There is not, it seems to me, in all this marvelous life, to which well nigh every year brought its additional aureole of glory, a point more important, a date more memorable, than the publication of theChâtiments.Between the prologueNightand the epilogueLightthe ninety-eight poems that roll and break and lighten and thunder like waves of a visible sea fulfill the choir of their crescent and refluent harmonies with hardly less depth and change and strength of music, with no less living force and with no less passionate unity, than the waters on whose shores they were written. Two poems, the third and the sixth, in the first of the seven books into which the collection is divided, may be taken as immediate and sufficient instances of the two different keys in which the entire book is written; of the two styles, one bitterly and keenly realistic, keeping scornfully close to shameful fact—one higher in flight and wider in range of outlook, soaring strongly to the very summits of lyric passion—which alternate in terrible and sublime antiphony throughout the living pages of this imperishable record. A second Juvenal might have drawn for us with not less of angry fidelity and superb disgust the ludicrous and loathsome inmates of the den infested by holy hirelings of the clerical press; no Roman satirist could have sung, no Roman lyrist could have thundered, such a poem as that which has blasted for ever the name and the memory of the prostitute archbishop Sibour. The poniard of the priest who struck him dead at the altar he had desecrated struck a blow less deep and deadly than had been dealt already on the renegade pander of a far more infamous assassin. The next poem is a notable and remarkable example of the fusion sometimes accomplished—or, if this be thought a phrase too strong for accuracy, of the middle note sometimes touched, of the middle way sometimes taken—between the purely lyric and the purely satiric style or method. But it would be necessary to dwell on every poem, to pause at every page, if adequate justice were to be done to this or indeed to any of the volumes of verse published from this time forth by Victor Hugo. I will therefore, not without serious diffidence, venture once more to indicate by selection such poems as seem to me most especially notable among the greatest even of these. In the first book, besides the three already mentioned, I take for examples the solemn utterance of indignant mourning addressed to the murdered dead of the fourth of December; the ringing song in praise of art which ends in a note of noble menace; the scornful song that follows it, with a burden so majestic in its variations; the fearful and faithful "map of Europe" in 1852, with its closing word of witness for prophetic hope and faith; and the simple perfection of pathos in the song of the little forsaken birds and lambs and children. In the second book, the appeal "To the People," with a threefold cry for burden, calling on the buried Lazarus to rise again in words that seem to reverberate from stanza to stanza like peal upon peal of living thunder, prolonged in steadfast cadence from height to height across the hollows of a range of mountains, is one of the most wonderful symphonies of tragic and triumphant verse that ever shook the hearts of its hearers with rapture of rage and pity. The first and the two last stanzas seem to me absolutely unsurpassed and unsurpassable for pathetic majesty of music.
Partout pleurs, sanglots, cris funèbres.Pourquoi dors-tu dans les ténèbres?Je ne veux pas que tu sois mort.Pourquoi dors-tu dans les ténèbres?Ce n'est pas l'instant où l'on dort.La pâle Liberté gît sanglante à ta porte.Tu le sais, toi mort, elle est morte.Voici le chacal sur ton seuil,Voici les rats et les belettes,Pourquoi t'es-tu laissé lier de bandelettes?Ils te mordent dans ton cercueil!De tous les peuples on prépareLe convoi...—Lazare! Lazare! Lazare!Lève-toi!
* * * * * *
Ils bâtissent des prisons neuves;Ô dormeur sombre, entends les fleuvesMurmurer, teints de sang vermeil;Entends pleurer les pauvres veuves,Ô noir dormeur au dur sommeil!Martyrs, adieu! le vent souffle, les pontons flottent,Les mères au front gris sanglotent;Leurs fils sont en proie aux vainqueurs;Elles gémissent sur la route;Les pleurs qui de leurs yeux s'échappent goutte à goutteFiltrent en haine dans nos cœurs.Les juifs triomphent, groupe avareEt sans foi...—Lazare! Lazare! Lazare!Lève-toi!Mais, il semble qu'on se réveille!Est-ce toi que j'ai dans l'oreille,Bourdonnement du sombre essaim?Dans la ruche frémit l'abeille;J'entends sourdre un vague tocsin.Les césars, oubliant qu'il est des gémonies,S'endorment dans les symphonies,Du lac Baltique au mont Etna;Les peuples sont dans la nuit noire;Dormez, rois; le clairon dit aux tyrans: victoire!Et l'orgue leur chante; hosanna!Qui répond à cette fanfare?Le beffroi...—Lazare! Lazare! Lazare!Lève-toi!
If ever a more superb structure of lyric verse was devised by the brain of man, it must have been, I am very certain, in a language utterly unknown to me. Every line, every pause, every note of it should be studied and restudied by those who would thoroughly understand the lyrical capacity of Hugo's at its very highest point of power, in the fullest sweetness of its strength.
About the next poem—'Souvenir de la nuit du 4'—others may try, if they please, to write, if they can; I can only confess that I cannot. Nothing so intolerable in its pathos, I should think, was ever written.
The stately melody of the stanzas in which the exile salutes in a tone of severe content the sorrows that environ and the comforts that sustain him, the island of his refuge, the sea-birds and the sea-rocks and the sea, closes aptly with yet another thought of the mothers weeping for their children.
Puisque le juste est dans l'abîme,Puisqu'on donne le sceptre au crime,Puisque tous les droits sont trahis,Puisque les plus fiers restent mornes,Puisqu'on affiche au coin des bornesLe déshonneur de mon pays;Ô République de nos pères,Grand Panthéon plein de lumières.Dôme d'or dans le libre azur,Temple des ombres immortelles,Puisqu'on vient avec des échellesColler l'empire sur ton mur;Puisque toute âme est affaiblie,Puisqu'on rampe, puisqu'on oublieLe vrai, le pur, le grand, le beau.Les yeux indignés de l'histoire,L'honneur, la loi, le droit, la gloire,Et ceux qui sont dans le tombeau;Je t'aime, exil! douleur, je t'aime!Tristesse, sois mon diadème!Je t'aime, altière pauvreté!J'aime ma porte aux vents battue.J'aime le deuil, grave statueQui vient s'asseoir à mon côté.J'aime le malheur qui m'éprouve,Et cette ombre où je vous retrouve,Ô vous à qui mon cœur sourit,Dignité, foi, vertu voilée,Toi, liberté, fière exilée,Et toi, dévouement, grand proscrit!J'aime cette île solitaire,Jersey, que la libre AngleterreCouvre de son vieux pavillon,L'eau noire, par moments accrue,Le navire, errante charrue,Le flot, mystérieux sillon.J'aime ta mouette, ô mer profonde,Qui secoue en perles ton ondeSur son aile aux fauves couleurs,Plonge dans les lames géantes,Et sort de ces gueules béantesComme l'âme sort des douleurs.J'aime la roche solennelleD'où j'entends la plainte éternelle,Sans trêve comme le remords,Toujours renaissant dans les ombres,Des vagues sur les écueils sombres,Des mères sur leurs enfants morts.
