Adam Roberts

Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 2:4 Song

Sun, 25 Oct 2026 10:29:33 +0000

If you have naught to say to me,
Why come to my side?
Why do you smile that way to me—
Smile no king has denied?
If you have naught to say to me,
Why come to my side?

If you don’t want me to render,
Why do you press my hand?
That dreamy, angelic, tender
Thought as you walk the strand—
If you don’t want me to render,
Why do you press my hand?

If you want me to depart,
Why do you come so near?
When I see you, I up-start:
You’re my joy, you’re my care.
If you want me to depart,
Why do you come so near?

May 18…

Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 2:3 Omphale’s Spinning Wheel

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 10:15:55 +0000

3. Omphale’s Spinning Wheel

In the hall a fine ivory spinning wheel is set.
The nimble wheel is white, the distaff black as jet—
An ebony distaff with lapis inlay snug.
It rests in the atrium upon a gorgeous rug.

An artisan from Aegina has carved, at its base
Europa, and a god who does not heed her pleas.
The white bull abducts her; Europa, forlorn,
Cries out, shrinks in terror, casts her eyes down,
Sees monstrous Ocean kissing her rosy feet.

Needles and thread, half-closed boxes and pleats
And Miletan purple- and gold-dyed wool,
Fill up a basket by the dormant spinning wheel.

Yet, loathsome, frightful, and immense, they come
From deep in the palace, twenty foul phantoms—
Twenty blood-stained monsters, only half-seen—
Teem round the slumbering wheel: the Nemean
Lion, the hideous Hydra of Lerna,
Cacus, dark brigand of dark cavern inner,
Three-bodied Geryon, the typhoons of the seas
That, at nightfall, blow with clamour through the reeds;
Each bears on his brow a club’s mark, ghastly bruising,
All—lingering at a distance, menacing—
Fix their dark, humbled eyes on the wheel, splendid,
Where a supple, knotted thread hangs suspended.

June 18…

Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 2:2

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 07:46:32 +0000

.2.

My verses would fly, sweet weaklings,
To your beautiful garden world,
If only my verses had wings,
Wings like a bird.

And they would fly, like leaping flames,
To your laughing heaped hearth-coal,
If only my verses had wings,
Wings like the soul.

They’d near you, as pure faithful things,
Drop night and day quick from above,
If only my verses had wings,
Wings like love.

Paris, March 18…

Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 2:1 The First of May

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 11:52:43 +0000

1. The First of May

It all conjugates the verb “to love.” Look—roses!
I speak of nothing else in all my poetries.
First of May! Love—joyful, hot, jealous, high—
Makes the woods, nests, the flowers, even wolves, sigh;
The tree with its motto which, last autumn, I incised,
Repeats it as its own, as if just improvised;
Old, pensive caves—where the mocking jay laughs—
Twitch heavy brows, purse lips, shaping a heart;
The atmosphere, tender and aromatic, sings
With declarations the land offers to Spring,
Which lovestruck grass whispers to enchanting sky.
Across the blue firmament Day passes by,
The countryside, deeper in love, at crosstrees,
Lavishes odours, and, on the mild breeze,
Sends its fragrant kisses to the returning season.
These bouquets—azure, carmine, saffron, crimson—
Whose breath drifts away, murmuring: “I love you!”
Across the ravine, pond, field, even the furrow,
Scattering splashes of every colour;
And, gifting perfumes, earth has kept the flower—
As if her sighs and tender epistolaries—
Sent to May-month, laughing amid languid trees—
And all the love notes of her garrulous heart,
Had imprinted on a blotting pad its mark!

In the woods, the birds—their voices soft and low—
Sing to the fairies: triolets and rondeaux;
Everything confides sweet secrets to the shade;
Everything loves, whisper-confessing. It could be said
That north, hot south, west to sunset, at the dawn
The flowering hedge, the ivy, and the murmuring spring,
The mountains, the fields, the lakes, and the oaks swaying
Repeat the four winds’ composed quatrain.

Saint-Germain, May 1st, 18..,

Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1:29. A Halt on the Way

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 15:25:00 +0000

29. A Halt on the Way

A mist once veiled the horizon; but now
Bright noon comes up with her radiant brow;
On the branch fog distils into pearls flecked, as
Gleaming diamonds on periwinkles’ necklace.
The wind blows between trees and over the roofs
Of a dark hamlet, hidden thatched eaves in the woods,
And one can see—scattered amidst leafy oaks—
The faint, drifting wisps of up-trembling smoke;
Between high banks a rivulet runs through meadows,
Under the restless sway of long-haired willows;
Elm and Beech—ancient denizens of the vale—
Brother trees on opposite shores join hands in hail—
Seeming to say, under blue sky, “here’s good faith!”
A bird pours out song, filled with both love and grace,
A flutter of leaves and wingbeats; the pond brimming
And glistening under green dragonflies skimming;
A hut is revealing there—nestled in thyme and sage—
Amidst pewter mugs, smiling, sits an old saint.
With sunlight like this, beside banks flower-patterned,
It might be a temple, or maybe a tavern.
Whether it’s lips that thirst, or it’s our hearts,
We praise Good God, for His cup as we depart!
We go in. — “What have you?” — “fresh eggs and cool drink.” —
It resembles a manger whose roof starts to sink.
At meadow’s spring, sheltered by foliage’s green bar,
A blonde child has come to fill the water jar—
Joyful, lifting the hem of her fustian skirt,
Dipping her pitcher in the fountain’s spurt,
The water was gazing with soft, murmuring awe
At this lovely little girl with eyes of azure.
And beside a great bed draped in old serge, I watch
Pensive, an image: Christ scourged by the lash.

What do they matter, martyrs suffering abuse?—
Insults from all sides, from each age spittle-sluiced,
The blind man’s futile clamour, eternal jeering
In which the mob’s always blindly careering?

