SOURCE: "The Sublimity of Hugo's Odes," in The Renaissance of the Lyric in French Romanticism: Elegy, "Poëme" and Ode, French Forum Publishers, 1978, pp. 75-106.

[In this excerpt, Porter examines the ways in which Hugo transformed the ode genre during the early and middle phases of his career.]

Those contemporaries who were sympathetic to French Romanticism considered that it had revitalized three poetic genres: ode, elegy, and "Poëme." Later in the century, a neo-elegiac strain continues in the love poems of Baudelaire and Verlaine; a neo-epic tendency persists in Leconte de Lisle; and many romantic verse epics of redemption were composed; but the ode came eventually to predominate in nineteenth-century French literature. Such, at least, is the opinion of the poet Banville, who surveyed post-revolutionary poetry in 1871: "l'Ode, je le répète, une dernière fois, a absorbé tous les genres poétiques [ … ] elle est devenue toute la poésie moderne." A dramatization of the poet's creative powers became relatively more prominent in poetry, in comparison to the depiction of private emotions and to the relation of a collective adventure in a timebound setting. [Vigny] moved steadily in this direction. "L'Esprit pur" and even "La Maison du Berger" could be defined as odes. But Hugo was a much more prolific and consistent writer of poems that are unequivocally odes. His treatment of the sublime is the key to his innovations in and renewal of the genre.

Traditional Neoclassical French literary theory distinguished three types of ode according to their tone and subject. The Anacreontic Ode praised wine, women, and song. The Horatian Ode treated a wide variety of subjects with a relatively informal diction. The Pindaric heroic Ode, characterized by a "noble and elevated" tone, dealt with poetic and religious inspiration, moral exhortation, and the destinies of dynasties and nations.

Hugo's early odes, composed between 1816 and 1828, are generally of the Pindaric type. At first glance they seem static, outmoded, and uninteresting, "a curiously petrified form of neoclassical diction in which the middle and low styles have been forgotten and only the noble tone survives, forcing all subjects into its mold." From this viewpoint, the Orientales of 1829 emerge as the first great liberation of Hugo's artistic imagination in verse. A closer look at the early odes, however, reveals that "les promesses du vrai Hugo, du visionnaire et du mystique des Contemplations, sont, ici, plus perceptibles qu'en aucun autre recueil antérieur à l'exil—Les Rayons et les Ombres étant mis hors de pair." Granted that the early Hugo remains mainly within the limited compass of the heroic ode, he nevertheless transforms it decisively during his first few years as a poet.

The essence of the heroic ode was traditionally considered to reside in the "sublime." The concept of the sublime (applied to epics and to tragedies as well as to the ode) was most fully developed by "Longinus" in the third century A.D. Down through the eighteenth century, few later commentators went far beyond him. Longinus explains that the sublime aims at transcending the human condition, either by evoking a superhuman scale and an ideal of divinity which embodies the incontaminate, or by repressing the undesirable weaknesses of humanity—lamentation, pain and fear. Examples given by Longinus and his followers fall into two main categories: the spatial, and the temporal sublime. The spatial sublime evokes the might and vastness of the gods. Olympus trembles when Jupiter nods; the coursers of Neptune leap to the horizon with a single bound. The spatial sublime can be summed up by the metaphor that the world is the house of the gods.

The temporal sublime appears in the heroic human resolve which defies death. This defiance affirms moral qualities which transcend the limits of our mortality. The poet further transcends mortality by commemorating these qualities in the monument of art. So Achilles chooses a short, glorious life over a long and obscure one; Ajax implores the gods to dispel the clouds which hide and protect the Trojans so that he can return to battle, even if the gods then intend to slay him; old Horace, asked what he expected his son to do alone against three warriors, other than running away, replies: "Qu'il mourût." Early in his poetic practice, Hugo renovated both spatial and temporal sublime, discovering devices which characterize the greatest odes ("Les Mages"; "Le Satyre"; "Plein Ciel") of his maturity.

