A Sunset

(From "Feuilles d'Automne")

  ~Victor Hugo (1802-1885)

I LOVE the evenings, passionless and fair, I love the evens,

Whether old manor-fronts their ray with golden fulgence leavens,

In numerous leafage bosomed close;

Whether the mist in reefs of fire extend its reaches sheer,

Or a hundred sunbeams splinter in an azure atmosphere

On cloudy archipelagos.

 

Oh, gaze ye on the firmament! a hundred clouds in motion,

Up-piled in the immense sublime beneath the winds' commotion,

Their unimagined shapes accord:

Under their waves at intervals flame a pale levin through,

As if some giant of the air amid the vapors drew

A sudden elemental sword.

 

The sun at bay with splendid thrusts still keeps the sullen fold;

And momently at distance sets, as a cupola of gold,

The thatched roof of a cot a-glance;

Or on the blurred horizon joins his battle with the haze;

Or pools the blooming fields about with inter-isolate blaze,

Great moveless meres of radiance.

 

Then mark you how there hangs athwart the firmament's swept track,

Yonder a mighty crocodile with vast irradiant back,

A triple row of pointed teeth?

Under its burnished belly slips a ray of eventide,

The flickerings of a hundred glowing clouds in tenebrous side

With scales of golden mail ensheathe.

 

Then mounts a palace, then the air vibrates--the vision flees.

Confounded to its base, the fearful cloudy edifice

Ruins immense in mounded wrack;

Afar the fragments strew the sky, and each envermeiled cone

Hangeth, peak downward, overhead, like mountains overthrown

When the earthquake heaves its hugy back.

 

These vapors, with their leaden, golden, iron, bronzèd glows,

Where the hurricane, the waterspout, thunder, and hell repose,

Muttering hoarse dreams of destined harms,--

'Tis God who hangs their multitude amid the skiey deep,

As a warrior that suspendeth from the roof-tree of his keep

His dreadful and resounding arms!

 

All vanishes! The Sun, from topmost heaven precipitated,

Like a globe of iron which is tossed back fiery red

Into the furnace stirred to fume,

Shocking the cloudy surges, plashed from its impetuous ire,

Even to the zenith spattereth in a flecking scud of fire

The vaporous and inflamèd spaume.

 

O contemplate the heavens! Whenas the vein-drawn day dies pale,

In every season, every place, gaze through their every veil?

With love that has not speech for need!

Beneath their solemn beauty is a mystery infinite:

If winter hue them like a pall, or if the summer night

Fantasy them starre brede.

 This English translation of "A Sunset" was composed by Francis Thompson (1859-1907).