the ultimate epithet: Revolutionary!
At this, the pedants all chorus: ‘Amen!
\nI am arrested; I’m set an exam in\nThe stammering Sorbonne, school scribbles away;
\nFrom twenty pens bursts-out a farcical fray:
\n“What do these foul innovators want?—verse? this?”
\nBefore their black books, read in the night’s blackness,
\nFemale readers tremble deep within their retreats.
\nMount Pindus hears rhymes as roaring wild beasts,
\nAnd shudders. Because of them, today all is dead;
\nThe alexandrine tears caesura to shreds;
\nLike grass and sage ripped up by wild swine,
\nEnjambment flounders in the midst of the line;
\nWhat is to become of us? Richelet can’t fix it.
\nEverything requires a Magister dixit.
\nLet us go back to The Rules, flee this taint;
\nHippocrene is water; thus, beauty is restraint.
\nThe wise are bound by reason for their part,
\nHave always consulted Quintilian on art,
\nLeibniz on maths, on war take Vegetius’s advice.
When impotence writes, it signs its name: ‘Wise’.
\nI see no reason why I should not tell you this
\nAs I have told others without shaking my fist.
\nWell then, let’s unmask! True, our soul is shadowy;
\nCast off the straitjacket of formal oratory.
\nWe’re pushing language toward a new horizon,
\nWith rhyme, in its wake, sweeping along reason,
\nLaunching—at the double, into pitched battle—
\nAll rebel force against one La Harpe, rattled.
\nWe attached a firebrand to the style of old:
\nLiberty! In that same conspiracy we’ve enrolled
\nThe Spirit—poor devil—and the Word—poor fool;
\nWe tore off the hood, hairshirt, the monk’s cowl
\nThat once cloaked the Idea—that vision diviner.
\nWe raged in a throng—orators and writers,
\nAnd poets alike; all pointing to the hour,
\nWe told Rhetoric: ‘Come, you’re a big girl now,
\nLift your eyes!’ — And me, singing, defying, a brawler,
\nI twisted the bars of the convent’s front parlour;
\nTorch in hand, I threw wide Drama’s doubled door;
\nAnd just like pirates, with sail and with oar,
\nWe seized the Three Unities’ dry archipelago;
\nI sounded the rally at trembling Helicon.
\nLost! Unmuzzled verses dart wild through the scene!
\nWe prefer Molière to a startled Racine;
\nOh, pedants! We’d rather Rotrou than Ducis.
\nWho’s this? Lucrezia Borgia? ’tis she!
\nMixing foul poisons into all your sweetbreads;
\nDisheveled Drama smites fear upon your bald heads;
\nIt is horrible! Yes—brigand, Jacobin, crime—
\nI have broken that great simpleton, the alexandrine;
\nRefined words, those syllable posh-os,
\nLived together deep in their exquisite grottos,
\nPursing their lips, speaking just to each to the same;
\nI told the low words—one-armed, goitrous, the lame—
\n‘Stand tall! Soar! Mingle in here without rules
\nIn the vast, rampant cavern of the eagles!’ —
\nI have confessed my crimes are killer-diller.
\nYes, I am Papavoine, Herostratus, Attila.
\nAnd then?
—————Fly into a rage, call the guard,
\nGood man! Storm! Thunder! I’m watching you hard.
\nOur ‘so-called progress’ strikes you as shocking;
\nYou loathe this people’s century where, when, talking,
\nVerse abandons the customary three bows;
\nA dark age, we writes as we think, uncowed,
\nWhere one is a philosopher and a poet in the raw,
\nWhere all dreamers are drunk on your sincere,
\nAdorable, foaming wine—O Ideal Unkind.
\nYou open our books and shield your eyes—blind
\nWith the brightness of the mot juste’s burning;
\nExecrate our frank, true verses; you screaming
\nIn fury at the sight of our naked verses.
\nBut where, then, is the time of nymphs unrehearsed,
\nWho ran through the woods, and whose nudity
\nDanced in the evening of summer’s lucidity?
\nAs the window is opened at white naked dawn,
\nThe modest and prudish mist-curtain is drawn,
\nA fig leaf is stuck on the star in the azure?
\nIs the ‘Tasteful’ of waves—shells of love!—so poor?
\nO Virgil! Pindar! Orpheus! Veil in gauze,
\nAs if it obscene, the wings of Pegasus—
\nWho, unfolding them on the blessed mount, is,
\nLike the vast butterfly of the infinite kiss?
\nIs the magnificent sun a cynic?
\nIs the flower wrong to cast off its tunic?
\nDoes Calliope—in the sky as she hovers—
\nWrong the pensive Dante when she uncovers
\nHer dazzling breasts through the stellar dark?
\nYou are a relic of yesterday. Free, uncloak
\nGreat naked Olympus would make you cry: “Urk!”
\nYou would make chubby Cupid put on a skirt.
\nYour taste tends to tinsel, the nine sisters posh,
\nTo Évrard Titon du Tillet’s Parnassus;
\nTo you, the Maenads would be dancing the can-can;
\nApollo would strike you as a Mohican;
\nYou would take Venus for a savage woman.
Age—which is often totals our wisdom’s sum—
\nMay well grumble to you in a low tone: “You’re wrong;
\nYou will make yourself cough if you shout so strong;
\nFor the sake of a few chance and wild novelties,
\nSir, do not disturb the peace of your qualities!
\nThese folk go their own way; how does it harm you?
\nThey find only ash in the fire that once warmed you.
\nWhy declare war on the noise that caused you annoy?
\nThis century’s as liberal as you were once a pageboy.
\nShut tight your shutters, draw your curtains closed tight,
\nBlow out your candle, and block all of it out!
\nWhat is the true sage’s soul? A deaf-mute.