The close of the third poem in the fourth book is a nobler protest than ever has been uttered or ever can be uttered in prose against the servile sophism of a false democracy which affirms or allows that a people has the divine right of voting itself into bondage. There is nothing grander in Juvenal, and nothing more true.
Ce droit, sachez-le bien, chiens du berger Maupas,Et la France et le peuple eux-mêmes ne l'ont pas.L'altière Vérité jamais ne tombe en cendre.La Liberté n'est pas une guenille à vendre,Jetée au tas, pendue au clou chez un fripier.Quand un peuple se laisse au piège estropier,Le droit sacré, toujours à soi-même fidèle,Dans chaque citoyen trouve une citadelle;On s'illustre en bravant un lâche conquérant,Et le moindre du peuple en devient le plus grand.Donc, trouvez du bonheur, ô plates créatures,À vivre dans la fange et dans les pourritures,Adorez ce fumier sous ce dais de brocart,L'honnête homme recule et s'accoude à l'écart.Dans la chute d'autrui je ne veux pas descendre.L'honneur n'abdique point. Nul n'a droit de me prendreMa liberté, mon bien, mon ciel bleu, mon amour.Tout l'univers aveugle est sans droit sur le jour.Fût on cent millions d'esclaves, je suis libre.Ainsi parle Caton. Sur la Seine ou le Tibre,Personne n'est tombé tant qu'un seul est debout.Le vieux sang des aïeux qui s'indigne et qui bout,La vertu, la fierté, la justice, l'histoire,Toute une nation avec toute sa gloireVit dans le dernier front qui ne veut pas plier.Pour soutenir le temple il suffit d'un pilier;Un français, c'est la France; un romain contient Rome,Et ce qui brise un peuple avorte aux pieds d'un homme.
The sixth and seventh poems in this book are each a superb example of its kind; the verses on an interview between Abd-el-Kader and Bonaparte are worthy of a place among the earlierOrientalesfor simplicity and fullness of effect in lyric tone and color; and satire could hardly give a finer and completer little study than that of the worthy tradesman who for love of his own strong-box would give his vote for a very Phalaris to reign over him, and put up with the brazen bull for love of the golden calf: an epigram which sums up an epoch. The indignant poem ofJoyeuse Vie, with its terrible photographs of subterranean toil and want, is answered by the not less terrible though ringing and radiant song ofL'empereur s'amuse; and this again by the four solemn stanzas in which a whole world of desolate suffering is condensed and realized. The verses of good counsel in which the imperial Macaire is admonished not to take himself too seriously, or trust in the duration of his fair and foul good fortune, are unsurpassed for concentration of contempt. The dialogue of the tyrannicide by the starlit sea with all visible and invisible things that impel or implore him to do justice is so splendid and thrilling in its keen and ardent brevity that we can hardly feel as though a sufficient answer were given to the instinctive reasoning which finds inarticulate utterance in the cry of the human conscience for retribution by a human hand, even when we read the two poems, at once composed and passionate in their austerity, which bid men leave God to deal with the supreme criminal of humanity.A Night's Lodging, the last poem of the fourth book, is perhaps the very finest and most perfect example of imaginative and tragic satire that exists: if this rank be due to a poem at once the most vivid in presentation, the most sublime in scorn, the most intense and absolute in condensed expression of abhorrence and in assured expression of belief.
But in the fifth of these seven caskets of chiseled gold and tempered steel there is a pearl of greater price than in any of the four yet opened. The song dated from sea, which takes farewell of all good things and all gladness left behind—of house and home, of the flowers and the sky, of the betrothed bride with her maiden brow—the song which has in its burden tile heavy plashing sound of the wave following on the wave that swells and breaks against the bulwarks—the song of darkening waters and darkened lives has in it a magic, for my own ear at least, incomparable in the whole wide world of human song. Even to the greatest poets of all time such a godsend as this—such a breath of instant inspiration—can come but rarely and seem given as by miracle. "There is sorrow on the sea," as the prophet said of old; but when was there sorrow on sea or land which found such piercing and such perfect utterance as this?
Adieu, patrie!L'onde est en furie.Adieu, patrie,Azur!Adieu, maison, treille au fruit mûrAdieu, les fleurs d'or du vieux mur!Adieu, patrie!Ciel, forêt, prairie!Adieu, patrie,Azur!Adieu, patrie!L'onde est en furie.Adieu, patrie,Azur!Adieu, fiancée au front pur.Le ciel est noir, le vent est dur.Adieu, patrie!Lise, Anna, Marie!Adieu, patrie.Azur!Adieu, patrie!L'onde est en furie.Adieu, patrie,Azur!Notre œil, que voile un deuil futur.Va du flot sombre au sort obscur.Adieu, patrie!Pour toi mon cœur prie.Adieu, patrie,Azur!
The next poem is addressed to a disappointed accomplice of the crime still triumphant and imperial in the eyes of his fellow-scoundrels, who seems to have shown signs of a desire to break away from them and a suspicion that even then the ship of empire was beginning to leak—though in fact it had still seventeen years of more or less radiant rascality to float through before it foundered in the ineffable ignominy of Sedan. Full of ringing and stinging eloquence, of keen and sonorous lines or lashes of accumulating scorn, this poem is especially noteworthy for its tribute to the murdered republic of Rome. Certain passages in certain earlier works of Hugo, inCromwellfor instance and inMarie Tudor, had given rise to a natural and indeed inevitable suspicion of some prejudice or even antipathy on the writer's part which had not less unavoidably aroused a feeling among Italians that his disposition or tone of mind was anything but cordial or indeed amicable towards their country: a suspicion probably heightened, and a feeling probably sharpened, by his choice of such dramatic subjects from Italian history or tradition as the domestic eccentricities of the exceptional family of Borgia, and the inquisitorial misdirection of the degenerate commonwealth of Venice. To the sense that Hugo was hardly less than an enemy and that Byron had been something more than a well-wisher to Italy I have always attributed the unquestionable and otherwise inexplicable fact that Mazzini should have preferred the pinchbeck and tinsel of Byron to the gold and ivory of Hugo. But it was impossible that the master poet of the world should not live to make amends, if indeed amends were needed, to the country of Mazzini and of Dante.
