시 분석

Listen. A woman with a gaunt profile, Thin, pale, carrying a surprised child, Is there lamenting in the middle of the street. The crowd rushes around her to hear. She accuses someone, another woman, or perhaps Her husband. Her children are hungry. She has nothing; No money; no bread; barely a straw bed. The man is at the cabaret while she works. She cries, and leaves. When this specter has passed, O thinkers, in the midst of this gathered group, Who has just seen the depths of a heart that tears, What do you always hear? A long burst of laughter.

This girl with a sweet forehead perhaps believed, one day, To have the right to happiness, to joy, to love. But she is alone, she is without parents, poor girl! Alone! — it doesn't matter! she has courage, a needle, She works, and can earn in her small place, By working during the day, by working at night, A bit of bread, a shelter, a cloth skirt. In the evening, she looks up dreaming at some star, And sings on the roof as long as summer lasts. But winter comes. It is very cold, indeed, In this poorly closed dwelling high up on the ramp; The days are short, one must light a lamp; Oil is expensive, wood is expensive, bread is expensive. O youth! spring! dawn! prey to winter! Hunger soon passes its claw under the door, Takes an old coat, seizes the watch, carries off The furniture, finally takes some humble gold ring; Everything is sold! The child works and struggles still; She is honest; but when she wakes, Misery, demon, whispers in her ear. Work is lacking, alas! it is often seen. What to become! One day, O dark day! she sells The poor honor cross of her old father, and cries; She coughs, she is cold. Therefore, she must die! At seventeen! great God! but what to do?... — Here Is what makes one morning the sweet girl went Straight to the abyss, and finally, now, what rises To her brow, is no longer modesty, it is shame. Alas, and now, mourning and eternal tears! It is finished. The children, those cruel innocents, Follow her in the street with cries of joy. Unfortunate! she drags a silk dress, She sings, she laughs... ah! poor soul in distress! And the severe people, with their loud voice, Blow that bends a man and breaks a woman, Tell her when she comes: "Is it you? Go away, vile one!"

A man has become rich by selling false weights; The law makes him a juror. Winter, in the cold times; A poor man took a bread to feed his family. Look at this hall where the people swarm; This rich man comes to judge this poor man. Listen well. It is just, since one has everything and the other nothing. This judge, — this merchant, — angry to lose an hour, Throws a distracted glance at this man who cries, Sends him to the galleys, and leaves for his country house. Everyone leaves saying: "It is good!" good and bad; And nothing remains there but a thoughtful and pale Christ, Raising his arms to heaven in the back of the hall.

A man of genius appears. He is gentle, He is strong, he is great; he is useful to all; Like the dawn above the rolling ocean, He gilds with a ray all the brows of the crowd; He shines; the day he casts is a brilliant day; He brings an idea to the century that awaits it; He does his work; he wants necessary things, To enlarge minds, to diminish miseries; Happy, in his works of which the heavens are witnesses, If one thinks a little more, if one suffers a little less! He comes. — Certainly, they will crown him! — They boo him! Scribes, scholars, rhetoricians, the salons, the crowd, Those who know nothing, those who doubt everything, Those who flatter the king, those who flatter the sewer, All shout at once and make a sinister noise. If he is an orator or if he is a minister, He is whistled. If he is a poet, he hears This chorus: "Absurd! false! monstrous! revolting!" He, however, while they spit on his palm, Stands, arms crossed, head raised, calm eye, He contemplates, serene, the ideal and the beautiful; He dreams; and, at times, he shakes a torch That, under his feet, in the shadow, dazzling hatred, Suddenly illuminates the depths of the human soul; Or, minister, he gives both his nights and his days; Orator, he piles up efforts, works, speeches; He walks, he struggles! Alas! the burning and sad insult, With every step he takes, transforms and persists. No shelter. It would be a public enemy, A fabulous monster, dragon or basilisk, That would be less hunted in all ways, Less surrounded by people armed with big stones, Less hated! — For them all and for those who will come, He goes sowing glory, he reaps affront. Progress is his goal, good is his compass; Pilot, at the front of the ship he isolates himself; Every sailor, to tame the winds and currents, Changes course at different points, And, to arrive better, deviates in appearance; He does the same; thus blame and cries; ignorance Knows everything, denounces everything; he was going north, He was wrong; he goes south, he is wrong; If the weather turns dark, what rage and joy! However, under the burden, his head finally bows, Age comes, he harbored a deep and slow illness, He dies. Envy then, this vigilant demon, Rushes, recognizes him, closes his eyelid, Takes care to nail it with his hands in the coffin, Leans, listens, spies in this dark night If he is really dead, if he makes no noise, If he can no longer know by what name he is called, And, wiping his eyes, says: "He was a great man!"