\nWhat do you care if this poet or that,
\nLike a bird of the heavens, comes singing his song;
\nAnd if some Pindaric rascal—some nursling
\nOf the Muses—amidst a Corybantic crashboom,
\nA sullen brat, has bitten their slightly sagging bosom? —
You heed none of this, and you listen to nary any.
\nVoltaire—great man, yet hardly ‘Voltairean’—he
\nWhispers in vain in your ear: “Friend, you’re a bore!"
\n— You foam with rage! — starting from the fact that we core
\nMen of anarchy-age, this hell, are laying
\nSiege to the great Louis, perched on twenty great names;
\nYou say that, after all, we are wasting our effort,
\nThat the climb is steep and our breath runs short;
\nThat the verdict is in: we shall never ‘successifize’;
\nThat Batteux stares at us with his big, round eyes,
\nThat Tancrède’s made of bronze and Hamlet of sand;
\nYou declare Boileau a wig that refuses to curl; crowned
\nWith laurels, with our a sidelong glances,
\nYou point out the rubbish heap of our verses—
\nThat dung-pile where this century’s ugliness struts—
\nTo poor old Good Taste, that sweeper of Parnassus;
\nAnd, bolder still, you shout to us again:
\n‘I shall sweep you away myself!’ —
\n——————————————————Sweep away, then.
Paris, November 1834.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-17T09:30:13+01:00", "url": "https://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/17/victor-hugo-contemplations-a-few.html" }, { "id": "http://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/16/victor-hugo-contemplations-unity.html", "title": "Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1:25 Unity", "content_html": "\nBeyond the horizon where browning hills tower,
\nThe sun, that infinitely splendid flower,
\nBent down to the earth at sunset, and revealed
\nA humble daisy, blooming at the edge of a field,
\nOn a grey wall, crumbling among the wild oat,
\nWhite and unfurling its candid halo;
\nAnd that little flower, above the old wall,
\nGazed fixedly into the endless azure,
\nAt the great star pouring forth, immortally lit.
\n“And I, too, have rays!” she declared to it.
Granville, July 1836.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-16T08:50:44+01:00", "url": "https://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/16/victor-hugo-contemplations-unity.html" }, { "id": "http://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/15/victor-hugo-contemplations.html", "title": "Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1: 24", "content_html": "\nHappy’s the man, occupied with eternal fate,
\nWho, like a traveller setting out as day breaks,
\nAwakens, his mind filled with reverie,
\nAnd at daybreak begins to read and pray!
\nAs he reads, the day is slowly coming nigh:
\nIt dawns in his soul as in the high sky.
\nHe sees distinctly, in this pale light,
\nThings in his room and sees in-self insight;
\nHe alone believes, as everyone else sleeps.
\nAnd yet, with hushing fingers upon their lips,
\nBehind him, as ecstasy has him moonstruck,
\nThe still-smiling angels lean over his book.
Paris, September 1842.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-15T08:04:57+02:00", "url": "https://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/15/victor-hugo-contemplations.html" }, { "id": "http://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/14/victor-hugo-contemplations-childhood.html", "title": "Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1: 23. Childhood.", "content_html": "\nThe child sang. The mother, exhausted, in bed,
\nLay dying, her lovely head bowed. Shadows clung.
\nDeath loomed in the clouds floating over her head;
\nAnd I heard that death rattle, hearing that song.
The child, near the window, was five years old;
\nHis laughter and games made a charming racket;
\nAnd the mother—as this poor, adorable child
\nSang all day—spent all night coughing and hacking.
The mother now sleeps under cloister stone;
\nAnd the small child begins once more to choir it… —
\nSorrow is a fruit: God does not make it grow
\nUpon a branch that is too weak to bear it.
Paris, January 1835.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-14T02:10:26+02:00", "url": "https://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/14/victor-hugo-contemplations-childhood.html" }, { "id": "http://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/13/victor-hugo-contemplations-the-party.html", "title": "Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1: 22 The Party at Thérèse’s", "content_html": "\n22. The Party at Thérèse’s\nThe affair was exquisite and skilfully laid.
\nIt was in April, on so temperate a day
\nOne might have thought Love himself its planter.
\nThérèse the Duchess—to whom I would grant her
\nParis were I king, or the world were I God,
\nEven were she nothing but Thérèse the Blonde;
\nThat lovely Thérèse, with eyes like diamonds—
\nHad invited us to her charming garden.
The company was small; selection was key.
\nWe were all together, yet each pair in intimacy.
\nCouples wandered slowly in every direction:
\nProud lords’ and rare beauties’ interaction,
\nAmyntas dreaming beside their Léonores,
\nMarchionesses laughing with Monsignors;
\nAnd, prowling the grand staircase, one saw appear
\nA dwarf stealing purses from each cavalier.
At noon: the spectacle accompanied by harmony.
\nWhy perform Plautus at night? Comedy
\nIs a fair maiden who laughs best by day.
\nThus—like a temple of love—they’d made
\nNear a shaded pool where a swan resided,
\nA trellis-work theatre, twining vine-sided.
\nAn open-work arch—in shape, basket-handled,
\nLike a green cage where a captive finch warbled—
\nCovered the entire stage, and the actresses smote
\nBy shadows of branches across their white throats.
Magical harmonies chimed from afar;
\nAnd above, coming waist-deep from frieze, to draw
\nThe whole of the crowd to his repeated hijinks,
\nWhite-clad Pulcinella sounded his syrinx.
\nTwo fauns supported the proscenium arch; while
\nTrivelin laughed in their faces like a rascal.
\nAmidst the ornaments carved in the trellis,
\nColumbine slept within a great seashell, as
\nBaring her bosom and arms, could be seen as
\nA goddess upon the conch—and call her Venus.
\nLord Pantaloon, in a niche on the right, made
\nUse of a bench selling sweet lemonade,
\nCrying out now and then: “Lords, man is divine!
\nGod made the water, but man has made wine!”