If I have hardly time to mention the simple and vivid narrative of the martyrdom of Pauline Roland, I must pause at least to dwell for a moment on so famous and so great a poem asL'Expiation; but not to pronounce, or presume to endeavor to decide, which of its several pictures is the most powerful, which of its epic or lyric variations the most impressive and triumphant in effect. The huge historic pageant of ruin, from Moscow to Waterloo, from Waterloo to St. Helena, with the posthumous interlude of apotheosis which the poet had loudly and proudly celebrated just twelve years earlier in an ode, turned suddenly into the peep-show of a murderous mountebank, the tawdry triumph of buffoons besmeared with innocent blood, is so tremendous in its anticlimax that not the sublimest and most miraculous climax imaginable could make so tragic and sublime an impression so indelible from the mind. The slow agony of the great army under the snow; its rout and dissolution in the supreme hour of panic; the slower agony, the more gradual dissolution, of the prisoner with a gaoler's eye intent on him to the last; who can say which of these three is done into verse with most faultless and sovereign power of hand, most pathetic or terrific force and skill? And the hideous judicial dishonor of the crowning retribution after death, the parody of his empire and the prostitution of his name, is so much more than tragic by reason of the very farce in it that out of ignominy itself and uttermost degradation the poet has made something more august in moral impression than all pageants of battle or of death.
In the sixth book I can but rapidly remark the peculiar beauty and greatness of the lyric lines in which the sound of steady seas regularly breaking on the rocks at Rozel Tower is rendered with so solemn and severe an echo of majestic strength in sadness; the verses addressed to the people on its likeness and unlikeness to the sea; the scornful and fiery appeal to the spirit of Juvenal; the perfect idyllic picture of spring, with all the fruitless exultation of its blossoms and its birds, made suddenly dark and dissonant by recollection of human crime and shame; the heavenly hopefulness of comfort in the message of the morning star, conveyed into colors of speech and translated into cadences of sound which no painter or musician could achieve.
Je m'étais endormi la nuit près de la grève.Un vent frais m'éveilla, je sortis de mon rêve,J'ouvris les yeux, je vis l'étoile du matin.Elle resplendissait au fond du ciel lointainDans une blancheur molle, infinie et charmante.Aquilon s'enfuyait emportant la tourmente.L'astre éclatant changeait la nuée en duvet.C'était une clarté qui pensait, qui vivait;Elle apaisait l'écueil où la vague déferle;On croyait voir une âme à travers une perle.Il faisait nuit encor, l'ombre régnait en vain,Le ciel s'illuminait d'un sourire divin.La lueur argentait le haut du mât qui penche;Le navire était noir, mais la voile était blanche;Des goëlands debout sur un escarpement,Attentifs, contemplaient l'étoile gravementComme un oiseau céleste et fait d'une étincelle:L'océan qui ressemble au peuple allait vers elle,Et, rugissant tout bas, la regardait briller,Et semblait avoir peur de la faire envoler.Un ineffable amour emplissait l'étendue.L'herbe verte à mes pieds frissonnait éperdue,Les oiseaux se parlaient dans les nids; une fleurQui s'éveillait me dit: c'est l'étoile ma sœur.Et pendant qu'à longs plis l'ombre levait son voile,J'entendis une voix qui venait de l'étoileEt qui disait:—Je suis l'astre qui vient d'abord.Je suis celle qu'on croit dans la tombe et qui sort.J'ai lui sur le Sina, j'ai lui sur le Taygète;Je suis le caillou d'or et de feu que Dieu jette,Comme avec une fronde, au front noir de la nuit.Je suis ce qui renaît quand un monde est détruit.Ô nations! je suis la Poésie ardente.J'ai brillé sur Moïse et j'ai brillé sur Dante.Le lion océan est amoureux de moi.J'arrive. Levez-vous, vertu, courage, foi!Penseurs, esprits! montez sur la tour, sentinelles!Paupières, ouvrez-vous; allumez-vous, prunelles;Terre, émeus le sillon; vie, éveille le bruit;Debout, vous qui dormez; car celui qui me suit,Car celui qui m'envoie en avant la première,C'est l'ange Liberté, c'est le géant Lumière!
The first poem of the seventh book, on the falling of the walls of Jericho before the seventh trumpet-blast, is equally great in description and in application; the third is one of the great lyric masterpieces of all time, the triumphant ballad of the Black Huntsman, unsurpassed in the world for ardor of music and fitful change of note from mystery and terror to rage and tempest and supreme serenity of exultation—"wind and storm fulfilling his word," we may literally say of this omnipotent sovereign of song.
The sewer of Rome, a final receptacle for dead dogs and rotting Cæsars, is painted line by line and detail by detail in verse which touches with almost frightful skill the very limit of the possible or permissible to poetry in the way of realistic loathsomeness or photographic horror; relieved here and there by a rare and exquisite image, a fresh breath or tender touch of loveliness from the open air of the daylight world above. The song on the two Napoleons is a masterpiece of skilful simplicity in contrast of tones and colors. But the song which follows, written to a tune of Beethoven's, has in it something more than the whole soul of music, the whole passion of self-devoted hope and self-transfiguring faith; it gives the final word of union between sound and spirit, the mutual coronation and consummation of them both.
La-haut qui sourit?Est-ce un esprit?Est-ce une femme?Quel front sombre et doux!Peuple, à genoux!Est-ce notre âmeQui vient à nous?Cette figure en deuilParaît sur notre seuil,Et notre antique orgueilSort du cercueil.Ses fiers regards vainqueursRéveillent tous les cœurs,Les nids dans les buissons,Et les chansons.C'est l'ange du jour;L'espoir, l'amourDu cœur qui pense;Du monde enchantéC'est la clarté.Son nom est FranceOu Vérité.Bel ange, à ton miroirQuand s'offre un vil pouvoir,Tu viens, terrible à voir,Sous le ciel noir.Tu dis au monde: Allons!Formez vos bataillons!Et le monde éblouiTe répond: Oui.C'est l'ange de nuit.Rois, il vous suit.Marquant d'avanceLe fatal momentAu firmament.Son nom est FranceOu Châtiment.Ainsi que nous voyonsEn mai les alcyons,Voguez, ô nations,Dans ses rayonsSon bras aux deux dresséFerme le noir passéEt les portes de ferDu sombre enfer.C'est l'ange de Dieu.Dans le ciel bleuSon aile immenseCouvre avec fiertéL'humanité.Son nom est FranceOu Liberté!