In time, the scourged wanderer comes to be God;
His bruises high-sky-blue, him dark, bleeding-browed,
In shadows—church, palace, hut come into view—
The crucifix whitens, Christ acquires heaven’s hue.
One day, crowds will follow; go forth now, blood-gushed,
Suffer, O thinkers—by your tormentors’ tears washed!
Sorrow consecrates saints, sages, thinkers of breadth;
A halo blooms trembling amongst shame’s dark depths,
And over this vile swamp—a glimmer from above—
Is an eternal flame, ghostly, in quagmires of blood.
The selfsame fate leads all toward the same story.
Deep in the fabric of our human history,
Lies an abyss of sorts, where, one’s by one’s,
All who belong to life and to light plunge—
The good, the pure, great, divine, the famous;
Like torches tossed wild in the breath of the dimness.
There, we see Dante is swallowed up—in go
Socrates, Milton, Thomas More and Scipio
Aeschylus, holding his trembling leaf palms.
A night from which their soaring memory comes!
Their complete all in their sacrifice for us.
From Aristides’ exile to the stake of Jan Hus,
Mankind—in its so frequent pensive state—
Dazzled, at the abyss, dreams of the great.
They are—it’s law for high, descending ones—yet
Like you, O Sun! Most glorious at sunset;
And, O proud Niagara, whose waters roar-brawl,
They’re like you: their finest quality is their fall.

A man who once bound Jesus Christ to the rack,
Who cast a vile cloak across His bare back,
Tore from that tranquil brow a grasp of hair
Drenched in the sweat of His resignation there,
Saying, ‘Oh, I shall show Caiaphas this!’
Then walked away, clenching his dusky fist;
As night fell, the street becoming shadow-locked;
The man walked in darkness—then suddenly stopped,
Stunned, pale, as if overwhelmed by insight,
Trembling!—in his hand he held—rays of light.

Forest of Compiègne, June 1837.

Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1:28

Mon, 19 Oct 2026 08:44:40 +0100

The poet must, as he loves shade and azure,
Gentle, grand spirit, whose radiance is pure,
Who walks before all, enlightening the uncertain,
Mysterious singer to whom, trembling, hearken
Women and dreamers and sages and lovers —
Must at some moments grow stronger, grow tougher.
Sometimes, when a book first provokes its dreams,
As all soothes, beguiles, dazzles, caresses and calms
Where the soul, at each step, finds sustenance, where
The darkest recesses are lit by sky’s glare,
In the midst of this humble and lofty verse,
Where the chosen flower grows in its sacred peace,
Where the flowing of springs and of tears are heard,
Where the stanza, like a thousand-coloured bird,
Flies singing of love, hope, jollity,
One must, from time to time, shiver to see
Suddenly, dark, grave, terrifying those who are nearing,
A tawny verse emerge from the shadows roaring!
The poet with his fertile seeds must be
Like the deep forest, fresh and green,
Full of songs, love of the wind and the sunrays shine on,
Charming, where suddenly, one encounters a lion.

Paris, May 1842.

Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1:27

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 13:13:59 +0100

Yes, I am the dreamer; I am companionable
To the tiny golden flowers on a crumbling wall,
And I hold discourse with the trees and the breeze.
All these things know me, as anyone sees.
In May, when the branches are heavy with perfume,
I engage in conversation with the wallflowers’ bloom;
I take counsel from cornflower and ivy at root.
That mysterious being you deem to be mute
Leans over me, and uses my pen to write.
I hear what Rabelais heard; I see, some cried
Some laughed; and I hear what Orpheus heard.
Do not be surprised by all I am told
By ineffable Nature’s sighs. I’m he who converses
With all the voices of metempsychosis.
Before the great sacred concert begins,
The sparrow, the bush, the meadow’s living springs,
The forest—that vast bass—flowers, birds flying free,
All these gentle instruments speak to me.
I often attend this divine orchestra to hear it.
If not a dreamer, I might have been a sylvan spirit.
Through the calm in which I gather my beliefs,
And by dint of speaking softly to the leaf,
To the raindrop, to the feather, to light’s rays shone,
I have descended so deeply into Creation—
That abyss where wild, primal tremors strike—
That I no longer even startle a fly into flight!
The grass-blade quivering with an eternal glee,
Grows tame and becomes familiar with me;
And, quite unaware that I am even there,
The roses and bumblebees carry on their affair;
Sometimes, amidst the boughs, soft and blessed,
I lean in close to gaze upon the nests;
And the little bird—that anxious, holy mother—
Fears me no more than we would if we discovered
The eye of God peering into our own retreats.
The modest lily watches my approach without fright
As the violet unfolds to the day’s kiss
Bashful, tends to its toilette before I wash;
To these fair things, I am a discreet and trusted ally.
And the sprightly butterfly—that libertine of the azure sky—
Who playfully ruffles the petals of a half-unveiled bloom,
Does not pause even when I pass through the gloom;
And if the flower hides itself in the grass,
He says to her: “Don’t be silly! He’s here—he belongs to us.”

Les Roches, August 1835.

Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1: 26. A Few Words to Another

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 09:30:13 +0100

26. A Few Words to Another

We return to the subject; I can’t float above it:
What’s attacked in me is my era, and I love it.
Surely, I’d be left in peace, passerby, obscure,
Did I not hold—an atom of the azure—
A fragment of the great ray by which our age is made.

Yesterday the citizen, today the bard.
The ‘Romantic’ follows the ‘Liberal.’ — Come on!
Go! Snap at my heels as I trundle along.
I am the dark figure through whom all things grow rank.
Hurl your next thunderbolt at my other flank.

You, too, saw me when I was young, and now
You denounce me—oh my good fellow, you too—
Tearing me apart with the greatest cheer,
Moved by memories childhood, my hair fair.
You cry out: “What, Sir! What is this cast before it?
Stanzas go barefoot! Drama has no corset!
The Muse throws her innocence-robe to the wind!
And Art shatters rules as: ‘we are growing’!” —
Literary Gerousia with your plaintive jeers,
You marvel—in your ‘retrospective’ verse—
That my voice disturbs the order, that this Romantic
Lives on, this little one—to whom ‘Art Poetic’
So kindly gave water and bread and cheese—
Has grown such a burden on Boileau’s knees!
You gaze at my verses, at its talons and wings,
Its refusal to march behind old modelings
As junior clerks trail after their deans;
You see, flashing from them, sinister gleams;
Horror! And you, shrieking with hyena bray
Peer through the bars of the Ev-er-y-day.

You exhaust your whole notebook on me and mine,
Citing Father Bouhours and Father Rapin;
And, crushing me with names, all nobiliary,
You unleash the ultimate epithet: Revolutionary!

