Demain, dès l'aube

Victor Hugo(1802–1885)

Les Contemplations, 1856

Demain, dès l’aube, à l’heure où blanchit la campagne,Je partirai. Vois-tu, je sais que tu m’attends.J’irai par la forêt, j’irai par la montagne.Je ne puis demeurer loin de toi plus longtemps.

Je marcherai les yeux fixés sur mes pensées,Sans rien voir au dehors, sans entendre aucun bruit,Seul, inconnu, le dos courbé, les mains croisées,Triste, et le jour pour moi sera comme la nuit.

Je ne regarderai ni l’or du soir qui tombe,Ni les voiles au loin descendant vers Harfleur,Et quand j’arriverai, je mettrai sur ta tombeUn bouquet de houx vert et de bruyère en fleur.

From Les Contemplations (1856), via the French Wikisource transcription.

Public domainThis poem is in the public domain. You may read it, copy it, recite it and publish it without asking anyone.

About the poem

«Tomorrow, at dawn, at the hour when the countryside turns white, I will set out. I know that you await me.» The poem reads like a lovers' tryst: the poet says he will walk all day, through forest and mountain, seeing and hearing nothing, hunched and sad, to reach the one who waits for him.

Only the last line reveals where he is going: he will lay upon her grave «a bouquet of green holly and flowering heather». It is an elegy for Léopoldine, his daughter, drowned at nineteen; Hugo dated it September 1847, near the anniversary of her death. The tenderness of the journey is the tenderness of grief.

The verse is kept in French. Translating it in passing would replace the work with a paraphrase of it.