TheCaravan, a magnificent picture, is also a magnificent allegory and a magnificent hymn. The poem following sums up in twenty-six lines a whole world of terror and of tempest hurtling and wailing round the wreck of a boat by night. It is followed by a superb appeal against the infliction of death on rascals whose reptile blood would dishonor and defile the scaffold: and this again by an admonition to their chief not to put his trust in the chance of a high place of infamy among the more genuinely imperial hellhounds of historic record. The next poem gives us in perfect and exquisite summary the opinions of a contemporary conservative on a dangerous anarchist of extravagant opinions and disreputable character, whom for example's sake it was at length found necessary to crucify. There is no song more simply and nobly pitiful than that which tells us in its burden how a man may die for lack of his native country as naturally and inevitably as for lack of his daily bread. I cite only the last three stanzas by way of sample.
Les exilés: s'en vont pensifs.Leur âme, hélas! n'est plus entière.Ils regardent l'ombre des ifsSur les fosses du cimetière;L'un songe à l'Allemagne altière,L'autre an beau pays transalpin,L'autre à sa Pologne chérie.—On ne peut pas vivre sans pain;On ne peut pas non plus vivre sans la patrie.—Un proscrit, lassé de souffrir,Mourait; calme, il fermait son livre;Et je lui dis: "Pourquoi mourir?"Il me répondit: "Pourquoi vivre?"Puis il reprit: "Je me délivre.Adieu! je meurs. Néron ScapinMet aux fers la France flétrie..."—On ne pent pas vivre sans pain;Où ne peut pas non plus vivre sans la patrie."...Je meurs de ne plus voir les champsOù je regardais l'aube naître,De ne plus entendre les chantsQue j'entendais de ma fenêtre.Mon âme est où je ne puis être.Sons quatre planches de sapinEnterrez-moi dans la prairie."—On ne peut pas vivre sans pain;On ne peut pas non plus vivre sans la patrie.
Then, in the later editions of the book, came the great and terrible poem on the life and death of the miscreant marshal who gave the watchword of massacre in the streets of Paris, and died by the visitation of disease before the walls of Sebastopol. There is hardly a more splendid passage of its kind in all theLégende des Sièclesthan the description of the departure of the fleet in order of battle from Constantinople for the Crimea; nor a loftier passage of more pathetic austerity in all this book ofChâtimentsthan the final address of the poet to the miserable soul, disembodied at length after long and loathsome suffering, of the murderer and traitor who had earned no soldier's death.[2]
And then come those majestic "last words" which will ring for ever in the ears of men till manhood as well as poetry has ceased to have honor among mankind. And then comes a poem so great that I hardly dare venture to attempt a word in its praise. We cannot choose but think, as we read or repeat it, that "such music was never made" since the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy. This epilogue of a book so bitterly and inflexibly tragic begins as with a peal of golden bells, or an outbreak of all April in one choir of sunbright song; proceeds in a graver note of deep and trustful exultation and yearning towards the future; subsides again into something of a more subdued key, while the poet pleads for his faith in a God of righteousness with the righteous who are ready to despair; and rises from that tone of awe-stricken and earnest pleading to such a height and rapture of inspiration as no Hebrew psalmist or prophet ever soared beyond in his divinest passion of aspiring trust and worship. It is simply impossible that a human tongue should utter, a human hand should write, anything of more supreme and transcendent beauty than the last ten stanzas of the fourth division of this poem. The passionate and fervent accumulation of sublimities, of marvelous images and of infinite appeal, leaves the sense too dazzled, the soul too entranced and exalted, to appreciate at first or in full the miraculous beauty of the language, the superhuman sweetness of the song. The reader impervious to such impressions may rest assured that what he admires in the prophecies or the psalms of Isaiah or of David is not the inspiration of the text, but the warrant and sign-manual of the councils and the churches which command him to admire them on trust.
Ne possède-t-il pas toute la certitude?Dieu ne remplit-il pas ce monde, notre étude,Du nadir au zénith?Notre sagesse auprès de la sienne est démence.Et n'est-ce pas à lui que la clarté commence,Et que l'ombre finit?Ne voit-il pas ramp r les hydres sur leurs ventres?Ne regarde-t-il pas jusqu'au fond de leurs antresAtlas et Pélion?Ne connaît-il pas l'heure où la cigogne émigre?Sait-il pas ton entrée et ta sortie, ô tigre,Et ton antre, ô lion?Hirondelle, réponds, aigle à l'aile sonore,Parle, avez-vous des nids que l'Eternel ignore?Ô cerf, quand l'as-tu fui?Renard, ne vois-tu pas ses yeux dans la broussaille?Loup, quand tu sens la nuit une herbe qui tressaille,Ne dis-tu pas: C'est lui!Puisqu'il sait tout cela, puisqu'il peut toute chose,Que ses doigts font jaillir les effets de la causeComme un noyau d'un fruit,Puisqu'il peut mettre un ver dans les pommes de l'arbre,Et faire disperser les colonnes de marbrePar le vent de la nuit;Puisqu'il bat l'océan pareil au bœuf qui beugle,Puisqu'il est le voyant et que l'homme est l'aveugle,Puisqu'il est le milieu,Puisque son bras nous porte, et puisqu'à son passageLa comète frissonne ainsi qu'en une cageTremble une étoupe en feu;Puisque l'obscure nuit le connaît, puisque l'ombreLe voit, quand il lui plaît, sauver la nef qui sombre,Comment douterions-nous,Nous qui, fermes et purs, fiers dans nos agonies,Sommes debout devant toutes les tyrannies,Pour lui seul, à genoux!D'ailleurs, pensons. Nos jours sont des joursd'amertume,Mais, quand nous étendons les bras dans cette brume,Nous sentons une main;Quand nous marchons, courbés, dans l'ombre du martyre,Nous entendons quelqu'un derrière nous nous dire:C'est ici le chemin.Ô proscrits, l'avenir est aux peuples! Paix, gloire,Liberté, reviendront sur des chars de victoireAux foudroyants essieux;Ce crime qui triomphe est fumée et mensonge.Voilà ce que je puis affirmer, moi qui songeL'œil fixé sur les cieux.Les césars sont plus fiers que les vagues marines,Mais Dieu dit:—Je mettrai ma boucle en leurs narines.Et dans leur bouche un mors,Et je tes traînerai, qu'on cède ou bien qu'on lutte,Eux et leurs histrions et leurs joueurs de flûte,Dans l'ombre où sont les morts!Dieu dit; et le granit que foulait leur semelleS'écroule, et les voilà disparus pêle-mêleDans leurs prospérités!Aquilon! aquilon! qui viens battre nos portes,Oh! dis-nous, si c'est toi, souffle, qui les emportes,Où les as-tu jetés?