At this, the pedants all chorus: ‘Amen!
I am arrested; I’m set an exam in The stammering Sorbonne, school scribbles away;
From twenty pens bursts-out a farcical fray:
“What do these foul innovators want?—verse? this?”
Before their black books, read in the night’s blackness,
Female readers tremble deep within their retreats.
Mount Pindus hears rhymes as roaring wild beasts,
And shudders. Because of them, today all is dead;
The alexandrine tears caesura to shreds;
Like grass and sage ripped up by wild swine,
Enjambment flounders in the midst of the line;
What is to become of us? Richelet can’t fix it.
Everything requires a Magister dixit.
Let us go back to The Rules, flee this taint;
Hippocrene is water; thus, beauty is restraint.
The wise are bound by reason for their part,
Have always consulted Quintilian on art,
Leibniz on maths, on war take Vegetius’s advice.

When impotence writes, it signs its name: ‘Wise’.

I see no reason why I should not tell you this
As I have told others without shaking my fist.
Well then, let’s unmask! True, our soul is shadowy;
Cast off the straitjacket of formal oratory.
We’re pushing language toward a new horizon,
With rhyme, in its wake, sweeping along reason,
Launching—at the double, into pitched battle—
All rebel force against one La Harpe, rattled.
We attached a firebrand to the style of old:
Liberty! In that same conspiracy we’ve enrolled
The Spirit—poor devil—and the Word—poor fool;
We tore off the hood, hairshirt, the monk’s cowl
That once cloaked the Idea—that vision diviner.
We raged in a throng—orators and writers,
And poets alike; all pointing to the hour,
We told Rhetoric: ‘Come, you’re a big girl now,
Lift your eyes!’ — And me, singing, defying, a brawler,
I twisted the bars of the convent’s front parlour;
Torch in hand, I threw wide Drama’s doubled door;
And just like pirates, with sail and with oar,
We seized the Three Unities’ dry archipelago;
I sounded the rally at trembling Helicon.
Lost! Unmuzzled verses dart wild through the scene!
We prefer Molière to a startled Racine;
Oh, pedants! We’d rather Rotrou than Ducis.
Who’s this? Lucrezia Borgia? ’tis she!
Mixing foul poisons into all your sweetbreads;
Disheveled Drama smites fear upon your bald heads;
It is horrible! Yes—brigand, Jacobin, crime—
I have broken that great simpleton, the alexandrine;
Refined words, those syllable posh-os,
Lived together deep in their exquisite grottos,
Pursing their lips, speaking just to each to the same;
I told the low words—one-armed, goitrous, the lame—
‘Stand tall! Soar! Mingle in here without rules
In the vast, rampant cavern of the eagles!’ —
I have confessed my crimes are killer-diller.
Yes, I am Papavoine, Herostratus, Attila.
And then?

—————Fly into a rage, call the guard,
Good man! Storm! Thunder! I’m watching you hard.
Our ‘so-called progress’ strikes you as shocking;
You loathe this people’s century where, when, talking,
Verse abandons the customary three bows;
A dark age, we writes as we think, uncowed,
Where one is a philosopher and a poet in the raw,
Where all dreamers are drunk on your sincere,
Adorable, foaming wine—O Ideal Unkind.
You open our books and shield your eyes—blind
With the brightness of the mot juste’s burning;
Execrate our frank, true verses; you screaming
In fury at the sight of our naked verses.
But where, then, is the time of nymphs unrehearsed,
Who ran through the woods, and whose nudity
Danced in the evening of summer’s lucidity?
As the window is opened at white naked dawn,
The modest and prudish mist-curtain is drawn,
A fig leaf is stuck on the star in the azure?
Is the ‘Tasteful’ of waves—shells of love!—so poor?
O Virgil! Pindar! Orpheus! Veil in gauze,
As if it obscene, the wings of Pegasus—
Who, unfolding them on the blessed mount, is,
Like the vast butterfly of the infinite kiss?
Is the magnificent sun a cynic?
Is the flower wrong to cast off its tunic?
Does Calliope—in the sky as she hovers—
Wrong the pensive Dante when she uncovers
Her dazzling breasts through the stellar dark?
You are a relic of yesterday. Free, uncloak
Great naked Olympus would make you cry: “Urk!”
You would make chubby Cupid put on a skirt.
Your taste tends to tinsel, the nine sisters posh,
To Évrard Titon du Tillet’s Parnassus;
To you, the Maenads would be dancing the can-can;
Apollo would strike you as a Mohican;
You would take Venus for a savage woman.

Age—which is often totals our wisdom’s sum—
May well grumble to you in a low tone: “You’re wrong;
You will make yourself cough if you shout so strong;
For the sake of a few chance and wild novelties,
Sir, do not disturb the peace of your qualities!
These folk go their own way; how does it harm you?
They find only ash in the fire that once warmed you.
Why declare war on the noise that caused you annoy?
This century’s as liberal as you were once a pageboy.
Shut tight your shutters, draw your curtains closed tight,
Blow out your candle, and block all of it out!
What is the true sage’s soul? A deaf-mute.
What do you care if this poet or that,
Like a bird of the heavens, comes singing his song;
And if some Pindaric rascal—some nursling
Of the Muses—amidst a Corybantic crashboom,
A sullen brat, has bitten their slightly sagging bosom? —

You heed none of this, and you listen to nary any.
Voltaire—great man, yet hardly ‘Voltairean’—he
Whispers in vain in your ear: “Friend, you’re a bore!"
— You foam with rage! — starting from the fact that we core
Men of anarchy-age, this hell, are laying
Siege to the great Louis, perched on twenty great names;
You say that, after all, we are wasting our effort,
That the climb is steep and our breath runs short;
That the verdict is in: we shall never ‘successifize’;
That Batteux stares at us with his big, round eyes,
That Tancrède’s made of bronze and Hamlet of sand;
You declare Boileau a wig that refuses to curl; crowned
With laurels, with our a sidelong glances,
You point out the rubbish heap of our verses—
That dung-pile where this century’s ugliness struts—
To poor old Good Taste, that sweeper of Parnassus;
And, bolder still, you shout to us again:
‘I shall sweep you away myself!’ —
——————————————————Sweep away, then.

Paris, November 1834.

Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1:25 Unity

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 08:50:44 +0100

25: Unity

Beyond the horizon where browning hills tower,
The sun, that infinitely splendid flower,
Bent down to the earth at sunset, and revealed
A humble daisy, blooming at the edge of a field,
On a grey wall, crumbling among the wild oat,
White and unfurling its candid halo;
And that little flower, above the old wall,
Gazed fixedly into the endless azure,
At the great star pouring forth, immortally lit.
“And I, too, have rays!” she declared to it.

Granville, July 1836.

Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1: 24

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 08:04:57 +0200

Happy’s the man, occupied with eternal fate,
Who, like a traveller setting out as day breaks,
Awakens, his mind filled with reverie,
And at daybreak begins to read and pray!
As he reads, the day is slowly coming nigh:
It dawns in his soul as in the high sky.
He sees distinctly, in this pale light,
Things in his room and sees in-self insight;
He alone believes, as everyone else sleeps.
And yet, with hushing fingers upon their lips,
Behind him, as ecstasy has him moonstruck,
The still-smiling angels lean over his book.

Paris, September 1842.

Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1: 23. Childhood.

Wed, 14 Oct 2026 02:10:26 +0200

23. Childhood

The child sang. The mother, exhausted, in bed,
Lay dying, her lovely head bowed. Shadows clung.
Death loomed in the clouds floating over her head;
And I heard that death rattle, hearing that song.

The child, near the window, was five years old;
His laughter and games made a charming racket;
And the mother—as this poor, adorable child
Sang all day—spent all night coughing and hacking.

The mother now sleeps under cloister stone;
And the small child begins once more to choir it… —
Sorrow is a fruit: God does not make it grow
Upon a branch that is too weak to bear it.

Paris, January 1835.

Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1: 22 The Party at Thérèse’s

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 07:27:02 +0100

22. The Party at Thérèse’s

The affair was exquisite and skilfully laid.
It was in April, on so temperate a day
One might have thought Love himself its planter.
Thérèse the Duchess—to whom I would grant her
Paris were I king, or the world were I God,
Even were she nothing but Thérèse the Blonde;
That lovely Thérèse, with eyes like diamonds—
Had invited us to her charming garden.

The company was small; selection was key.
We were all together, yet each pair in intimacy.
Couples wandered slowly in every direction:
Proud lords’ and rare beauties’ interaction,
Amyntas dreaming beside their Léonores,
Marchionesses laughing with Monsignors;
And, prowling the grand staircase, one saw appear
A dwarf stealing purses from each cavalier.

At noon: the spectacle accompanied by harmony.
Why perform Plautus at night? Comedy
Is a fair maiden who laughs best by day.
Thus—like a temple of love—they’d made
Near a shaded pool where a swan resided,
A trellis-work theatre, twining vine-sided.
An open-work arch—in shape, basket-handled,
Like a green cage where a captive finch warbled—
Covered the entire stage, and the actresses smote
By shadows of branches across their white throats.

Magical harmonies chimed from afar;
And above, coming waist-deep from frieze, to draw
The whole of the crowd to his repeated hijinks,
White-clad Pulcinella sounded his syrinx.
Two fauns supported the proscenium arch; while
Trivelin laughed in their faces like a rascal.
Amidst the ornaments carved in the trellis,
Columbine slept within a great seashell, as
Baring her bosom and arms, could be seen as
A goddess upon the conch—and call her Venus.
Lord Pantaloon, in a niche on the right, made
Use of a bench selling sweet lemonade,
Crying out now and then: “Lords, man is divine!
God made the water, but man has made wine!”
On one side Scaramouche belaboured with bat
The tragic Alcantor and mournful Arbate;
Crispin, black-clad, waved his fan up and down;
Perched on the gateway, one leg dangling down,
Carlino leaned forward, listening to the serenades,
His foot traced dreamy shapes in the air as it played.

The sun served as chandelier; seasonal June
Had embroidered a wide rolling lawn with blooms—
A green carpet on which many groups were ranged.
Lined up on both sides of the rustic stage,
The park’s true trees—lilacs and rowans,
And ebony trees laden with April’s growings—
Exhaling delights with their fragrant sap,
Seemed to amuse themselves by holding things up,
And, opening their blossoms like eyes, watching,
Joined their joyful murmurs to the violin;
So that, in this graceful concert classical
Nature’s was joined by everything musical

Everything charmed: woods, serene day, air pure,
The women all love, and the sky all azure.
As the play was excellent, though of a great age.
With Pierrot, sat nonchalant at the edge of the stage,
Haranguing—his discourse solemn-ing along—
A ape playing kettledrums astride a dog.

Just that: simple and love. — And there were times
The monkey in a frenzy would bang on his drums;
And Pierrot would say. — Listen! If you wish.
One man had the valet bring him some ice;
Another, a gallant in a fanciful casque,
Spoke softly to his lady while tying on her mask;
Three marquises sat at a table, singing a melody.
Thérèse sat in the shade of a small tree;
The roses compared to her cheek seemed pale,
And, seeing her loveliness, a peacock fanned its tail.

Me, I listened, pensive, to a ditty of snark
That an abbé in violet robes hummed in the dark.

Night fell; all grew silent; the torches were spent;
In darkening woods the springs murmured laments;
The nightingale, hidden in its shadowed nest,
Sang, like a poet, like a lover, his best.
Everyone scattered beneath foliage throng;
The giddy ones, laughing, swept the prudent along;
The lover and his beloved walked in shadows away;
And, in a daze like that of a dream, they say
They feel—gradually mingling their souls,
With their burning glances, their whispered words,
With their hearts, their senses, and their yielding reason—
The blue moonlight that bathed the horizon.

April 18…

Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1: 21

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 07:49:29 +0100

21.

She had no shoes, and dishevelled hair, she
Sat barefoot among the drooping reeds;
I, as I passed, thought I saw a fairy,
I said to her: Will you come out to the fields?

She looked at me with that supreme gaze
That beauty retains in its victories
And I said: Shall we, in these, Love’s own days,
Shall we go together into the deep trees?

She dried her feet on the bankside grasses;
She cast on me a second look, as she could,
And the playful beauty then became pensive.
Oh! how the birds sang deep in the wood!

How gently the water caressed the shoreside!
I saw come toward me, through tall green reeds, this
Beautiful girl, happy, startled, and wild,
Her hair in her eyes, laughing in the midst.

Mont.-l’Am., June 183..

Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1: 20 To A Blind Poet

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 08:17:15 +0100

20. To A Blind Poet

Thank you, poet! — At the pious threshold of my house,
Like a divine guest, you come and reveal who you are;
And the golden halo of your radiant verse
Shines around my name like a circle of stars.

Sing! As Milton sang; sing! As Homer sang.
The sensual poet cuts through sombre clouds;
The blind see in shadows worlds of brightness frank:
When the eye is extinguished, the spirit unshrouds.

Paris, May 1842.

Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1: 19 An Old Song of Youthful Days

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 09:14:08 +0100

19. An Old Song of Youthful Days

I was not thinking of Rose;
Rose and I went to the woods;
We spoke of something—who knows?
I no longer remember our words.