\nOn one side Scaramouche belaboured with bat
\nThe tragic Alcantor and mournful Arbate;
\nCrispin, black-clad, waved his fan up and down;
\nPerched on the gateway, one leg dangling down,
\nCarlino leaned forward, listening to the serenades,
\nHis foot traced dreamy shapes in the air as it played.
The sun served as chandelier; seasonal June
\nHad embroidered a wide rolling lawn with blooms—
\nA green carpet on which many groups were ranged.
\nLined up on both sides of the rustic stage,
\nThe park’s true trees—lilacs and rowans,
\nAnd ebony trees laden with April’s growings—
\nExhaling delights with their fragrant sap,
\nSeemed to amuse themselves by holding things up,
\nAnd, opening their blossoms like eyes, watching,
\nJoined their joyful murmurs to the violin;
\nSo that, in this graceful concert classical
\nNature’s was joined by everything musical
Everything charmed: woods, serene day, air pure,
\nThe women all love, and the sky all azure.
\nAs the play was excellent, though of a great age.
\nWith Pierrot, sat nonchalant at the edge of the stage,
\nHaranguing—his discourse solemn-ing along—
\nA ape playing kettledrums astride a dog.
Just that: simple and love. — And there were times
\nThe monkey in a frenzy would bang on his drums;
\nAnd Pierrot would say. — Listen! If you wish.
\nOne man had the valet bring him some ice;
\nAnother, a gallant in a fanciful casque,
\nSpoke softly to his lady while tying on her mask;
\nThree marquises sat at a table, singing a melody.
\nThérèse sat in the shade of a small tree;
\nThe roses compared to her cheek seemed pale,
\nAnd, seeing her loveliness, a peacock fanned its tail.
Me, I listened, pensive, to a ditty of snark
\nThat an abbé in violet robes hummed in the dark.
Night fell; all grew silent; the torches were spent;
\nIn darkening woods the springs murmured laments;
\nThe nightingale, hidden in its shadowed nest,
\nSang, like a poet, like a lover, his best.
\nEveryone scattered beneath foliage throng;
\nThe giddy ones, laughing, swept the prudent along;
\nThe lover and his beloved walked in shadows away;
\nAnd, in a daze like that of a dream, they say
\nThey feel—gradually mingling their souls,
\nWith their burning glances, their whispered words,
\nWith their hearts, their senses, and their yielding reason—
\nThe blue moonlight that bathed the horizon.
April 18…
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-13T07:27:02+01:00", "url": "https://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/13/victor-hugo-contemplations-the-party.html" }, { "id": "http://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/12/victor-hugo-contemplations.html", "title": "Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1: 21", "content_html": "\nShe had no shoes, and dishevelled hair, she
\nSat barefoot among the drooping reeds;
\nI, as I passed, thought I saw a fairy,
\nI said to her: Will you come out to the fields?
She looked at me with that supreme gaze
\nThat beauty retains in its victories
\nAnd I said: Shall we, in these, Love’s own days,
\nShall we go together into the deep trees?
She dried her feet on the bankside grasses;
\nShe cast on me a second look, as she could,
\nAnd the playful beauty then became pensive.
\nOh! how the birds sang deep in the wood!
How gently the water caressed the shoreside!
\nI saw come toward me, through tall green reeds, this
\nBeautiful girl, happy, startled, and wild,
\nHer hair in her eyes, laughing in the midst.
Mont.-l’Am., June 183..
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-12T07:49:29+01:00", "url": "https://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/12/victor-hugo-contemplations.html" }, { "id": "http://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/11/victor-hugo-contemplations-to-a.html", "title": "Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1: 20 To A Blind Poet", "content_html": "\nThank you, poet! — At the pious threshold of my house,
\nLike a divine guest, you come and reveal who you are;
\nAnd the golden halo of your radiant verse
\nShines around my name like a circle of stars.
Sing! As Milton sang; sing! As Homer sang.
\nThe sensual poet cuts through sombre clouds;
\nThe blind see in shadows worlds of brightness frank:
\nWhen the eye is extinguished, the spirit unshrouds.
Paris, May 1842.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-11T08:17:15+01:00", "url": "https://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/11/victor-hugo-contemplations-to-a.html" }, { "id": "http://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/10/victor-hugo-contemplations-an-old.html", "title": "Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1: 19 An Old Song of Youthful Days", "content_html": "19. An Old Song of Youthful Days
\nI was not thinking of Rose;
\nRose and I went to the woods;
\nWe spoke of something—who knows?
\nI no longer remember our words.
I was as cold as marble;
\nI walked with absent tread;
\nI spoke of trees, of myrtle;
\n‘What now?’ it seemed she said.
The dew offered its pearls,
\nThe thicket its sunshine shade;
\nI walked; I heard blackbirds,
\nAnd Rose the nightingale.
I, sixteen, was quite morose.
\nShe, twenty; her eyes agleam.
\nThe nightingales sang of Rose,
\nAnd the blackbirds whistled at me.
Rose, standing tall and fine,
\nRaised her lovely, trembling arm
\nTo pluck a blackberry from its vine;
\nI did not see her white arm.
A stream, cool and deep, spilled,
\nOver stones velvet-mossed;
\nAnd nature, love-filled,
\nSlept in the vast woods, hushed.
Rose unfastened her shoe,
\nAnd, with an artless air, put
\nHer small foot in the water blue;
\nI did not see her bare foot.
I didn’t know what to say the while;
\nI followed her through the trees,
\nSeeing her sometimes smile,
\nAnd sometimes sigh unease.
I only saw how lovely she was
\nLeaving these vast, hushed ways.
\n‘So,’ she said; ‘let’s think it no more’.
\nSince then, I have thought of it always.