Where do all these children go, none of whom laugh? These sweet thoughtful beings, whom fever thins? These eight-year-old girls seen walking alone? They go to work fifteen hours under mills; They go, from dawn to dusk, to eternally do In the same prison the same movement. Crouched under the teeth of a dark machine, Hideous monster that chews we know not what in the dark, Innocents in a prison, angels in a hell, They work. Everything is bronze, everything is iron. Never do they stop and never do they play. Also what pallor! the ash is on their cheek. It is barely day, they are already very tired. They understand nothing of their destiny, alas! They seem to say to God: "Little as we are, "Our father, see what men do to us!" O infamous servitude imposed on the child! Rickets! work whose suffocating breath Destroys what God has made; which kills, senseless work, Beauty on the foreheads, in the hearts the thought, And which would make — that is its most certain fruit — Of Apollo a hunchback, of Voltaire a cretin! Bad work that takes tender age in its grip, That produces wealth by creating misery, That uses a child as a tool! Progress of which one asks: "Where is it going? What does it want?" That breaks youth in bloom! that gives, in sum, A soul to the machine and takes it away from man! May this work, hated by mothers, be cursed! Cursed like the vice where one becomes degraded, Cursed like the disgrace and like the blasphemy! O God! may it be cursed in the name of work itself, In the name of true work, holy, fruitful, generous, That makes the people free and makes man happy!

The heavy cart carries an enormous stone; The lime worker, sweating from the bridle to the croup, Pulls, and the driver whips, and the slippery pavement Rises, and the sad horse with a bloody chest. He pulls, drags, groans, pulls again and stops; The black whip swirls above his head; It is Monday; the man drank yesterday at the Porcherons A wine full of fury, of cries and of oaths; Oh! what is this formidable law that delivers Being to being, and the frightened beast to the drunken man! The terrified animal can no longer take a step; It feels the shadow weigh on it; it does not know, Under the block that crushes it and the whip that stuns it, What the stone wants from it and what the man wants from it. And the driver is nothing but a storm of blows Falling on this convict who drags shackles, Who suffers and knows neither rest nor Sunday. If the rope breaks, he strikes with his foot; And the horse, trembling, dazed, crippled, Lowers its gloomy neck and its lost head; One hears, under the blows of the iron boot, The naked belly of the poor mute being ring! He groans; just a moment ago he was moving; But he does not move anymore, and his strength is finished; And the furious blows rain down; his agony Attempts a last effort; his foot makes a shift, He falls, and there he is broken under the stretcher; And, in the shadow, while his executioner redoubles, He looks at someone with his troubled eye; And one sees slowly extinguish, humble and tarnished, His eye full of the dark stupors of infinity, Where shines vaguely the frightening soul of things. Alas!

This lawyer pleads all the cases; He laughs at the generous who wish to know If white is not right, before saying black; Calm, in his conscience he puts what he encounters, Or the bag of money For, or the bag of money Against; The bag weighs for him what the case is worth. Ambushed, pen in hand, in a devout journal, Like a bandit would kill, this writer defames. The crowd hates this man and proscribes this woman; They are cursed. What is their crime? They loved. Creeping opinion crushes the oppressed, And, cat at the feet of the strong, for the weak is a tigress. From the dying inventor the parasite fattens. The world speaks, assures, affirms, swears, lies, Cheats, and laughs at cheating the dupe Devotion. The powerful shines and plays with destiny; Behind him, while he walks and shows off, His expanded excrement engenders his flatterer. The dwarfs are disdainful of all their height. O hideous street corners where the gloomy ragpicker Goes, holding in hand his horn lantern, Your heaps of rubbish are less black than the living! Who, of the winds or the hearts, is the most sure? The winds. This man believes nothing and pretends to believe; He has the clear eye, the graceful forehead, the black soul; He bends; he will be your master tomorrow.