I was as cold as marble;
I walked with absent tread;
I spoke of trees, of myrtle;
‘What now?’ it seemed she said.

The dew offered its pearls,
The thicket its sunshine shade;
I walked; I heard blackbirds,
And Rose the nightingale.

I, sixteen, was quite morose.
She, twenty; her eyes agleam.
The nightingales sang of Rose,
And the blackbirds whistled at me.

Rose, standing tall and fine,
Raised her lovely, trembling arm
To pluck a blackberry from its vine;
I did not see her white arm.

A stream, cool and deep, spilled,
Over stones velvet-mossed;
And nature, love-filled,
Slept in the vast woods, hushed.

Rose unfastened her shoe,
And, with an artless air, put
Her small foot in the water blue;
I did not see her bare foot.

I didn’t know what to say the while;
I followed her through the trees,
Seeing her sometimes smile,
And sometimes sigh unease.

I only saw how lovely she was
Leaving these vast, hushed ways.
‘So,’ she said; ‘let’s think it no more’.
Since then, I have thought of it always.

Paris, June 1831.

Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1: 18 The Birds

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 10:31:22 +0100

18. The Birds

I dreamt a deserted graveyard, wide-spread,
And heard the duet of my soul and the dead,
Among flowered lawns and tombs cross-adorned.
God wills that what falls should ignite what is born.
And the shadow filled me.

———————————Around me, a crowd
Cheerful, heedless of my sad head bowed,
In this field, bedchamber of ultimate sleep,
Free sparrows played truant and hide-and-seek.
Eternity teased by the here and the now!
They came and went, singing, flying, hopping about,
Scratching at death with their sharp little claws,
Smoothing their beaks on a statue’s sad nose,
Pecking at the tombs, those seedbeds of mystery.
I took these winged noisemakers seriously;
Cried out: — “You harpies! Grant peace to the dead!”
“We’re sparrows,” is what these impious creatures said.
“Silence! Go off!” I retorted, harsh, groaningly.
They flew off because I was strongest—but only,
One still remained behind, and, with his bold music,
Lifted his tail up and said: “Who’s this old classic?”

As they all departed, furious, unjolly,
Shouting, and glaring at a giant black holly
A tree lost in thought near a tomb: a wise man,
Suddenly grabbed me by the sleeve as I ran,
And said: “This is these birds’ purpose, their rightness.
Leave them alone. We need this ray of brightness.
God sends them. They bring life to the cemetery.
Man, they are the joy of all nature’s hymnary.
They take its light, the murmur from the stream,
From the star, the smile of dawn’s enchanted gleam;
Wherever a wise man laughs, they carry his joy,
And bring it to us; shadows blaze at their employ;
They fill their beaks with schoolchildren’s calls;
Through man and grass, through bushes, waterfalls,
They go plundering joy in the vast universe.
They possess a reason which seems to you perverse.
They pity us lolling in sadness, far from their throng;
And, when they are full of their game and song,
Of eclogues and kisses, all the gossip that’s made,
They make nests in April beneath the green shade,
They come running, joyful, charming, lightly, they rave,
To pour it all into our frightening graves,
And come, from palaces, from woodland and hut,
To empty this brightness all into our night!
When May brings them back to us, O dreamer, we say:
Here they are! Everything stirs, stones, mounds, hay;
The smallest shrub speaks, and the grass is ecstatic;
The weeping willow sings, its phrasing emphatic;
The old yew tree, chattering now, confesses;
They gossip about man’s life with the hearses;
They unsnick the clasps of the too-pompous shrouds;
Mocking our marble; spell old words aloud;
And I, who am here amongst old, sulky weeds
Before whom the Lie shows its ugliest screed
Where shamelessly I’m of the tourist crowd,
I find it just, friends, that by reading aloud
Epitaphs styling dead as blessed in the hereafter,
They should make the whole graveyard burst with laughter.

Paris, May 1835.

Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1: 17 To Monsieur Froment Meurice

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 07:10:48 +0100

17 To Monsieur Froment Meurice

We are brothers: the flower
Is fashioned in doubled art.
The poet is a sculptor,
The sculptor is a poet.

Through us, poet or sculptor,
Spirit becomes scrutable.
We make the good better,
You make beauty more beautiful.

On her neck or on the arm,
You make from your dreams,
Sculptor of the jeweled charm
Palaces of precious gems!

Don’t say: My art’s a blank …
Step beyond the threshold,
Magic craftsman, make:
Blending thought with gold!

True thinkers take no stock
Who ends it or who starts:
They sculpt from the same rock.
This rock is immense art.

Michelangelo, great old man,
In large blocks he hurls around,
Makes it spring forth at random;
Benvenuto breaks it down.

And, before infinite art’s endlessness,
Whose law is changeless, locked,
Cellini’s crumb-small part
Is worth Michelangelo’s block.

Everything is grand. Red or dun,
Each bright fire’s a soul-claim.
The star is worth the sun;
The spark is worth the flame.

Paris, October 22, 1841.

Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1: 16. Circa 1820

Wed, 07 Oct 2026 07:35:12 +0100

16. Circa 1820

So Denise, your husband—our old pedagogue—
Is out for a stroll; grubbing a new eclogue
With “fairest young April upon forest clearing.”
All tremble, pedanticize, at his appearing:
The ass grunts some Latin to ox, his mate;
The wind drones some dull prose, the tree a tirade;
The greening briar-rose—soft, growing young-man—
Cites Theramenes’ tale, and struggles to scan:
“His broad brow is arméd with menacing horns.”

Denise, in the meantime: you dream, you sing songs,
Your age is when innocence shows its dark bloom;
With your unknowing eye—neither joy nor gloom,
Nor fear nor desire—you’re watching, as hubby
Returns to his room and the scholar to study,
The pair approach you, and they climb stairs together:
The schoolmaster Boredom, the schoolboy Lover.

Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1: 15 The Ladybird

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 00:41:32 +0100

15 The Ladybird

She said: Some little speck
Torments me. So I stared:
On her snowy neck there
A tiny pink insect.

I should have—(but, wise or thick,
At sixteen, one is glib)—
Seen the kiss upon her lip
More than the bug on neck.

It looked like seashell conch;
Its pink back black-freckled.
Above us, songbirds settled
To watch us from their branch.

Her cool mouth was on my way
As I bent in, allured,
And I took the ladybird,
But the kiss flew away.

“Son, learn now my name,”
Said the bug of the blue sky,
“Animals belong to the Divine:
But foolishness to man.”