Paris, June 1831.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-10T09:14:08+01:00", "url": "https://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/10/victor-hugo-contemplations-an-old.html" }, { "id": "http://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/09/victor-hugo-contemplations-the-birds.html", "title": "Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1: 18 The Birds", "content_html": "\nI dreamt a deserted graveyard, wide-spread,
\nAnd heard the duet of my soul and the dead,
\nAmong flowered lawns and tombs cross-adorned.
\nGod wills that what falls should ignite what is born.
\nAnd the shadow filled me.
———————————Around me, a crowd
\nCheerful, heedless of my sad head bowed,
\nIn this field, bedchamber of ultimate sleep,
\nFree sparrows played truant and hide-and-seek.
\nEternity teased by the here and the now!
\nThey came and went, singing, flying, hopping about,
\nScratching at death with their sharp little claws,
\nSmoothing their beaks on a statue’s sad nose,
\nPecking at the tombs, those seedbeds of mystery.
\nI took these winged noisemakers seriously;
\nCried out: — “You harpies! Grant peace to the dead!”
\n“We’re sparrows,” is what these impious creatures said.
\n“Silence! Go off!” I retorted, harsh, groaningly.
\nThey flew off because I was strongest—but only,
\nOne still remained behind, and, with his bold music,
\nLifted his tail up and said: “Who’s this old classic?”
As they all departed, furious, unjolly,
\nShouting, and glaring at a giant black holly
\nA tree lost in thought near a tomb: a wise man,
\nSuddenly grabbed me by the sleeve as I ran,
\nAnd said: “This is these birds’ purpose, their rightness.
\nLeave them alone. We need this ray of brightness.
\nGod sends them. They bring life to the cemetery.
\nMan, they are the joy of all nature’s hymnary.
\nThey take its light, the murmur from the stream,
\nFrom the star, the smile of dawn’s enchanted gleam;
\nWherever a wise man laughs, they carry his joy,
\nAnd bring it to us; shadows blaze at their employ;
\nThey fill their beaks with schoolchildren’s calls;
\nThrough man and grass, through bushes, waterfalls,
\nThey go plundering joy in the vast universe.
\nThey possess a reason which seems to you perverse.
\nThey pity us lolling in sadness, far from their throng;
\nAnd, when they are full of their game and song,
\nOf eclogues and kisses, all the gossip that’s made,
\nThey make nests in April beneath the green shade,
\nThey come running, joyful, charming, lightly, they rave,
\nTo pour it all into our frightening graves,
\nAnd come, from palaces, from woodland and hut,
\nTo empty this brightness all into our night!
\nWhen May brings them back to us, O dreamer, we say:
\nHere they are! Everything stirs, stones, mounds, hay;
\nThe smallest shrub speaks, and the grass is ecstatic;
\nThe weeping willow sings, its phrasing emphatic;
\nThe old yew tree, chattering now, confesses;
\nThey gossip about man’s life with the hearses;
\nThey unsnick the clasps of the too-pompous shrouds;
\nMocking our marble; spell old words aloud;
\nAnd I, who am here amongst old, sulky weeds
\nBefore whom the Lie shows its ugliest screed
\nWhere shamelessly I’m of the tourist crowd,
\nI find it just, friends, that by reading aloud
\nEpitaphs styling dead as blessed in the hereafter,
\nThey should make the whole graveyard burst with laughter.
Paris, May 1835.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-09T10:31:22+01:00", "url": "https://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/09/victor-hugo-contemplations-the-birds.html" }, { "id": "http://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/08/victor-hugo-contemplations-to-monsieur.html", "title": "Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1: 17 To Monsieur Froment Meurice", "content_html": "17 To Monsieur Froment Meurice
\nWe are brothers: the flower
\nIs fashioned in doubled art.
\nThe poet is a sculptor,
\nThe sculptor is a poet.
Through us, poet or sculptor,
\nSpirit becomes scrutable.
\nWe make the good better,
\nYou make beauty more beautiful.
On her neck or on the arm,
\nYou make from your dreams,
\nSculptor of the jeweled charm
\nPalaces of precious gems!
Don’t say: My art’s a blank …
\nStep beyond the threshold,
\nMagic craftsman, make:
\nBlending thought with gold!
True thinkers take no stock
\nWho ends it or who starts:
\nThey sculpt from the same rock.
\nThis rock is immense art.
Michelangelo, great old man,
\nIn large blocks he hurls around,
\nMakes it spring forth at random;
\nBenvenuto breaks it down.
And, before infinite art’s endlessness,
\nWhose law is changeless, locked,
\nCellini’s crumb-small part
\nIs worth Michelangelo’s block.
Everything is grand. Red or dun,
\nEach bright fire’s a soul-claim.
\nThe star is worth the sun;
\nThe spark is worth the flame.
Paris, October 22, 1841.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-08T07:10:48+01:00", "url": "https://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/08/victor-hugo-contemplations-to-monsieur.html" }, { "id": "http://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/07/victor-hugo-contemplations-circa.html", "title": "Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1: 16. Circa 1820", "content_html": "\nSo Denise, your husband—our old pedagogue—
\nIs out for a stroll; grubbing a new eclogue
\nWith “fairest young April upon forest clearing.”
\nAll tremble, pedanticize, at his appearing:
\nThe ass grunts some Latin to ox, his mate;
\nThe wind drones some dull prose, the tree a tirade;
\nThe greening briar-rose—soft, growing young-man—
\nCites Theramenes’ tale, and struggles to scan:
\n“His broad brow is arméd with menacing horns.”
Denise, in the meantime: you dream, you sing songs,
\nYour age is when innocence shows its dark bloom;
\nWith your unknowing eye—neither joy nor gloom,
\nNor fear nor desire—you’re watching, as hubby
\nReturns to his room and the scholar to study,
\nThe pair approach you, and they climb stairs together:
\nThe schoolmaster Boredom, the schoolboy Lover.
She said: Some little speck
\nTorments me. So I stared:
\nOn her snowy neck there
\nA tiny pink insect.