Once the vitality of classical pagan mythology declined, the hero of the ode, epic, or tragedy no longer could affirm his timeless human virtues by defying hostile gods (of course there are striking exceptions to this statement, such as Sartre's Les Mouches). So there arose the "moral ode" of the eighteenth century. It sought the temporal sublime on an abstract plane. The poet demonstrated his imaginative power by personifying in detail those virtues which are our immortal part. Hugo follows this tradition in his very early "Ode à l'Amitié" (1816: Cahier de Vers français). He begins with an apostrophe to this "adorable divinité," and after two exempla repeats the apostrophe. The power of friendship makes men lay down their life for their friends.

The moral ode transcends the fear of death and other base emotions, not by depicting a struggle against a personified human or divine enemy, but by creating episodic, personified anti-heroes who serve to embody human weakness. The moral ode characteristically portrays this anti-self, and ritually expels him from the world of the poem, just before the culmination of heroic resolve with which the ode ends. This resolve is usually expressed through an appeal to some spiritual power to maintain the poet in the happiness of virtue: So Hugo's long second apostrophe to L Amitié concludes:

Loin de toi ces vils scélérats
Qui n'ont jamais senti tes charmes,
Et ne jouissent ici-bas
Que par la terreur et les larmes!
Ce n'est point auprès de Plutus,
Dans les palais et le tumulte,
Que tu rassembles sous ton culte
Ceux qui chérissent les vertus.
Plaise aux dieux que de ce bonheur,

…..

Je puisse enivrer mon cœur.

…..

The "Dernier jour du monde," also composed in 1816, carries to its logical extreme the tendency of the moral ode to polarize good and evil with clear-cut moral judgments. God appears on His throne to mete out reward and punishment. Even some stanzas are divided in half to separate the wicked from the virtuous. Later, a heavily sarcastic passage of "La Bande noire" will grant the anti-self the unusual privilege of elaborating an anti-ode of its own (Odes Book II, number 3). Nobody believes the things a moral ode condemns—sin, cruelty, greed, and cowardice—are desirable, but the ode exhorts us to virtue and demands an active response to the good by dramatizing the repellent nature of its contrary.

Both moral and heroic odes seek to assure the immortality of the poet as well as of the hero. First the creative act associates the poet with lasting material achievements or with timeless moral excellence. Then he proclaims the word more real than the deed. As Vigny put it in "L'Esprit pur," speaking of his noble ancestors, "C'est en vain que d'eux tous le sang m'a fait descendre: / Si j'écris leur histoire, ils descendront de moi." Ever since Pindar, the ode writer had stressed the poet's power to confer or withhold immortality.

Hugo quickly abandoned the moral ode in its traditional form. From late 1818 to early 1821, most of his odes are politically inspired by events such as the Vendée massacres, the assassination of the Duc de Berry, the birth of the Due de Bordeaux, and the re-erection of Henri IV's statue. But even these odes, mainly referring to the recent past, sometimes transcend it to achieve a refinement of the temporal sublime. First he associates heroic deeds with an implied Exegi monumentum topos, suggesting once again that the poem is more important than the history whose memory it preserves; and then he promotes the poem itself from the status of a monument to that of the monument of a monument—a superlative of immortality. By making his poem commemorate not a man, but a monument to a man, Hugo transcends the Exegi monumentum topos which leaves the poem itself subject metaphorically to the risks of deterioration and oblivion. Consider "A la Colonne de la Place Vendôme" (Odes III, 7), or the last stanza of "Le Rétablissement de la Statue de Henri IV" (Odes I, 6):

After having described the return of his statue, with magical powers of moral inspiration, Hugo dismisses the statues of the bad rulers or anti-selves which it is the ode's business to purge. These endure, forgotten, in the larval form of meaningless dilapidated pyramids, "la ruine d'untombeau." Thus Hugo suggests the superlative of a superlative: death squared. But the undefined eternity of loyalty in "our hearts" survives both the boundary of life marked by the tombstone, and the span of known human history which marks the boundary of the life of monuments. The title of the poem, and the projet (memorializing a memorial) which that title represents, promote the poem beyond a mere restatement of the Ubi sunt topos to the rank of an assurance of the eternity of the poetic vision.