Three years after theChâtimentsVictor Hugo published theContemplations; the book of which he said that if the title did not sound somewhat pretentious it might be called "the memoirs of a soul." No book had ever in it more infinite and exquisite variety; no concert ever diversified and united such inexhaustible melodies with such unsurpassable harmonies. The note of fatherhood was never touched more tenderly than in the opening verses of gentle counsel, whose cadence is fresher and softer than the lapse of rippling water or the sense of falling dew: the picture of the poet's two little daughters in the twilight garden might defy all painters to translate it: the spirit, force, and fun of the controversial poems, overflowing at once with good humor, with serious thought, and with kindly indignation, give life and charm to the obsolete questions of wrangling schools and pedants; and the last of them, on the divine and creative power of speech, is at once profound and sublime enough to grapple easily and thoroughly with so high and deep a subject. The songs of childish loves and boyish fancies are unequalled by any other poets known to me for their union of purity and gentleness with a touch of dawning ardor arid a hint of shy delight:Lise, La Coccinelle, Vieille chanson du jeune temps, are such sweet miracles of simple perfection as we hardly find except in the old songs of unknown great poets who died and left no name. The twenty-first poem, a lyric idyl of but sixteen lines, has something more than the highest qualities of Theocritus; in color and in melody it does but equal the Sicilian at his best, but there are two lines at least in it beyond his reach for depth and majesty of beauty.ChildhoodandUnity, two poems of twelve and ten lines respectively, are a pair of such flawless jewels as lie now in no living poet's casket. Among the twenty-eight poems of the second book, if I venture to name with special regard the second and the fourth, two songs uniting the subtle tenderness of Shelley's with the frank simplicity of Shakespeare's; the large and living land—scape in a letter dated from Tréport; the tenth and the thirteenth poems, two of the most perfect love-songs in the world, written (if the phrase be permissible) in a key of serene rapture; the "morning's note," with its vision of the sublime sweetness of life transfigured in a dream;Twilight, with its opening touches of magical and mystic beauty; above all, the mournful and tender magnificence of the closing poem, with a pathetic significance in the double date appended to the text: I am ready to confess that it is perhaps presumptuous to express a preference even for these over the others. Yet perhaps it may be permissible to select for transcription two of the sweetest and shortest among them.
Mes vers fuiraient, doux et frêles,Vers votre jardin si beau,Si mes vers avaient des ailes,Des ailes comme l'oiseau.Ils voleraient, étincelles,Vers votre foyer qui rit,Si mes vers avaient des ailes,Des ailes comme l'esprit.Près de vous, purs et fidèles,Ils accourraient nuit et jour,Si mes vers avaient des ailes,Des ailes comme l'amour.
Nothing of Shelley's exceeds this for limpid perfection of melody, renewed in the next lyric with something of a deeper and more fervent note of music.
Si vous n'avez rien à me dire,Pourquoi venir auprès de moi?Pourquoi me faire ce sourireQui tournerait la tête au roi?Si vous n'avez rien à me dire,Pourquoi venir auprès de moi?Si vous n'avez rien à m'apprendre,Pourquoi me pressez-vous la main?Sur le rêve angélique et tendre,Auquel vous songez en chemin,Si vous n'avez rien à m'apprendre,Pourquoi me pressez-vous la main?Si vous voulez que je m'en aille,Pourquoi passez-vous par ici?Lorsque je vous vois, je tressaille,C'est ma joie et c'est mou souci.Si vous voulez que je m'en aille,Pourquoi passez-vous par ici?
In the third book, which brings us up to the great poet's forty-second year, the noble poem calledMelancholiahas in it a foretaste and a promise of all the passionate meditation, all the studious and indefatigable pity, all the forces of wisdom and of mercy which were to find their completer and supreme expression inLes Misérables.InSaturnwe may trace the same note of earnest and thoughtful meditation on the mystery of evil, on the vision so long cherished by mankind of some purgatorial world, the shrine of expiation or the seat of retribution, which in the final volume of theLégende des Siècleswas toched again with a yet more august effect: the poem there calledInferiresumes and expands the tragic thought here first admitted into speech and first clothed round with music. The four lines written beneath a crucifix may almost be said to sum up the whole soul and spirit of Christian faith or feeling in the brief hour of its early purity, revived in every age again for some rare and beautiful natures—and for these alone.
Vous qui pleurez, venez à ce Dieu, car il pleure.Vous qui souffrez, venez à lui, car il guérit.Vous qui tremblez, venez à lui, car il sourit.Vous qui passez, venez à lui, car il demeure.
La Statue, with its grim swift glance over the worldwide rottenness of imperial Rome, finds again an echo yet fuller and more sonorous than the note which it repeats in the poem on Roman decadence which forms the eighth division of the revised and completedLégende des Siècles.The two delicately tender poems on the death of a little child are well relieved by the more terrible tenderness of the poem on a mother found dead of want among her four little children. In this and the next poem, a vivid and ghastly photograph of vicious poverty, we find again the same spirit of observant and vigilant compassion that inspires and informs the great prose epic of suffering which records the redemption of Jean Valjean: and in the next, suggested by the sight (a sorrowful sight always, except perhaps to very small children or adults yet more diminutive in mental or spiritual size) of a caged lion, we recognize the depth of noble pity which moved its author to writeLe Crapaud—a poem redeemed in all rational men's eyes from the imminent imputation of repulsive realism by the profound and pathetic beauty of the closing lines—and we may recognize also the imaginative and childlike sympathy with the traditional king of beasts which inspired him long after to writeL'Épopée du Lionfor the benefit of his grandchildren.Insomnie, a record of the tribute exacted by the spirit from the body, when the impulse to work and to create will not let the weary workman take his rest, but enforces him, reluctant and recalcitrant, to rise and gird up his loins for labor in the field of imaginative thought, is itself a piece of work well worth the sacrifice even of the happiness of sleep. The verses on music, suggested by the figure of a flute-playing shepherd on a bas-relief; the splendid and finished picture of spring, softened rather than shadowed by the quiet thought of death; the deep and tender fancy of the dead child's return to its mother through the gateway of a second birth; the grave sweetness and gentle fervor of the verses on the outcast and detested things of the animal and the vegetable world; and, last, the nobly thoughtful and eloquent poem on the greatness of such little things as the fire on the shepherd's hearth confronting the star at sunset, which may be compared with thePrayer for all menin theFeuilles d'Automne; these at least demand a rapid word of thankful recognition before we close the first volume of theContemplations.