I should have—(but, wise or thick,
\nAt sixteen, one is glib)—
\nSeen the kiss upon her lip
\nMore than the bug on neck.
It looked like seashell conch;
\nIts pink back black-freckled.
\nAbove us, songbirds settled
\nTo watch us from their branch.
Her cool mouth was on my way
\nAs I bent in, allured,
\nAnd I took the ladybird,
\nBut the kiss flew away.
“Son, learn now my name,”
\nSaid the bug of the blue sky,
\n“Animals belong to the Divine:
\nBut foolishness to man.”
Paris, May 1830.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-06T00:41:32+01:00", "url": "https://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/06/victor-hugo-contemplations-the-ladybird.html" }, { "id": "http://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/05/victor-hugo-contemplations-in-granville.html", "title": "Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1: 14 In Granville 1836", "content_html": "\nSo: it’s June. Sparrows rail
\nAt lovers in the fields;
\nThe wall-dwelt nightingale
\nSings, stone nest concealed.
The branches and the grasses,
\nDog- and sigh- filled,
\nRepeat their suave choruses
\nIn depths of the wood.
The thrush and the turtledove
\nProlong, on nest-soft branch,
\nThe sweet quarrel of love
\nOf kisses and romance.
Beneath the plain’s fine fences,
\nCaves, green willows sway,
\nVergil intoxicates Silenus,
\nRabelais, Grandgousier.
O Vergil—fine wine: pour me!
\nO Rabelais! Fill the glass.
\nThe forest is a glory;
\nThe cavern a palace!
There’s no lake, isle in-middle
\nWhere birdlime doesn’t snare us,
\nWhere we don’t sing an idyll,
\nWhere a duet doesn’t pair us.
For love hunts in boscages,
\nLove fishes in the streams;
\nAnd fair maidens are the cages
\nOur hearts the birds within.
From the spring within its basin
\nWater mirrors flower,
\nBids “Good morning” as the jay sings,
\n“Good evening” to the owl.
The roof awaits its thatch mats—
\nBread first, next sheafs for good;
\nThe ox’s flank amongst the grass
\nSeems a mountain in the wood.
The pond laughs at the sea-ducks,
\nField laughs at oriole,
\nWhile the deep-set grounded ruts
\nGroan as great wagons roll.
From a wallflower gold peeks;
\nZephyr, old-myth-proud,
\nBlows with puffed-out cheeks
\nDeep inside blue cloud.
Jersey upon the docile swell,
\nDraped in skies so pure,
\nAdopts a Sicilian veil
\nAnd a vast cloak of azure.
Everywhere eclogues are writ—as
\nFar off as cold Albion
\nThe air’s filled with Theocritus,
\nThe wind recalling Bion;
Repeating the melancholic,
\nSong once hummed forth
\nBy Moschus—that grig bucolic,
\nUpon Etna’s hearth.
Winter, old man, coughs, sick:
\nThe mist dissolves; he goes;
\nThe lapping waves provide the music
\nFor verses trees compose.
All of sombre nature is displayed,
\nPours forth mysterious glow;
\nThe dreaming soul holds more shade,
\nAnd the flower holds more love.
The grass bursts into daisies;
\nScents—deemed mute—and powers
\nThe secret sorrow’s phrases
\nBindweeds to cornflowers.
Myriad tiny white wings branch
\nUpon the water’s furrow
\nDescending in an avalanche;
\nIts butterflies pour snow.
And on the sea, reflecting together
\nDawn’s enamel smile,
\nThe purple-violet heather
\nCapes ancient mountain-isle,
And addressing the abyss
\nHolding, blessing brighter—
\nIntones its sublime mass
\nBeneath its granite mitre.
Granville, June 1836.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-05T07:37:11+01:00", "url": "https://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/05/victor-hugo-contemplations-in-granville.html" }, { "id": "http://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/04/victor-hugo-contemplations-on-horace.html", "title": "Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1: 13. On Horace", "content_html": "\nPeddlers of Old Greek and Latin! Pedants! Dogs!
\nPhilistines! Teachers! I hate you, pedagogues!
\nIn your solemn, infallible, dull confidence,
\nYou deny the ideal, grace, and beauty at once!
\nFor your texts, your laws, your rules: all mere fossils!
\nAnd, beneath an air of profundity, you are just tossers!
\nYou claim to teach everything, yet you know nothing!
\nYour ways are wicked and mean! — My blood’s seething
\nAt the mere thought of me as a dreamy ass,
\nA lanky sixteen-year-old in the rhetoric class,
\nI endured such boredom! Rage! Folly! — Head-blocks! —
\nSuch cold punishments and such sudden shocks!
\n— Sunday in detention and “Horace: five hundred lines!” —
\nI’d gaze at the monster with his nails begrimed,
\nAnd stammer: “Sir…” — But no: “no excuses!
\nTwenty times: ‘Plancus’ and the ‘Epistle to the Pisos!’” —
\nYet that very day—oh, sweet notional idea
\nThat made me dream then of Armida and Haidée—
\nI had a tryst with the doorkeeper’s daughter.
\nGreat God! To lose such a day! All gone for naught! I
\nHad meant—while speaking of love, of pure bliss!
\nIntoxicating her with sky and naturalness—
\nTo take her, if the weather wasn’t too grim-grey,
\nTo eat galette cakes up on Butte Saint-Gervais!
\nHappy dream! I saw it all, in my furious needing—
\nThe holidays, lilacs, the suburbs, that Eden—
\nAnd I heard, amidst thyme and lilies-of-the-valley,
\nThe swelling violins of Mother Saguet!
Oh, the anguish! Furious, I would climb to my room—
\nAn icebox in December, a furnace in June—
\nAnd there, I would cry out:
———————————— Horace! Friend mine!
\nYou who lived life calmly by reason’s shine,
\nAnd who, with your candid wisdom, would perch
\nUpon all things as a bird lights upon a branch—
\nNot weighing things down, or lingering, ask gods
\nFor nothing but the time to sing your free joyful odes!