Often the early Hugo confers immortality upon his verse much more explicitly. The ode poet's traditional role of making heroes' fame live forever appears only optatively in the "Ode à l'Amitié" when Hugo speaks of Castor and Pollux, Orestes and Pylade:

Puissent vos noms, amis constans,
Couverts d'une éternelle gloire,
Passer au temple de mémoire,
Jusqu'aux derniers de nos enfans.

Of course the poem itself is a room of this temple. "Le Temps et les Cités" affirms the poet's immortality more directly by contrasting material monuments, and the mountains themselves—all of which must eventually fall—with genius. "Ilion fut, Homère existe."

[ … ] d'une cité périssable
Si le sort compte les instans,
Il est un pouvoir plus durable
Qui seul peut défier le Tems;
C'est le Génie

Then in "Le Désir de la Gloire—Ode" (1818), Hugo confers immortality upon himself rather than on Homer, though he remains in the conditional. And soon an open-ended equation of the spatial sublime leads him to a superlative of the temporal sublime of poetic immortality. He describes the seven planets revolving around the sun:

Et peut-être cet astre immense
Ressent lui-même la puissance
D'un astre plus immense encor.
…..

Astres, dont le feu nous éclaire,
Parlez, avez-vous un Homère
Dont le nom vive plus que vous?

As the vastness of the solar system is in proportion to the entire universe, so is Homer's fame in proportion to the glory Hugo desires. After this grandiose vision, however, the effect of the poem trails off through ninety more lines.

Religious inspiration comes to dominate political inspiration in the Odes early in 1821. Hugo had allied himself with the ultraroyalists, becoming their main poetic spokesman. But their overreaction to the murder of the Duc de Berry made allegiance to their cause seem less attractive. At the same time, Lamennais's religious writings began to influence Hugo (in July 1820 he uses a Lamennais text as an epigraph to an ode to Chateaubriand), and he became acquainted with Lamennais personally in the spring of 1821. His mother's death in June of that year reinforced his meditative tendencies. The preface to the Nouvelles Odes, dated February 1824, reflects his new orientation: "II ne sera jamais l'écho d'aucune parole, si ce n'est de celle de Dieu." But when Hugo attempts literally to put this intention into practice, by having God speak in his odes, he mars them with anticlimax similar to that of "Le Désir de la Gloire," by continuing the poem after the divine words have been uttered (compare the effective sobriety of having God speak only seven words at the conclusion of La Fin de Satan). He obviates this difficulty, in his more successful odes, by not depicting God directly. Instead, he imbues history with a spiritual significance, under the influence of Joseph de Maistre, Saint-Simon, Ballanche, Lamennais, and the articles by Baron Eckstein which he admiringly published in Le Drapeau Blanc, and which introduced him to the ideas of Schlegel, Fichte, and Schelling. Hugo spiritualizes history by combining two familiar topoi: Exegi monumentum, and hopes for the future of mankind. Antithesis effectuates this combination in the third stanza of "La Bande noire" (Odes II, 3): "vieux monuments d'un peuple enfant." The vast span of civilization coextensive with the life of the monuments—themselves nearly immortal in comparison with individual human lives—merely corresponds to the childhood of humanity, evolving through eons towards an as yet undefined maturity.

It is in the domain of the spatial sublime that Hugo's innovations proved most effective. The implied metaphor that "the world is the gods' house" was renewed in Christian visions of a Last Judgment and Apocalypse, and in eighteenth-century Deistic visions of the plurality of worlds, but the poetic vision of these systems remained static, confined within the limits of a known cosmology. Eventually Hugo transcends these limits by no longer naming the vaster theater to which his metaphors of expansion point. And rather than simply shifting suddenly from the human to the divine spatial perspective (a shift accomplished in the traditional ode with the exclamation "Que vois-je!" and the like), he will depict the human as dynamically expanding until it attains and then exceeds the proportions of the divine: "Et, si vous aboyez, tonnerres, / Je rugirai" ("Ibo," Les Contemplations). Thus the imagination comes to mediate between visionary consciousness and the phenomenal world. It preserves Nature from apocalyptic destruction and sustains a dialectical relationship between mind and nature, while keeping both intact.