The fourth book, as most readers will probably remember, contains the poems written in memory of Victor Hugo's daughter, drowned by the accidental capsizing of a pleasure-boat, just six months and seventeen days after her marriage with the young husband who chose rather to share her death than to save himself alone. These immortal songs of mourning are almost too sacred for critical appreciation of even the most reverent and subdued order. There are numberless touches in them of such thrilling beauty, so poignant in their simplicity and so piercing in their truth, that silence is perhaps the best or the only commentary on anything so "rarely sweet and bitter." One only may perhaps be cited apart from its fellows: the sublime little poem headedMors.
Je vis cette faucheuse. Elle était dans son champ.Elle allait à grands pas moissonnant et fauchant,Noir squelette laissant passer le crépuscule.Dans l'ombre où l'on dirait que tout tremble et recule,L'homme suivait des yeux les lueurs de sa faulx.Et les triomphateurs sous les arcs triomphauxTombaient; elle changeait en désert Babylone,Le trône en échafaud et l'échafaud en trône,Les roses en fumier, les enfants en oiseaux,L'or en cendre, et les yeux des mères en ruisseaux.Et les femmes criaient: Rends-nous ce petit être.Pour le faire mourir, pourquoi l'avoir fait naître?Ce n'était qu'un sanglot sur terre, en haut, en bas;Des mains aux doigts osseux sortaient des noirs grabats;Un vent froid bruissait dans les linceuls sans nombre;Les peuples éperdus semblaient sous la faulx sombreUn troupeau frissonnant qui dans l'ombre s'enfuit:Tout était sous ses pieds deuil, épouvante et nuit.Derrière elle, le front baigné de douces flammes,Un ange souriant portait la gerbe d'âmes.
The fifth book opens most fitly with an address to the noble poet who was the comrade of the author's exile and the brother of his self-devoted son-in-law. Even Hugo never wrote anything of more stately and superb simplicity than this tribute of fatherly love and praise, so well deserved and so royally bestowed. The second poem, addressed to the son of a poet who had the honor to receive the greatest of all his kind as a passing guest in the first days of his long exile, is as simple and noble as it is gentle and austere. The third, written in reply to the expostulations of an old friend and a distant kinsman, is that admirable vindication of a man's right to grow wiser, and of his duty to speak the truth as he comes to see it better, which must have imposed silence and impressed respect on all assailants if respect for integrity and genius were possible to the imbecile or the vile, and if silence or abstinence from insult were possible to the malignant or the fool The epilogue, appended nine years later to this high-minded and brilliant poem, is as noble in imagination, in feeling, and in expression, as the finest page in theChâtiments.
J'ajoute un post-scriptum après neuf ans. J'écoute;Êtes-vous toujours là? Vous êtes mort sans doute,Marquis; mais d'où je suis on peut parler aux morts.Ah! votre cercueil s'ouvre:—Où donc es tu?—Dehors.Comme vous.—Es-tu mort?—Presque. J'habite l'ombre.Je suis sur un rocher qu'environne l'eau sombre,Écueil rongé des flots, de ténèbres chargé,Où s'assied, ruisselant, le blême naufragé.—Eh bien, me dites-vous, après?—La solitudeAutour de moi toujours a la même attitude;Je ne vois que l'abîme, et la mer, et les cieux,Et les nuages noirs qui vont silencieux;Mon toit, la nuit, frissonne, et l'ouragan le mêleAux souffles effrénés de l'onde et de la grêle;Quelqu'un semble clouer un crêpe à l'horizon;L'insulte dat de loin le seuil de ma maison;Le roc croule sous moi dès que mon pied s'y pose;Le vent semble avoir peur de m'approcher, et n'oseMe dire qu'en baissant la voix et qu'à demiL'adieu mystérieux que me jette un ami.La rumeur des vivants s'éteint diminuée.Tout ce que j'ai rêvé s'est envolé, nuée!Sur mes jours devenus fantômes, pâle et seul,Je regarde tomber l'infini, ce linceul.—Et vous dites:—Après?—Sous un mont qui surplombe,Près des flots, j'ai marqué la place de ma tombe;Ici, le bruit du gouffre est tout ce qu'on entend;Tout est horreur et nuit—Après?—Je suis content.
The verses addressed to friends whose love and reverence had not forsaken the exile—to Jules Janin, to Alexandre Dumas, above all to Paul Meurice—are models of stately grace in their utterance of serene and sublime resignation, of loyal and affectionate sincerity: but those addressed to the sharers of his exile—to his wife, to his children, to their friend—have yet a deeper spiritual music in the sweet and severe perfection of their solemn cadence. I have but time to name with a word of homage in passing the famous and faultless little poemAux Feuillantines, fragrant with the memory and musical as the laugh of childhood; the memorial verses recurring here and there, with such infinite and subtle variations on the same deep theme of mourning or of sympathy; the great brief studies of lonely landscape, imbued with such grave radiance and such noble melancholy, or kindled with the motion and quickened by the music of the sea: but two poems at all events I must select for more especial tribute of more thankful recognition: the sublime and wonderful vision of the angel who was neither life nor death, but love, more strong than either; and the all but sublimer allegory couched in verse of such majestic resonance, which shows us the star of Venus in heaven above the ruin of her island on earth. The former and shorter of these is as excellent an example as could be chosen of its author's sovereign simplicity of insight and of style.