Paris, May 1830.

Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1: 14 In Granville 1836

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 07:37:11 +0100

14. In Granville, 1836

So: it’s June. Sparrows rail
At lovers in the fields;
The wall-dwelt nightingale
Sings, stone nest concealed.

The branches and the grasses,
Dog- and sigh- filled,
Repeat their suave choruses
In depths of the wood.

The thrush and the turtledove
Prolong, on nest-soft branch,
The sweet quarrel of love
Of kisses and romance.

Beneath the plain’s fine fences,
Caves, green willows sway,
Vergil intoxicates Silenus,
Rabelais, Grandgousier.

O Vergil—fine wine: pour me!
O Rabelais! Fill the glass.
The forest is a glory;
The cavern a palace!

There’s no lake, isle in-middle
Where birdlime doesn’t snare us,
Where we don’t sing an idyll,
Where a duet doesn’t pair us.

For love hunts in boscages,
Love fishes in the streams;
And fair maidens are the cages
Our hearts the birds within.

From the spring within its basin
Water mirrors flower,
Bids “Good morning” as the jay sings,
“Good evening” to the owl.

The roof awaits its thatch mats—
Bread first, next sheafs for good;
The ox’s flank amongst the grass
Seems a mountain in the wood.

The pond laughs at the sea-ducks,
Field laughs at oriole,
While the deep-set grounded ruts
Groan as great wagons roll.

From a wallflower gold peeks;
Zephyr, old-myth-proud,
Blows with puffed-out cheeks
Deep inside blue cloud.

Jersey upon the docile swell,
Draped in skies so pure,
Adopts a Sicilian veil
And a vast cloak of azure.

Everywhere eclogues are writ—as
Far off as cold Albion
The air’s filled with Theocritus,
The wind recalling Bion;

Repeating the melancholic,
Song once hummed forth
By Moschus—that grig bucolic,
Upon Etna’s hearth.

Winter, old man, coughs, sick:
The mist dissolves; he goes;
The lapping waves provide the music
For verses trees compose.

All of sombre nature is displayed,
Pours forth mysterious glow;
The dreaming soul holds more shade,
And the flower holds more love.

The grass bursts into daisies;
Scents—deemed mute—and powers
The secret sorrow’s phrases
Bindweeds to cornflowers.

Myriad tiny white wings branch
Upon the water’s furrow
Descending in an avalanche;
Its butterflies pour snow.

And on the sea, reflecting together
Dawn’s enamel smile,
The purple-violet heather
Capes ancient mountain-isle,

And addressing the abyss
Holding, blessing brighter—
Intones its sublime mass
Beneath its granite mitre.

Granville, June 1836.

Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1: 13. On Horace

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 07:41:11 +0100

13. On Horace

Peddlers of Old Greek and Latin! Pedants! Dogs!
Philistines! Teachers! I hate you, pedagogues!
In your solemn, infallible, dull confidence,
You deny the ideal, grace, and beauty at once!
For your texts, your laws, your rules: all mere fossils!
And, beneath an air of profundity, you are just tossers!
You claim to teach everything, yet you know nothing!
Your ways are wicked and mean! — My blood’s seething
At the mere thought of me as a dreamy ass,
A lanky sixteen-year-old in the rhetoric class,
I endured such boredom! Rage! Folly! — Head-blocks! —
Such cold punishments and such sudden shocks!
— Sunday in detention and “Horace: five hundred lines!” —
I’d gaze at the monster with his nails begrimed,
And stammer: “Sir…” — But no: “no excuses!
Twenty times: ‘Plancus’ and the ‘Epistle to the Pisos!’” —
Yet that very day—oh, sweet notional idea
That made me dream then of Armida and Haidée—
I had a tryst with the doorkeeper’s daughter.
Great God! To lose such a day! All gone for naught! I
Had meant—while speaking of love, of pure bliss!
Intoxicating her with sky and naturalness—
To take her, if the weather wasn’t too grim-grey,
To eat galette cakes up on Butte Saint-Gervais!
Happy dream! I saw it all, in my furious needing—
The holidays, lilacs, the suburbs, that Eden—
And I heard, amidst thyme and lilies-of-the-valley,
The swelling violins of Mother Saguet!

Oh, the anguish! Furious, I would climb to my room—
An icebox in December, a furnace in June—
And there, I would cry out:

———————————— Horace! Friend mine!
You who lived life calmly by reason’s shine,
And who, with your candid wisdom, would perch
Upon all things as a bird lights upon a branch—
Not weighing things down, or lingering, ask gods
For nothing but the time to sing your free joyful odes!
You walked, listening at evening beneath the arbours
Heard the stifled laughter of giddy young girls,
Heard soft whispers in the woods’ dark enclave;
And at times you wooed your beautiful slave,
Blond-haired Myrtale, who would flare up and rear
As the ocean carves out the gulfs of Calabria;
Or else you leaned upon the table, drinking straight a
Glass of wine you poured out of a Greek krater.
Pegasus breathed verses from his nostrils to you, clean;
You mused; you composed various odes to Barine,
To Maecenas, to Virgil, to your Tibur field friends,
To the antique wall by which Chloe wends,
Bearing a fine amphora upon her lovely head.
At night, when Phoebe turned into Hecate the Dread,
The thickets filled with visions for your sight;
You saw glimmers, shapes, darkness, and rays of light;
Cerberus—tail between legs—rubbing up spends time
With Bacchus, god of wine and father of the iamb;
Silenus, pensive, digesting, in a spelunk, Lasciviously darts into the shadows to get drunk
On the scanty-clad nymphs white nakedness,
The faun with goat-feet and tapered ears!
Horace, when—tipsy on a little Sabine wine-quaff—
You caught Glycera or Lycoris at her bath,
Who could have told you, O Flaccus!—when in Rome
You painted young knights racing the hippodrome,
Just as Molière painted those French marquises,
You were crafting beguiling, profound, fine verses
To serve—in this odious age of ours— As instruments of torture for horrible fellows,
Disheveled and ill-clad, who—dull pedants—devour
Your name with their teeth as an ape chews a flower!
Hideous scribblers who—their heads being clear—
Have never had girlfriend nor had an idea!