The static form of the sublime spatial metaphor, with its abrupt shift of perspective, appears in Hugo's "Dernier jour du monde" written in 1816. The vision is related from the viewpoint of a resurrected man. "Où suis-je? Quelle main me rend à la lumière?" the ode begins. God appears; earth trembles; chaos engulfs the universe; and the spatial sublime leads to frozen time: "le Temps dort et s'arrête / Sur le trône du ciel." Christian cosmology here imposes an ultimate limit on poetic vision.

The poetry of Hugo's maturity at times simply suggests the implications of such expansive figures—God is the Selfhood of the infinite—more eloquently, frequently, and clearly. He speaks, for example, of "l'immensité qui n'est qu'un œil sublime" ("Pleurs dans la nuit," Les Contemplations). Elsewhere, combining the spatial with the temporal sublime, he declares:

Le vent de l'infini sur ce monde souffla.
Il a sombré….

…..

Qu'est-ce que le simoun a fait du grain de sable?
Cela fut. C'est passé. Cela n'est plus ici.
("Pleine Mer," Légende)

But he transcends this cosmic framework even in the early odes (a) by creating an open-ended version of the motif of proportions and (b) by leading the imagination from the spatial sublime to a dynamic, evolving continuum of heroic resolve for the future.

So "A la Colonne de la Place Vendôme" (Odes) describes the huge column as only a small part of a fallen empire unimaginably vaster. The Vergilian epigraph "parva magnis" emphasizes the motif of proportions, which will recur, for example, in the magnificent expatiation "Magnitudo parvi" of the Contemplations. In the latter poem, the world of the human imagination symbolized by the shepherd's fire is vaster than the stars. In "A la Colonne," a scale yet vaster than the Napoleonic empire is implied when Hugo compares the column itself to a warrior. As much as the column is greater than a single human, so much greater than the empire of Napoleon would be an undefined empire of the imagination, conquered by an army of such columns which the poet had brought back to life.

Again, and similarly, the connotations of warlike valor and the active verbs associated with the key metaphor of "Aux ruines de Montfort-L'Amaury" (Odes)—the town as sword—removes the limits from the movement of visionary expansion. This expansion represents only an initial expression of soldierly resolve, the prelude to great exploits in a theater unimaginably vaster than the physical world itself:

Je médite longtemps, en mon cœur replié;
Et la ville, à mes pieds, d'arbres enveloppée,
Etend ses bras en croix et s'allonge en épée,
Comme le fer d'un preux dans la plaine oublié.

This time, nostalgia aborted the prophetic adventure, which was to achieve its plenitude only in the poetry of Hugo's exile. Otherwise, he might well have continued:

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.
(Blake, Milton, preface)

What warrior would take Hugo's sword-town in hand, and what would be his battle? It has been described: "The ancient struggle between man and spirit-influence—that is, of man for self-dependence—is continuing in a more intimate way. What do the spirits want? Always the same: man's fall, his ontic degradation. How does humanism deal with that? By sending against them the thunderbolt of hermeneutic degradation." Hugo will finally dramatize this humanistic strategy in what is perhaps his greatest poem, "Le Satyre." Summoned before the Olympian gods, the humble faun sings. And as he sings, he grows and swells until the gods shrink into insignificance:

L'avenir [ … ]
C'est l'élargissement dans l'infini sans fond,
C'est l'esprit pénétrant de toutes parts la chose!
On mutile l'effet en limitant la cause;
Monde, tout le mal vient de la forme des dieux.
On fait du ténébreux avec le radieux;
Pourquoi mettre au-dessus de l'Etre, des fantômes?
(Légende)

Blake said this often, but he couldn't have put it better.