\nYou walked, listening at evening beneath the arbours
\nHeard the stifled laughter of giddy young girls,
\nHeard soft whispers in the woods’ dark enclave;
\nAnd at times you wooed your beautiful slave,
\nBlond-haired Myrtale, who would flare up and rear
\nAs the ocean carves out the gulfs of Calabria;
\nOr else you leaned upon the table, drinking straight a
\nGlass of wine you poured out of a Greek krater.
\nPegasus breathed verses from his nostrils to you, clean;
\nYou mused; you composed various odes to Barine,
\nTo Maecenas, to Virgil, to your Tibur field friends,
\nTo the antique wall by which Chloe wends,
\nBearing a fine amphora upon her lovely head.
\nAt night, when Phoebe turned into Hecate the Dread,
\nThe thickets filled with visions for your sight;
\nYou saw glimmers, shapes, darkness, and rays of light;
\nCerberus—tail between legs—rubbing up spends time
\nWith Bacchus, god of wine and father of the iamb;
\nSilenus, pensive, digesting, in a spelunk,\nLasciviously darts into the shadows to get drunk
\nOn the scanty-clad nymphs white nakedness,
\nThe faun with goat-feet and tapered ears!
\nHorace, when—tipsy on a little Sabine wine-quaff—
\nYou caught Glycera or Lycoris at her bath,
\nWho could have told you, O Flaccus!—when in Rome
\nYou painted young knights racing the hippodrome,
\nJust as Molière painted those French marquises,
\nYou were crafting beguiling, profound, fine verses
\nTo serve—in this odious age of ours—\nAs instruments of torture for horrible fellows,
\nDisheveled and ill-clad, who—dull pedants—devour
\nYour name with their teeth as an ape chews a flower!
\nHideous scribblers who—their heads being clear—
\nHave never had girlfriend nor had an idea!
Then I’d add, fierce:
\n—————————— O dunces! You who dress-up
\nThe angry gods of the ether in cassocks,
\nPut a nightcap on Diana, and grimly place at
\nThe heads of sombre Olympians your three-cornered hats—
\nEunuchs, tormentors, cretins—be accursed!
\nFor you are the sluggishness, old, dark, the worst;
\nFor you are the winter; for you are—O ninnies—
\nThe bear roaming the woods for a tree full of bees,
\nThe shadow, the lead, the death, tomb, the void!
\nNo one sits upright beside your stance sigmoid;
\nAnd you petrify with your stone-foulness of breath
\nEach innocent, radiant, splendid youth;
\nAnd you draw near the dawn, O you brings of slumber!
\nTo serene Pindar, filled with far epic thunder,
\nTo Sophocles, Terence, Plautus, and ambrosia,
\nO traitors, you mingle ancient Hypocrisia,
\nYour darkness, your morals, yokes, exeats, rotas
\nAnd the stupor of grim, sanctimonious cloisters;
\nYour claw-marks that scar every most-sublime book,
\nYour prejudices making your eyes fog-cooked,
\nThe dread of the future, the hatred of progress;
\nAnd—fearless, unrepentant and pitiless—
\nOf youth, virgin hearts, and hope, you’re choking them
\nBy night-forcing on them that stale, ancient opium!
\nO shutters of the human Bible! Sextons
\nOf art, of science, and of masters that are ex-!, gone!,
\nAnd of the truth with which man spells sky scrabble—
\nYou turn this vast temple into a tiny chapel!
\nJailers of spirit, you scoundrels whose ‘acumen’
\nLeads Beauty on a leash, and locks-away blue heaven,
\nYou take Theocritus, Aeschylus in his sacred veil,
\nTibullus filled with love, Virgil through whom stars sail,
\nAnd turn all these paradises into hell!
And, my rage mounting, I resumed:
\n———————————————— Cursed! Fell!
\nThose deaf monasteries! hated prisons! Pigsty!
\nOh! what was done of old to the pedant of Veii?—
\nBreeches down, old tiger! Schoolboys! schoolboys!
\nCome swarming, by the thousand, come in convoys,
\nFrom the Paris urchin to the Old Roman ‘Greekling’;
\nCut green wood, and give that man a good thrashing!
\nYoung mouths, bite the one who ties on the gags!
\nThe shop-window dummy who’s wearing just rags
\nHas just as much wit as that pedant in his hut,
\nAnd just as much heart as that one has fat gut
\nFull of Latin and Greek as if all stuffed with hay.
\nAh! I call Phyllodoce and Xanthis to relay
\nThat I am in love with their bright-coloured tunics;
\nWhilst hating the vile heap of those pedant-eunuchs!
\nEntrusting a child—think it—to those black-clad
\nPseudo-scholars! One might as well, by God,
\nLock up a fly in a tarantula’s house!
\nThose monks explain Plato, they’r reading Catullus,
\nTacitus recounting the great Agricola,
\nLucretius!— deciphering Homer, those infusoria?
\nThose deacons, those beadles with snuffling snouts!
\nSkulls spewing night, paws ready to grout,
\nOld oafs with high airs, triumphant brows wild,
\nWho don’t even know how to spell ‘the child’!
\nKnow nothing of how souls are born, how to foster.
\nThey’ve only La Harpe and Nonotte in their cloister!
\nThey’re stuck on the heart’s A, B, C, D plateau;
\nThey’re the pinched Yesterday trying kill Tomorrow;
\nOffer their eaglets stale crawfishy rules
\nAnd those black shards reeking of vices of fools.
\nOh, old goblets chipped by thirsts dare not confess!
\nTheir plural meas culpas take an added ‘S’;
\nMysterious he-goats bristle seeing them chaff,
\nAnd hearing “Love”—heavens and earth!—cross themself.
\nTheir dead, withered innards insult hearts florescent.
