A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields/The Forts of Paris (L'Année Terrible, Victor Hugo)
They are the watch-dogs, terrible, superb,
Enormous, faithfully that Paris guard.
As at each moment we could be surprised,
As a wild horde is there, as ambush vile
Creeps sometimes even to the city walls,
Nineteen in number, scattered on the mounts
They watch,—unquiet, menacing, sublime,
Over dark spaces limitless, at eve,
And as the night advances, warn, inform,
And one another aid, far stretching out
Their necks of bronze around the walls immense.
They rest awake, while peacefully we sleep,
And in their hoarse lungs latent thunders growl
Low premonitions. Sometimes from the hills,
Sharply and suddenly bestrewed with stars,
A lightning darts athwart the sombre night
Over the valleys; then the heavy veil
Of twilight thick, or utter darkness, falls
Upon us, masking in its silence deep
A treacherous snare, and in its peace, a camp;
Like a huge crawling serpent round us winds
The enemy, and enlaces us in coils
Inveterate, interminable, but in vain.
At a respectful distance keep the forts
A multitude, a populace of monstrous guns,
That, in the far horizon, wolf-like prowl.
Bivouac, and tomb, and prison, Paris now is all.
Upright and straight before the universe
That has become a solitude, she stands
A sentinel, and surprised with weariness
From over-watching, slumbers; all is still.
Men, women, children, sobs passionate, bursts
Of triumphant laughter, cars, footsteps, quays,
Squares, crossways, and the river's sandy banks,
The thousand roofs whence issue murmurs low,
The murmurs of our dreams, the hope that says
I trust and I believe, the hunger, that I die,
The dark despair that knows not what it says,
All, all keep silence. O thou mighty crowd!
O noises indistinct and vague! O sleep,
Of all a word! And O great glorious dreams,
Unfathomable, that ever one and all
Mock our frail wisdom, now are ye submerged
In one vast ocean of oblivion deep.
But they are there, formidable and grand,
And bend to listen. What is it they hear?
A subterraneous roar, a voice profound
As from a mountain's bowels. All the town
Listens intent, and all the country round
Awakes. And hark! to the first rumbling sound
Succeeds a second, hollow, sullen, fierce,
And in the darkness other noises crash,
And echo follows echo flying far!
A hundred voices terrible through night,
Rolling, reverberating, and dying off!
It is the forts. It is that they have seen
In depths profound of spaces vast and dim,
The sinister cannon-waggons darkly grouped;
It is, that they the outlines have surprised
Of cannons ranged; it is that in some wood
From whence the owl has fled on hurried wings,
Beside a field, they faintly have descried
The black swarm of battalions on the march,
With bayonet gleams, like points of silver sharp
Commingled; it is that in thickets dense
They have found out the flash of traitorous eyes