The royal road past the divine to a humanistic perspective is the archetype of Inversion ("to see the World in a Grain of Sand") implied by the motif of proportion, as stated and illustrated, for example, in "A la Colonne de la Place Vendôme." What seemed bad, proves good. (What seemed enormous, proves small. What seemed insignificant, proves important, etc. For countless examples, see Christ's sayings in the Gospels, passim.) It was Hugo's explicit statement of the archetype of Inversion in the early odes which inspired him, apparently, to discover a new verbal dimension beyond spatial vastness, and thus to overcome the power of the gods. "A M. de Chateaubriand" (Odes) praises that minister for resigning from the government in 1824. Material renunciation leads to a moral triumph. "Chacun de tes revers pour ta gloire est compté [ … ] Tomber plus haut encore que tu n'étais monté!" Here the archetype of Inversion functions to transfer the perception of vastness from the objective to the subjective plane. Then the "beyonding" effect of the sublime will not depend on the existence of a God or gods, the theater of whose action is larger than ours, but rather on the creative fiat of the poetic imagination. God is in us, not "up there."

Thus the mechanism of transcendence is shifted from the continual evocation of mythological beings, personified abstractions, and angels or spirits (which persist to create the beyonding effect as late as the poetry of Baudelaire and of the early Mallarmé) to the poet's manipulation of syntax. So, at the beginning of this same ode to Chateaubriand, Hugo writes:

As far as I know, "mondes volcans" is Hugo's earliest use of the "metaphor maxima," the juxtaposition of noun with noun in violation of ordinary French syntax, which has attracted much attention in the Contemplations and later collections. (In English, on the contrary, the juxtaposition of noun and noun—e.g. houseboat, boathouse—is so common that some computer programs for machine translation do not distinguish between English nouns and adjectives, calling both parts of speech "nadjes.") Clearly the metaphor maxima arises from placing a noun in apposition to another ("des astres, rois"), for in this situation French drops the article before the second noun, removing a barrier to its assimilation with the first. This condensation may seem trivial, but it is not. First, by violating normal syntax it implies a poetic vision which normal syntax cannot adequately communicate. It shows rather than tells the topos of inexpressibility. Second, without the metaphor maxima Hugo would have to express the sublime equation in a sentence with verb and subject ("The world is a volcano"). By condensing this equation to the single unit of two noun/adjectives, he frees the surrounding syntax. This syntax then no longer constitutes a mechanism ending with and limited by the metaphor maxima. It becomes capable of maneuvering that metaphor in the context of a vaster vision ("The world-volcano flies").

In this way the poet acquires limitless possibilities for displacing or transforming metaphorical immensity through his use of verbs. He ("le génie," above) rather than a god becomes the master of time and space, through his use of language ("des symboles"). The final step in this process will be to subject the entire known universe to the dynamic dominion of syntax: "L'hydre Univers tordant son corps écaillé d'astres" "Ce que dit la Bouche d'Ombre," (Les Contemplations). The metaphor maxima becomes an "être verbal" (e.g. the familiar "knife without a handle, whose blade is missing"), a concept which exists across our ordinary categories for experience—abstract and concrete, moral and physical, being and non-being—and thus dramatizes the transcending power of the creative imagination at work in a universe of words.

Hugo's theoretical statements in his prefaces to the Odes clearly show that he associates the Ode form with the Ancien Régime. Progressively as he evolves from monarchical views towards liberalism, he experiences the ode as inadequate for his poetic vision. His earliest definition of the ode proclaims quite conventionally that it "avec majesté célèbre les exploits / Des dieux, des conquérants, des héros et des rois" ("Régles de l'Ode"). His 1822 preface reaffirms the reactionary viewpoint that "l'histoire des hommes ne présente de poésie que jugée due haut des idées monarchiques et des croyances religieuses." And again in 1823 he advocates replacing pagan mythology with Christian dogma in an attempt to support and console French monarchical society "qui sort, encore toute chancelante, des saturnales de l'athéisme et de l'anarchie."