\nThey look down their noses at all adolescents,
\nThey just won’t accept the light entering heart
\nIn the guise of a thought or as woman’s part.
\nWhen the Muse appears, these clamorous scoffers
\nCry: “Who is this madwoman coming to mock us?"
\nAnd, faced by her beauty, brought out by her light,
\nThey sneer: “Harsh colors: the shades are too bright;
\nVapours, illusions, dreams—what whim perverse
\nMakes you cram such a rainbow now into your verse?”
\nThey mock the children, they mock the poets’ lines;
\nGlare at the nightingales with great owl-eyes;
\nThe child’s just ignorant; they are the pedants of ignorance;
\nStriking out soul, splendour, and the dawn’s glance;
\nThey weed out the ideal as if it were a solecism,
\nAnd those bottle-bottom eyes scorn upon the prism!
Thus I was heard: crying out in my chains.
\nThe monologue had time to shift and change.
\nAnd I grew exasperated, committing great wrong—
\nI was right in substance, yet awry in form.
\nAnd after Abbé Tuet, I cursed all Bézout brought;
\nFor, beyond the drudgery that dissolves all thought,
\nI was then in the clutches of mathematics.
\nDark times! A child stirred by poetry’s phatics,
\nA poor bird banging my skull against the bars,
\nSent alive to ‘the numbers’—black executioners;
\nThey forced me to swallow algebra’s dimness;
\nShackled me deep inside Boisbertrand’s grimness;
\nThey twisted me, from my wing-tip to my beak,
\nUpon X and Y and Z’s hideous rack;
\nAlas! Crammed beneath my maxillaries
\nThe theorem, decked out with all its corollaries;
\nAnd I struggled, a lugubrious patient
\nAiding the divisor and abetting the quotient.
\nHence my cries!
———————One day, when mankind grows sage,
\nWhen birds are no longer taught by their cage,
\nWhen misshapen societies grasp what is different
\nTheir minds lifted high through the better-known infant,
\nWhen—having fathomed the rules of free flight—
\nWe all know the law of the eagle’s birthright,
\nAnd when high noon shines for us all, replete:
\nAs knowledge is sublime, then learning will be sweet.
\nThen, when all will essay mountain-peak etudes
\nThe great Latin-Greek books—those high solitudes
\nWhere lightning rumbles, sea gleams, starlight laughs,
\nFilled with vast winds of the spirit that blasts—
\nIt is by illuminating with tender good,
\nBy making them loved, we’ll make them understood.
\nHomer will sweep dazzled schoolboys to sea
\nIn his vast, surging tide; the child will no longer be
\nA beast of burden yoked to Virgil;
\nAnd no longer shall we see that keen spirit, agile,
\nBecome, under some pedant or abbot’s hard whip,
\nThe heavy, wheezing horse of bogged-down hardship.
\nIn a rustic temple, bathed in light, each village class a
\nReplacement—in place of the old schoolmaster
\nSo gloomy no daylight could never penetrate—
\nThe clear-sighted, true teacher: a magistrate
\nOf progress, a healer of ignorance, a priest
\nOf the ideal; we’ll see vanish into the mist
\nThe eternal schoolboy and the eternal pedant.
\nDawn comes singing, not growls of dread. And
\nOur sons will laugh at us in that bright new reach;
\nThey’ll wonder how we ever hoped to teach
\nThe sparrow by means of the haggard owl’s rage.
\nAnd then, the young mind and the youthful gaze
\nShall rise to the skies with serene clarity
\nTowards august, kindly, sovereign verity;
\nThen, no more obscure tomes, dull, stifling, awful;
\nThe teacher—bending over the child, sweet apostle—
\nShall pour out God, blue sky, and true comradeship,\nBid the little soul drink from the infinite cup.
\nThen all shall be true—dogmas, rights, duties, laws.
\nYou shall let pass, through your dark pillars you shall let pass,
\nA pure gleam, less dim day by day, shall grow—
\nO Nature, alphabet of great letters of shadow!
Paris, May 1831.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-04T07:41:11+01:00", "url": "https://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/04/victor-hugo-contemplations-on-horace.html" }, { "id": "http://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/03/victor-hugo-contemplations-vere-novo.html", "title": "Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1: 12. Vere Novo", "content_html": "\nHow the morning laughs upon the weeping roses!
\nOh! charming little lovers that the flower possesses!
\nIt is only in the jasmines, only in periwinkles
\nThat this dazzling display of wild white twinkles
\nComing and going, that come back shuttering,
\nReopening, in one vast and gentle fluttering.
\nO spring! When one thinks of all the billets doux
\nFrom dreamy lovers to pensive beauties, who
\nEntrusted to paper their hearts, of those heaps
\nOf letters penned on taffeta-fine sheets,
\nOf messages of love, intoxication gay,
\nReceived in April and torn up in May—
\nImagine them flying away, at the glad wind’s whim,
\nIn meadows, woods, water, to the very skies’ rim,
\nAnd roaming everywhere, seeking a soul,
\nRunning to the flower upon leaving the girl,
\nThe little white fragments the winds scatters fly,
\nOf all the love notes that become butterflies.
May 1831
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-03T07:29:31+01:00", "url": "https://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/03/victor-hugo-contemplations-vere-novo.html" }, { "id": "http://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/02/victor-hugo-contemplations-lise.html", "title": "Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1: 11. Lise", "content_html": "\nI was twelve; she was going-on sixteen.
\nShe was tall, I was on the small side.
\nTo speak with her more freely at evening,
\nI would wait for her mother to go outside;
\nThen I’d come in and sit next to her chair
\nTo speak more free in the evening, there.
How many blooms trampled by Time’s quick feet!
\nHow many fires quenched, how many sealed tombs!
\nDoes anyone remember that hearts once beat?
\nDoes anyone remember that roses bloomed?
\nShe loved me. I loved her. We were, in God’s sight,
\nTwo pure children, two fragrances, two rays of light.