Je vis un ange blanc qui passait sur ma tête;Son vol éblouissant apaisait la tempête,Et faisait taire au loin la mer pleine de bruit.—Qu'est-ce que tu viens faire, ange, dans cette nuit?Lui dis-je. Il répondit:—Je viens prendre ton âme.—Et j'eus peur, car je vis que c'était une femme;Et je lui dis, tremblant et lui tendant les bras:—Que me restera-t-il? car tu t'envoleras.—Il ne répondit pas; le ciel que l'ombre assiègeS'éteignait...—Si tu prends mon âme, m'écriai-je.Où l'emporteras-tu? montre-moi dans quel lieu.Il se taisait toujours.—O passant du ciel bleu,Es-tu la mort? lui dis-je, ou bien es-tu la vie?—Et la nuit augmentait sur mon âme ravie,Et l'ange devint noir, et dit:—Je suis l'amour.Mais son front sombre était plus charmant que le jour,Et je voyais, dans l'ombre où brillaient ses prunelles,Les astres à travers les plumes de ses ailes.
If nothing were left of Hugo but the sixth book of theContemplations, it would yet be indisputable among those who know anything of poetry that he was among the foremost in the front rank of the greatest poets of all time. Here, did space allow, it would be necessary for criticism with any pretense to adequacy to say something of every poem in turn, to pause for observation of some beauty beyond reach of others at every successive page. In the first poem a sublime humility finds such expression as should make manifest to the dullest eye not clouded by malevolence and insolent conceit that when this greatest of modern poets asserts in his own person the prerogative and assumes for his own spirit the high office of humanity, to confront the darkest problem and to challenge the utmost force of intangible and invisible injustice as of visible and tangible iniquity, of all imaginable as of all actual evil, of superhuman indifference as well as of human wrongdoing, it is no merely personal claim that he puts forward, no vainly egotistic arrogance that he displays; but the right of a reasonable conscience and the duty of a righteous faith, common to ail men alike in whom intelligence of right and wrong, perception of duty or conception of conscience can be said to exist at all. If there be any truth in the notion of any difference between evil and good more serious than the conventional and convenient fabrications of doctrine and assumption, then assuredly the meanest of his creatures in whom the perception of this difference was not utterly extinct would have a right to denounce an omnipotent evil-doer as justly amenable to the sentence inflicted by the thunders of his own unrighteous judgment. How profound and intense was the disbelief of Victor Hugo in the rule or in the existence of any such superhuman malefactor could not be better shown than by the almost polemical passion of his prophetic testimony to that need for faith in a central conscience and a central will on which he has insisted again and again as a crowning and indispensable, requisite for moral and spiritual life. From the sublime daring, the self-confidence born of self-devotion, which finds lyrical utterance in the majestic verses headedIbo, through the humble and haughty earnestness of remonstrance and appeal—"humble to God, haughty to man"—which pervades the next three poems, the meditative and studious imagination of the poet passes into the fuller light and larger air of thought which imbues and informs with immortal life every line of the great religious poem calledPleurs dans la nuit.In this he touches the highest point of poetic meditation, as in the epilogue to theChâtiments, written four months earlier, he had touched the highest point of poetic rapture possible to the most ardent of believers in his faith and the most unapproachable master of his art. Where all is so lofty in its coherence of construction, so perfect in its harmony of composition, it seems presumptuous to indicate any special miracle of inspired workmanship: yet, as Hugo in his various notes on mediaeval architecture was wont to select for exceptional attention and peculiar eloquence of praise this or that part or point of some superb and harmonious building, so am I tempted to dwell for a moment on the sublime imagination, the pathetic passion, of the verses which render into music the idea of a terrene and material purgatory, with its dungeons of flint and cells of clay wherein the spirit imprisoned and imbedded may envy the life and covet the suffering of the meanest animal that toils on earth; and to set beside this wonderful passage that other which even in a poem so thoroughly imbued with hope and faith finds place and voice for expression of the old mysterious and fantastic horror of the grave, more perfect than ever any mediæval painter or sculptor could achieve.
Le soir vient; l'horizon s'emplit d'inquiétude;L'herbe tremble et bruit comme une multitude;Le fleuve blanc reluit;Le paysage obscur prend les veines des marbres;Ces hydres que, le jour, on appelle des arbres,Se tordent dans la nuit.Le mort est seul. Il sent la nuit qui le dévore.Quand naît le doux matin, tout l'azur de l'aurore,Tous ses rayons si beaux,Tout l'amour des oiseaux et leurs chansons sans nombre,Vont aux berceaux dorés; et, la nuit, toute l'ombreAboutit aux tombeaux.Il entend des soupirs dans les fosses voisines;Il sent la chevelure affreuse des racinesEntrer dans son cercueil;Il est l'être vaincu dont s'empare la chose;Il sent un doigt obscur, sous sa paupière close,Lui retirer son œil.Il a froid; car le soir qui mêle à son haleineLes ténèbres, l'horreur, le spectre et le phalène,Glace ces durs grabats;Le cadavre, lié de bandelettes blanches,Grelotte, et dans sa bière entend les quatre planchesQui lui parlent tout bas.L'une dit:—Je fermais ton coffre-fort—Et l'autreDit:—J'ai servi de porte au toit qui fut le nôtre.—L'autre dit:—Aux beaux jours,La table où rit l'ivresse et que le vin encombre.C'était moi.—L'autre dit:—J'étais le chevet sombreDu lit de tes amours.
Among all the poems which follow, some exquisite in their mystic tenderness as the elegiac stanzas onClaireand the appealing address to a friend unknown (À celle qui est voilée), others possessed with the same faith and wrestling with the same questions as beset and sustained the writer of the poem at which we have just rapidly and reverently glanced, there are three at least which demand—at any rate one passing word of homage. The solemn song of meditation "at the window by night" seems to me to render in its first six lines the aspects and sounds of sea and cloud and wind and trees and stars with an utterly incomparable magic of interpretation.
Les étoiles, points d'or, percent les branches noires;Le flot huileux et lourd décompose ses moiresSur l'océan blêmi;Les nuages ont l'air d'oiseaux prenant la fuite;Par moments le vent parle, et dit des mots sans suite,Comme un homme endormi.
No poet but one could have written the three stanzas, so full of infinite sweetness and awe, inscribed "to the angels who see us."