The reactionary reign of Charles X made Hugo change his mind. From late in 1821, moreover, he had been prepared for a change of heart by a progressive reconciliation with his father, who had been a general under Napoleon. The 1826 preface no longer casts a nostalgic backward glance at the Ancien Régime. Hugo, now chafing under the restraint of the ode's historical associations with a political system from which he is coming to wish himself free, simply defines the genre so broadly that his definition becomes meaningless. The ode reflects "toute inspiration purement religieuse, toute étude purement antique, toute traduction d'un événement contemporain ou d'une impression personnelle." Already in 1825, moreover, the weakening of Hugo's religious faith and his desire for a larger public led him to bid farewell—for a time—to visionary poetry. The October 1825 ode "A M. Alponse de L[amartine]" which introduces the third book of odes exclaims "Ah! nous ne sommes plùs au temps où le poète / Parlait au ciel en prêtre, a la terre en prophète!" and yields the palm to Hugo's friendly rival. No later poem in the Odes et Ballades proclaims the poet's prophetic mission, describes the abysses which open to his visionary gaze, nor invokes God or History.

The 1828 preface traces the evolution of his choice of subjects for the ode from historical (Books I-III) to "sujets de fantaisie" (Book IV), to "impressions personnelles" (Book V). With the ballades of Book VI and the Orientales of 1829 he abandons the formal designation of "ode" altogether: since "tout a droit de cité en poésie" (1829), any generic label seems overly restrictive. Until the Feuilles d'automne, published in 1831, Hugo marks time with prosodie virtuosity, exoticism, and the light fantastic. The Ballades and Orientales show Hugo turning his attention away from France and from the decaying political influence of the aristocracy and monarchists with whom he had allied himself. The very act of juxtaposing the playful Ballades with the serious Odes in 1828 reflects a certain depreciation of the latter in Hugo's mind.

Nevertheless, to call to mind the features of the ode is to perceive more clearly the imaginative origins of the great poetry of the exile period. There Hugo multiplies original versions of the sublime suggested by his discoveries in the early odes. But beyond that, several other possibilities inherent in the ode, suggested but not exploited in the 1820's, receive a detailed imaginative development in the 1850's: the excoriation of the scapegoat figure (Les Châtiments); the redemption of the scapegoat (Les Contemplations; La Fin de Satan); the extension of the static temporal sublime into the dynamic future of humanity (La Légende des siècles); and the dramatization of an inexhaustibly unfolding poetic vision (Dieu).

After 1828, Hugo's transformation of the Ode passes through two main phases: generally speaking, the middle period collections—Les Feuilles d'Automne, Les Chants du Crépuscule, Les Voix intérieures, and Les Rayons et les Ombres—reverse the traditional arrangement of (a) inspiration from a superior order, and (b) report of the resulting vision. Hugo's growing democratic sensibilities now preclude his presenting himself as an intellectual or spiritual aristocrat at the outset of the poems. Instead, an imaginative encounter with the physical world leads him and the reader together towards the visionary insight suggested at the conclusion of the poems. Not having received an initial revelation, the poet can no longer play the role of Christ and Judge, self-confidently separating the sheep from the goats. Generalized metaphors of light and darkness replace the overtly judgmental polarities of hero and scapegoat, good and evil. To counterbalance this diminution of poetic prestige, Hugo reverses the relationship between poet and nature. Rather than nature being a source of inspiration for the poet, she receives a revelation from him. And it remains apparent that the implied author—as distinguished from the lyric self—has undergone a visionary experience by the beginning of the poems: allusions to it are insinuated into the initial sections of the poem, by descriptive details which imply an overarching harmony into which the polar oppositions of good and evil have been subsumed. Thus "La Vache" of Les Voix intérieures is compared both to a doe and to a leopard; her hide combines the colors white and russet red (ice and fire); and her barnyard contains both a sedentary old man and noisy children, before the visionary climax which equates her to universal nature. Hugo's rural landscape with figures revives, both in theme and subject, the seventeenth and eighteenth-century descriptive poetry which celebrated the cosmic order of concordia discors.