God had made her angel, fairy, princess.
\nAnd since she was by so much taller than I,
\nMy asking her questions could be endless
\nFor the sheer pleasure of saying to her: “Why?”
\nAnd many times, she would shyly evade all
\nMy dreamy gaze that made her so heedful.
Then I’d regale her with all my chitchatting,
\nShow her my games, my swift top, my large ball;
\nI was so proud to be learning my Latin;
\nI showed her my Phaedrus and my Virgil;
\nI braved all things; nothing was stopping us there;
\nI’d tell her: “My father’s an army officer.”
Latin is needful, even for girls, for Lise,
\nDreamily to spell out its words—to look
\nTranslating a verse at church-service to please her
\nI would often lean over her prayerbook.
\nA stone angel spread its white wing to crest us
\nAs we attended Sunday Vespers.
She would say of me: “Oh, he’s only a child!”
\nAnd I would call her Mademoiselle Lise.
\nTo translate a psalm for her, quite often I’d,
\nLean over her book at church to please her;
\nAnd then one day—oh, heavens!—you saw it:
\nHer blooming cheek touched my burning lip.
Young loves, whose blossoms so swiftly unfold,
\nYou are the heart’s dawn and morning’s tomorrow.
\nEnchant the child, O raptures untold!
\nAnd when evening comes, bringing sorrow,
\nEnchant our dazzled souls once more deftly,
\nYoung loves, that disappear so swiftly!
May 1843.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-02T00:52:21+01:00", "url": "https://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/02/victor-hugo-contemplations-lise.html" }, { "id": "http://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/01/victor-hugo-contemplations-to-madame.html", "title": "Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1: 10. To Madame D. G. de G.", "content_html": "\nOnce I said to you: “Live, Madame—reign!
\nThe salon awaits you! Success calls your name!
\nThe dazzling ball grows pale at your going!
\nBe illustrious, beautiful! Love! Laugh! Show, sing!
\nYou own the splendour of roses and stars!
\nYour charming gaze, in which I read your memoirs,
\nComplements your light and your most graceful words.
\nYour mouth’s sparkles on your eyes conferred.
\nIt seems, when sorrow sometimes makes you fear,
\nThe drop of a pearl, and never a tear.
\nEven when you are dreaming, you can still smile.
\nLive, feted and proud, O golden-haired belle!”
\nNow you are pale, solemn, silent, you know it,
\nDead, and transfigured; I say to you: “Poet!
\nCome fetch me! Archangel! Mysteriously be!
\nMake earth and heavens transparent to me!
\nReveal to me, let your profound mouth say the word,
\nThe great human enigma, secret of the world!
\nConfirm to me Descartes and Spinoza too!
\nYou know the true name of the One who broke through—
\nSo that we might see His light shining far—
\nHoles in dark ceiling we like to call stars!
\nFor I feel you hovering beneath low tree limbs;
\nYour invisible lyre holding your sublime hymns!
\nMy sombre ocean, on which the skiff floats rager,
\nBoth terrifies and delights you; for holy nature—
\nEternal nature, the fields, and woods choice—
\nSpeak of your great soul with their mighty voice!"
Paris, 1840. — Jersey, 1855.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-01T06:31:12+01:00", "url": "https://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/10/01/victor-hugo-contemplations-to-madame.html" }, { "id": "http://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/09/30/victor-hugo-contemplations-the-poem.html", "title": "Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1: 9: ‘The Poem Weeps its Lament’", "content_html": "9: ‘The Poem Weeps its Lament’
\nThe poem weeps its lament; drama suffers
\nTwenty actors pour out their souls in gushes;
\nAnd the crowd, leaning forward, is much moved by it,
\nUntil they resume: — “Bah! author’s a man of wit,
\nHe’s hurling false thunderbolts at falser heroes,
\nAnd laughs to see us mourn their fanciful woes.
\nWife, calm yourself now! Sister, dry your eyes” —
\nThe mob’s wrong: mind is heart; to philosophize
\nIs to suffer from thought, to be eaten by fire.
\nThe poet has bled blood that flows through theatre;
\nThese beings he creates bind him in a scrum;
\nHe shakes in them, lives them, and he dies in them;
\nWithin his creation the poet grows shuddery;
\nHe is her; she is him; he works his work shadowy,
\nHe weeps, he rips out his own viscera, dumps it—
\nHis drama, sole sculptor—upon his dark summit,
\nKneads his own flesh, sacred clay; he self-mates
\nIs reborn endlessly, the dreamer who creates
\nOthello from a tear, Alceste from a sob, lonesome
\nThough he is with them, pell-mell, work blossoms.
\nIn his immense and true genesis, one and diverse,
\nHe, suffering eternal pain, pours out his rivers,
\nWithout exhausting his side from which light shines.
\nWhat makes him a god is his truth to greater mankind.
\nHe is genius, being, more than others, un homme.
\nCorneille is in Rouen but his soul is in Rome;
\nHis brow, like old Catos, bears masculine tiredness.
\nHow pale is Shakespeare! Before Hamlet, attired is
\nHe whom the ghost awaits on the harsh stage front,
\nWhile an enormous moon rises on the horizon.
\nFrom Argan’s bad dream, Poquelin’s superficies;
\nHe laughs: yes, he gasps! With wandering Ulysses,
\nHomer, distraught, rushes into sea mist.
\nSaint John is a-tremble; in his deep-dark breast
\nThe horrible Apocalypse sounds its alarum.
\nAeschylus! Orestes stomps, shouts in your bosom,
\nAnd, black bard, it’s where you sharp breath is exhaled,
\nUpon your giant skull that Prometheus is nailed.
Paris, January 1834.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-30T07:33:29+01:00", "url": "https://adamroberts.micro.blog/2026/09/30/victor-hugo-contemplations-the-poem.html" } ] }