Then I’d add, fierce:
—————————— O dunces! You who dress-up
The angry gods of the ether in cassocks,
Put a nightcap on Diana, and grimly place at
The heads of sombre Olympians your three-cornered hats—
Eunuchs, tormentors, cretins—be accursed!
For you are the sluggishness, old, dark, the worst;
For you are the winter; for you are—O ninnies—
The bear roaming the woods for a tree full of bees,
The shadow, the lead, the death, tomb, the void!
No one sits upright beside your stance sigmoid;
And you petrify with your stone-foulness of breath
Each innocent, radiant, splendid youth;
And you draw near the dawn, O you brings of slumber!
To serene Pindar, filled with far epic thunder,
To Sophocles, Terence, Plautus, and ambrosia,
O traitors, you mingle ancient Hypocrisia,
Your darkness, your morals, yokes, exeats, rotas
And the stupor of grim, sanctimonious cloisters;
Your claw-marks that scar every most-sublime book,
Your prejudices making your eyes fog-cooked,
The dread of the future, the hatred of progress;
And—fearless, unrepentant and pitiless—
Of youth, virgin hearts, and hope, you’re choking them
By night-forcing on them that stale, ancient opium!
O shutters of the human Bible! Sextons
Of art, of science, and of masters that are ex-!, gone!,
And of the truth with which man spells sky scrabble—
You turn this vast temple into a tiny chapel!
Jailers of spirit, you scoundrels whose ‘acumen’
Leads Beauty on a leash, and locks-away blue heaven,
You take Theocritus, Aeschylus in his sacred veil,
Tibullus filled with love, Virgil through whom stars sail,
And turn all these paradises into hell!

And, my rage mounting, I resumed:
———————————————— Cursed! Fell!
Those deaf monasteries! hated prisons! Pigsty!
Oh! what was done of old to the pedant of Veii?—
Breeches down, old tiger! Schoolboys! schoolboys!
Come swarming, by the thousand, come in convoys,
From the Paris urchin to the Old Roman ‘Greekling’;
Cut green wood, and give that man a good thrashing!
Young mouths, bite the one who ties on the gags!
The shop-window dummy who’s wearing just rags
Has just as much wit as that pedant in his hut,
And just as much heart as that one has fat gut
Full of Latin and Greek as if all stuffed with hay.
Ah! I call Phyllodoce and Xanthis to relay
That I am in love with their bright-coloured tunics;
Whilst hating the vile heap of those pedant-eunuchs!
Entrusting a child—think it—to those black-clad
Pseudo-scholars! One might as well, by God,
Lock up a fly in a tarantula’s house!
Those monks explain Plato, they’r reading Catullus,
Tacitus recounting the great Agricola,
Lucretius!— deciphering Homer, those infusoria?
Those deacons, those beadles with snuffling snouts!
Skulls spewing night, paws ready to grout,
Old oafs with high airs, triumphant brows wild,
Who don’t even know how to spell ‘the child’!
Know nothing of how souls are born, how to foster.
They’ve only La Harpe and Nonotte in their cloister!
They’re stuck on the heart’s A, B, C, D plateau;
They’re the pinched Yesterday trying kill Tomorrow;
Offer their eaglets stale crawfishy rules
And those black shards reeking of vices of fools.
Oh, old goblets chipped by thirsts dare not confess!
Their plural meas culpas take an added ‘S’;
Mysterious he-goats bristle seeing them chaff,
And hearing “Love”—heavens and earth!—cross themself.
Their dead, withered innards insult hearts florescent.
They look down their noses at all adolescents,
They just won’t accept the light entering heart
In the guise of a thought or as woman’s part.
When the Muse appears, these clamorous scoffers
Cry: “Who is this madwoman coming to mock us?"
And, faced by her beauty, brought out by her light,
They sneer: “Harsh colors: the shades are too bright;
Vapours, illusions, dreams—what whim perverse
Makes you cram such a rainbow now into your verse?”
They mock the children, they mock the poets’ lines;
Glare at the nightingales with great owl-eyes;
The child’s just ignorant; they are the pedants of ignorance;
Striking out soul, splendour, and the dawn’s glance;
They weed out the ideal as if it were a solecism,
And those bottle-bottom eyes scorn upon the prism!

Thus I was heard: crying out in my chains.

The monologue had time to shift and change.
And I grew exasperated, committing great wrong—
I was right in substance, yet awry in form.
And after Abbé Tuet, I cursed all Bézout brought;
For, beyond the drudgery that dissolves all thought,
I was then in the clutches of mathematics.
Dark times! A child stirred by poetry’s phatics,
A poor bird banging my skull against the bars,
Sent alive to ‘the numbers’—black executioners;
They forced me to swallow algebra’s dimness;
Shackled me deep inside Boisbertrand’s grimness;
They twisted me, from my wing-tip to my beak,
Upon X and Y and Z’s hideous rack;
Alas! Crammed beneath my maxillaries
The theorem, decked out with all its corollaries;
And I struggled, a lugubrious patient
Aiding the divisor and abetting the quotient.
Hence my cries!

———————One day, when mankind grows sage,
When birds are no longer taught by their cage,
When misshapen societies grasp what is different
Their minds lifted high through the better-known infant,
When—having fathomed the rules of free flight—
We all know the law of the eagle’s birthright,
And when high noon shines for us all, replete:
As knowledge is sublime, then learning will be sweet.
Then, when all will essay mountain-peak etudes
The great Latin-Greek books—those high solitudes
Where lightning rumbles, sea gleams, starlight laughs,
Filled with vast winds of the spirit that blasts—
It is by illuminating with tender good,
By making them loved, we’ll make them understood.
Homer will sweep dazzled schoolboys to sea
In his vast, surging tide; the child will no longer be
A beast of burden yoked to Virgil;
And no longer shall we see that keen spirit, agile,
Become, under some pedant or abbot’s hard whip,
The heavy, wheezing horse of bogged-down hardship.
In a rustic temple, bathed in light, each village class a
Replacement—in place of the old schoolmaster
So gloomy no daylight could never penetrate—
The clear-sighted, true teacher: a magistrate
Of progress, a healer of ignorance, a priest
Of the ideal; we’ll see vanish into the mist
The eternal schoolboy and the eternal pedant.
Dawn comes singing, not growls of dread. And
Our sons will laugh at us in that bright new reach;
They’ll wonder how we ever hoped to teach
The sparrow by means of the haggard owl’s rage.
And then, the young mind and the youthful gaze
Shall rise to the skies with serene clarity
Towards august, kindly, sovereign verity;
Then, no more obscure tomes, dull, stifling, awful;
The teacher—bending over the child, sweet apostle—
Shall pour out God, blue sky, and true comradeship, Bid the little soul drink from the infinite cup.
Then all shall be true—dogmas, rights, duties, laws.
You shall let pass, through your dark pillars you shall let pass,
A pure gleam, less dim day by day, shall grow—
O Nature, alphabet of great letters of shadow!