In 1823, "Le Poète" (Odes) already anticipates standing the ode on its head: inspiration and the message from a higher order occur at the very end of the poem. The first section evokes the poet's solitary condition; the second complains that he must live amidst the frivolous crowd; the third tells that crowd to leave him in peace, because he is divinely inspired; and the fourth shows him appearing among mankind once more, bearing a transcendent revelation: "son front porte tout un Dieu!" "Extase" in 1828 (Orientales) is the first poem in which the poet's contemplation of nature, rather than the dictation of a Muse, leads to spiritual revelation. The stars and the waves beneath them proclaim the presence of God: "Mes yeux plongeaient plus loin que le monde réel."

In "Pan" of Les Feuilles d'Automne, the poet becomes the interpreter as well as the recipient of messages from a panpsychic nature, of "le mot mystérieux que chaque voix bégaie." He invites other poets to mingle their souls with creation. In an inversion of the poet-as-Aeolian-harp topos, nature metaphorically becomes a keyboard passively responding to the poet's strong fingers. As Pierre Albouy comments, here.

Hugo renoue avec la haute ambition du poète 'vates' qui s'exprimait dans les Odes; à nouveau, le poète est défini comme un être 'sacré,' dont la mission consiste à traduire en langage humain ce 'verbe' divin qu'est la nature. Le poème annonce ainsi, lointainement, les Mages, et, aussi, par le symbole du dieu Pan, le mythe du Satyre, dans la Légende des Siècles.

The poet's mental processes are compared in detail to natural processes, and nature imitates him as much as he imitates her, in "Dictée en présence du glacier du Rhône" and "La Pente de la Rêverie" of Les Feuilles d'Automne. In the latter poem,

La Seine, ainsi que moi, laissait son flot vermeil
Suivre nonchalamment sa pente, et le soleil
Faisait évaporer à la fois sur les grèves
L'eau du fleuve en brouillards et ma pensée en rêves!

Fused with nature, the poet no longer can hold himself aloof, a detached intellect, to judge and condemn the anti-selves of the traditional ode. In "Ce qu'on entend sur la montagne," for example (July 1829; Les Feuilles d'Automne,), he distinguishes both a hymn of praise and a wail of lamentation emanating from the land scape. But now he feels sympathy for the dark world of suffering.

In short, Hugo's middle-period poetry adopts a three-fold rather than a two-fold vision. He undertakes a mission of mediation and reconciliation, rather than simply discriminating between black and white, evil and good. His habit of tripartite thinking is evident in La Préface de Cromwell (1827) and in the preface to Les Voix intérieures, but it becomes associated with a hierarchy of soul, mind, and body only in the "Prélude" of the Chants du Crépuscule. The poet as mind mediates between the soul and body. He echoes "tout ce que le monde [the body] / Chante [the soul] dans l'ombre en attendant!" The word "Crépuscule," which can mean either pre-dawn or dusk, also transcends a simple binary opposition of light and darkness, as Hugo insists in his preface:

Tout aujourd'hui, dans les idées comme dans les choses, dans la société comme dans l'individu, est à l'état de crépuscule. De quelle nature est ce crépuscule? de quoi sera-t-il suivi? … La société attend que ce qui est à l'horizon s'allume tout à fait ou s'éteigne complètement.

The preface likewise transcends the opposition of Good and Evil: "Dans ce livre … il y a tous les contraires, le doute et le dogme, le jour et la nuit … Le poète n'est pourtant, lui, ni de ceux qui nient, ni de ceux qui affirment. Il est de ceux qui espèrent." And in the liminal "Prélude," the nearest approach to an anti-self is the uncertain poets and priests who seek a revelation and a new role. Hugo's poet-persona of the middle period odes seeks to penetrate a mystery rather than to distribute praise and blame.