You break stones, old man, on the road; Your humble and holey felt opens to the wet air; Under the rain and the weather your bare skull rusts; The heat is your tyrant, the cold is your executioner; Your old shivering body trembles under your coat; Your hut, at the level of the ditch by the road, Offers its mossy roof to the goat that browses; You earn in your day just enough black bread To eat in the morning and to fast in the evening; And, suspect ghost before whom one recoils, Looked at askew when twilight comes, Poor enough to alarm the passersby, Dark and thoughtful brother of the shivering trees, You let your years fall just as they let their foliage fall; Once, man then in the prime of life, When you saw that implacable Europe was coming, And threatened Paris and our dawn that is born, And, sea of men, rolled toward frightened France, And the Russian and the Hun on the sacred land Rush, and the north vomit Attila, You rose, you took your fork; in those days, You were, before the kings who held the countryside, One of the great peasants of great Champagne. That's good. But, look, over there, along the green furrow, A carriage arrives, and, like a whirlwind, In the evening dust that you shake from your forehead, Mixes the whip's flash with the thunder of the wheels. A man sleeps there. Old man, hat low! This passerby Made his fortune at the time when you shed your blood; He played to lower, and rose as the more Our fall was deeper and more certain; It took a vulture for our dead; he was it; He made, a harsh worker and always on the lookout, Sweat at our misfortunes from castles and rents; Moscow filled his meadows with fragrant stacks; For him, Leipzig paid dogs and valets, And the Berezina carried a palace; For him, so that this man has flowers, charm, Parks in Paris itself opening their wide gates, Gardens where one sees the swan wandering on the water, A joyful million came out of Waterloo; So much so that from disaster he made his victory, And that, to eat it, and twist it, and drink it, This Shylock, with Blucher's sword, Cut a pound of flesh from France. Now, of you two, it is you who are hated, him who is venerated; Old man, you are but a beggar, and this millionaire, Is the honest man. Come on, stand up, and hat low!

The crossroads are full of shocks and fights. The multitudes come and go in the streets. Crowds! furrows dug by these dreary plows: Night, pain, mourning! sad field where often has sprouted A ear that scares those who have sown it! Life and death! wave where the hydra entwines infinitely! Ocean people throwing the populace foam! There are all the chaos and all the greatness; There, savage, with its evils, its horrors, its uglinesses, Its larvae, despairs, hatreds, desires, sufferings, That one distinguishes through vague transparencies, Its rough appetites, formidable lovers, Its prostitutions, its degradations, And the inevitability of unlosable customs, Misery thickens its formidable layers. The unfortunate are there, recluse in misfortune. Indigence, black flux, ignorance, reflux, Rise, awful tide, and among the debris, Rolls the dark net of dark penalties. Need flees the evil that tempts and follows it, And man seeks man by touch; it is night; The little naked children stretch their funereal hands; Crime, yawning den, opens in these darkness; The wind shakes and pushes, in its cold whirlwinds, The souls in tatters in the bodies in rags: No heart where a blind chimera does not grow. Who grinds their teeth? Man. And who cries? The mother. Who sobs? The virgin with wide and sweet eyes. Who says: "I am cold?" The old woman. And who says: "I am hungry?" Everyone! And the bottom is horror, and the surface is joy. Above hunger, the feast that flames, And on the pale heap of cries and pains, The songs and laughter and flowered hats! Those are the happy. They have but one thought: To what nothing to throw the senseless day? Dogs, cars, horses! ash in the vermilion reflection! Dust whose grains seem gold in the sun! Their life is in endless pleasures, without goal, without truce, And passes trying to forget in a dream The hell below them and the sky above. When one veils Lazarus, one erases Jesus. They do not look into the gloomy shadows. They admit only the air all perfumed with roses, The voluptuousness, the pride, the intoxication and the lackey This gaily clad specter of the poor, at their banquets. The flowers cover the breasts and overflow from the vases. The ball, all trembling with breaths and ecstasies, Shines, dazzling what vanishes; Strange Eden made of light and night. The chandeliers on the ceilings let their flames hang, And seem the burning root full of souls Of some celestial tree blooming higher. Black paradise dancing on the immense dungeon! They savor, delighted, the dark dazzle Of beauties, splendors, countless quadrilles, Couples, loves, blue eyes, black eyes. The waltzes, visions, pass in the mirrors. Sometimes, like in the forests the flight of mares, The wild gallops run; at intervals, The ball catches its breath; one interrupts, one flees, One wanders, two by two, under the trees without noise; Then, mad, and recalling the distant shadows, The music, throwing the notes in handfuls, Returns, and the gazes light up, and the bow, Jumping, regains the crowd that was walking. O delirium! and of incense and intoxicating noise, The hour carries away laughing the rapid evenings, And the nights and the days, dead leaves of the skies. Others, all night, roll the joyful dice, Or, bitter, and mixing the cards they caress, Where laughing or bloody specters appear, Their thirst for gold, leaning around a green carpet, Until the shutter yawns open at dawn, Pursues the pharaoh, the lansquenet or the hombre; And, while one groans and shudders in the shadow, While the granaries shiver under the roofs, That the rivers, passing full of lugubrious voices, Hit the great white quays with the ice they carry, All these men happy to live, drink, laugh, Sing; and, at times, one sees, above them, Two posts supporting a hideous triangle, That slowly emerges from the black pavement of the cities.