Paris, May 1831.

Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1: 12. Vere Novo

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 07:29:31 +0100

12. Vere Novo

How the morning laughs upon the weeping roses!
Oh! charming little lovers that the flower possesses!
It is only in the jasmines, only in periwinkles
That this dazzling display of wild white twinkles
Coming and going, that come back shuttering,
Reopening, in one vast and gentle fluttering.
O spring! When one thinks of all the billets doux
From dreamy lovers to pensive beauties, who
Entrusted to paper their hearts, of those heaps
Of letters penned on taffeta-fine sheets,
Of messages of love, intoxication gay,
Received in April and torn up in May—
Imagine them flying away, at the glad wind’s whim,
In meadows, woods, water, to the very skies’ rim,
And roaming everywhere, seeking a soul,
Running to the flower upon leaving the girl,
The little white fragments the winds scatters fly,
Of all the love notes that become butterflies.

May 1831

Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1: 11. Lise

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 00:52:21 +0100

11: Lise

I was twelve; she was going-on sixteen.
She was tall, I was on the small side.
To speak with her more freely at evening,
I would wait for her mother to go outside;
Then I’d come in and sit next to her chair
To speak more free in the evening, there.

How many blooms trampled by Time’s quick feet!
How many fires quenched, how many sealed tombs!
Does anyone remember that hearts once beat?
Does anyone remember that roses bloomed?
She loved me. I loved her. We were, in God’s sight,
Two pure children, two fragrances, two rays of light.

God had made her angel, fairy, princess.
And since she was by so much taller than I,
My asking her questions could be endless
For the sheer pleasure of saying to her: “Why?”
And many times, she would shyly evade all
My dreamy gaze that made her so heedful.

Then I’d regale her with all my chitchatting,
Show her my games, my swift top, my large ball;
I was so proud to be learning my Latin;
I showed her my Phaedrus and my Virgil;
I braved all things; nothing was stopping us there;
I’d tell her: “My father’s an army officer.”

Latin is needful, even for girls, for Lise,
Dreamily to spell out its words—to look
Translating a verse at church-service to please her
I would often lean over her prayerbook.
A stone angel spread its white wing to crest us
As we attended Sunday Vespers.

She would say of me: “Oh, he’s only a child!”
And I would call her Mademoiselle Lise.
To translate a psalm for her, quite often I’d,
Lean over her book at church to please her;
And then one day—oh, heavens!—you saw it:
Her blooming cheek touched my burning lip.

Young loves, whose blossoms so swiftly unfold,
You are the heart’s dawn and morning’s tomorrow.
Enchant the child, O raptures untold!
And when evening comes, bringing sorrow,
Enchant our dazzled souls once more deftly,
Young loves, that disappear so swiftly!

May 1843.

Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1: 10. To Madame D. G. de G.

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 06:31:12 +0100

10. To Madame D. G. de G.

Once I said to you: “Live, Madame—reign!
The salon awaits you! Success calls your name!
The dazzling ball grows pale at your going!
Be illustrious, beautiful! Love! Laugh! Show, sing!
You own the splendour of roses and stars!
Your charming gaze, in which I read your memoirs,
Complements your light and your most graceful words.
Your mouth’s sparkles on your eyes conferred.
It seems, when sorrow sometimes makes you fear,
The drop of a pearl, and never a tear.
Even when you are dreaming, you can still smile.
Live, feted and proud, O golden-haired belle!”
Now you are pale, solemn, silent, you know it,
Dead, and transfigured; I say to you: “Poet!
Come fetch me! Archangel! Mysteriously be!
Make earth and heavens transparent to me!
Reveal to me, let your profound mouth say the word,
The great human enigma, secret of the world!
Confirm to me Descartes and Spinoza too!
You know the true name of the One who broke through—
So that we might see His light shining far—
Holes in dark ceiling we like to call stars!
For I feel you hovering beneath low tree limbs;
Your invisible lyre holding your sublime hymns!
My sombre ocean, on which the skiff floats rager,
Both terrifies and delights you; for holy nature—
Eternal nature, the fields, and woods choice—
Speak of your great soul with their mighty voice!"

Paris, 1840. — Jersey, 1855.

Victor Hugo “Contemplations” (1856) 1: 9: ‘The Poem Weeps its Lament’

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 07:33:29 +0100

9: ‘The Poem Weeps its Lament’

The poem weeps its lament; drama suffers
Twenty actors pour out their souls in gushes;
And the crowd, leaning forward, is much moved by it,
Until they resume: — “Bah! author’s a man of wit,
He’s hurling false thunderbolts at falser heroes,
And laughs to see us mourn their fanciful woes.
Wife, calm yourself now! Sister, dry your eyes” —
The mob’s wrong: mind is heart; to philosophize
Is to suffer from thought, to be eaten by fire.
The poet has bled blood that flows through theatre;
These beings he creates bind him in a scrum;
He shakes in them, lives them, and he dies in them;
Within his creation the poet grows shuddery;
He is her; she is him; he works his work shadowy,
He weeps, he rips out his own viscera, dumps it—
His drama, sole sculptor—upon his dark summit,
Kneads his own flesh, sacred clay; he self-mates
Is reborn endlessly, the dreamer who creates
Othello from a tear, Alceste from a sob, lonesome
Though he is with them, pell-mell, work blossoms.
In his immense and true genesis, one and diverse,
He, suffering eternal pain, pours out his rivers,
Without exhausting his side from which light shines.
What makes him a god is his truth to greater mankind.
He is genius, being, more than others, un homme.
Corneille is in Rouen but his soul is in Rome;
His brow, like old Catos, bears masculine tiredness.
How pale is Shakespeare! Before Hamlet, attired is
He whom the ghost awaits on the harsh stage front,
While an enormous moon rises on the horizon.
From Argan’s bad dream, Poquelin’s superficies;
He laughs: yes, he gasps! With wandering Ulysses,
Homer, distraught, rushes into sea mist.
Saint John is a-tremble; in his deep-dark breast
The horrible Apocalypse sounds its alarum.
Aeschylus! Orestes stomps, shouts in your bosom,
And, black bard, it’s where you sharp breath is exhaled,
Upon your giant skull that Prometheus is nailed.

Paris, January 1834.