—Passant, qu'es-tu? je te connais.Mais, étant spectre, ombre et nuage,Tu n'as plus de sexe ni d'âge.—Je suis ta mère, et je venais!—Et toi dont l'aile hésite et brille,Dont l'œil est noyé de douceur,Qu'es-tu, passant?—Je suis ta sœur.—Et toi, qu'es-tu?—Je suis ta fille.—Et toi, qu'es-tu, passant?—Je suisCelle à qui tu disais: Je t'aime!—Et toi?—Je suis ton âme même.—Oh! cachez-moi, profondes nuits!/
Nor could any other hand have achieved the pathetic perfection of the verses in which just thirty years since, twelve years to a day after the loss of his daughter, and fifteen years to a day before the return of liberty which made possible the return of Victor Hugo to France, his claims to the rest into which he now has entered, and his reasons for desiring the attainment of that rest, found utterance unexcelled for divine and deep simplicity by any utterance of man on earth.
J'ai perdu mon père et ma mère,Mon premier-né, bien jeune, hélas!Et pour moi la nature entièreSonne le glas.Je dormais entre mes deux frères;Enfants, nous étions trois oiseaux;Hélas! le sort change en deux bièresLeurs deux berceaux.Je t'ai perdue, ô fille chère,Toi qui remplis, ô mon orgueil,Tout mon destin de la lumièreDe ton cercueil!J'ai su monter, j'ai su descendre.J'ai vu l'aube et l'ombre en mes cieux.J'ai connu la pourpre, et la cendreQui me va mieux.J'ai connu les ardeurs profondes,J'ai connu les sombres amours;J'ai vu fuir les ailes, les ondes,Les vents, les jours.J'ai sur ma tête des orfraies;J'ai sur tous mes travaux l'affront,Au pied la poudre, au cœur des plaies,L'épine au front.J'ai des pleurs à mon œil qui pense,Des trous à ma robe en lambeau;Je n'ai rien à la conscience;Ouvre, tombeau.
Last comes the magnificent and rapturous hymn of universal redemption from suffering as from sin, the prophetic vision of evil absorbed by good, and the very worst of spirits transfigured into the likeness of the very best, in which the daring and indomitable faith of the seer finds dauntless and supreme expression in choral harmonies of unlimited and illimitable hope. The epilogue which dedicates the book to the daughter whose grave was now forbidden ground to her father—so long wont to keep there the autumnal anniversary of his mourning—is the very crown and flower of the immortal work which it inscribes, if we may say so, rather to the presence than to the memory of the dead.
Not till the thirtieth year from the publication of these two volumes was the inexhaustible labor of the spirit which inspired them to cease for a moment—and then, among us at least, for ever. Three years afterwards appeared the first series of theLégende des Siècles, to be followed nineteen years later by the second, and by the final complementary volume six years after that: so that between the inception and the conclusion of the greatest single work accomplished in the course of our century a quarter of that century had elapsed—with stranger and more tragic evolution of events than any poet or any seer could have foretold or foreseen as possible. Three years again from this memorable date appeared the great epic and tragic poem of contemporary life and of eternal humanity which gave us all the slowly ripened fruit of the studies and emotions, the passions and the thoughts, the aspiration and the experience, brought finally to their full and perfect end inLes Misérables.As the key-note ofNotre-Dame de Pariswas doom—the human doom of suffering to be nobly or ignobly endured—so the key-note of its author's next romance was redemption by acceptance of suffering and discharge of duty in absolute and entire obedience to the utmost exaction of conscience when it calls for atonement, of love when it calls for sacrifice of all that makes life more endurable than death. It is obvious that no account can here be given of a book which if it required a sentence would require a volume to express the character of its quality or the variety of its excellence—the one unique, the latter infinite as the unique and infinite spirit whose intelligence and whose goodness gave it life.
Two years afterLes Misérablesappeared the magnificent book of meditations on the mission of art in the world, on the duty of human thought towards humanity, inscribed by Victor Hugo with the name of William Shakespeare. To allow that it throws more light on the greatest genius of our own century than on the greatest genius of the age of Shakespeare is not to admit that it is not rich in valuable and noble contemplations or suggestions on the immediate subject of Shakespeare's work; witness the admirably thoughtful and earnest remarks on Macbeth, the admirably passionate and pathetic reflections on Lear. The splendid eloquence and the heroic enthusiasm of Victor Hugo never found more noble and sustained expression than in this volume—the spontaneous and inevitable expansion of a projected preface to his son's incomparable translation of Shakespeare. The preface actually prefixed to it is admirable for concision, for insight, and for grave historic humor. It appeared a year after the book which (so to speak) had grown out of it; andin the same year appeared theChansons des Rues et des BoisThe miraculous dexterity of touch, the dazzling mastery of metre, the infinite fertility in variations on the same air of frolic and thoughtful fancy, would not apparently allow the judges of the moment to perceive or to appreciate the higher and deeper qualities displayed in this volume of lyric idyls. The prologue is a superb example of the power peculiar to its author above all other poets; the power of seizing on some old symbol or image which may have been in poetic use ever since verse dawned upon the brain of man, and informing it again as with life, and transforming it anew as by fire. Among innumerable exercises and excursions of dainty but indefatigable fancy there are one or two touches of a somewhat deeper note than usual which would hardly be misplaced in the gravest and most ambitious works of imaginative genius. The twelve lines (of four syllables each) addressedÀ la belle Imperieuseare such, for example, as none but a great poet of passion, a master of imaginative style, could by any stroke of chance or at any cost of toil have written.
L'amour, paniqueDe la raison,Se communiquePar le frisson.Laissez-moi dire,N'accordez rien.Si je soupire,Chantez, c'est bien.Si je demeure,Triste, à vos pieds,Et si je pleure,C'est bien, riez.Un homme sembleSouvent trompeur.Mais si je tremble,Belle, ayez peur.
The sound of the songs of a whole woodland seems to ring like audible spring sunshine through the adorable song of love and youth rejoicing among the ruins of an abbey.
Seuls tous deux, ravis, chantants!Comme on s'aime!Comme on cueille le printempsQue Dieu sème!Quels rires étincelantsDans ces ombresPleines jadis de fronts blancs.De cœurs sombres!On est tout frais mariés.On s'envoieLes charmants cris variésDe la joie.Purs ébats mêlés au ventQui frissonne!Gaîtés que le noir couventAssaisonne!On effeuille des jasminsSur la pierreOù l'abbesse joint ses mainsEn prière.Ses tombeaux, de croix marqués,Font partieDe ces jeux, un peu piquésPar l'ortie.Ou se cherche, on se poursuit,On sent croîtreTon aube, amour, dans la nuitDu vieux cloître.On s'en va se becquetant,On s'adore,On s'embrasse à chaque instant,Puis encore,Sous les piliers, les arceaux,Et les marbres.C'est l'histoire des oiseauxDans les arbres.