Waiting for the Votes to be Counted

by Brett Rutherford

from Victor Hugo's "When 7.5 Million Voted Yes"

 

Oh! what falls around us in the shadow?

So many snowflakes! Do you know the number?

Count the millions and then the millions!

Black night! We see the lions returning to their den.

The thought of eternal life recedes and fades.

The snow falls. The twilight, hideous, blinds us.

We feel but cannot see, the mountains hunching, sinister.

We dare not fall asleep, for fear we’d never wake.

Snow blankets the fields, it covers the cities;

Flakes whiten the sewer grates, hiding their vile mouths;

The dismal avalanche fills the tarnished sky;

Dark ice, hard-caked and falling thick! Is it over?

We can no longer distinguish our path; everything is a trap.

What will be left of all this snow,

The earth’s cold veil, one universal shroud,

Tomorrow, one hour after sunrise?

What is to become of us?

 

My first English version of a 230-line poem by Victor Hugo is in the computer. If I had any doubts about the "relevance" of this work the opening tirade removes all doubts. It is titled "Les 7,500,000 Oui" which seems to make no sense. It is actually about the 1870 referendum in which French voters were asked to approve everything the dictator Napoleon III had done since 1860 (overlooking tens of thousands of liberals and democrats exiled or arrested and thrown into foreign prisons). The poem's title is therefore properly titled, "When 7.5 Million Voted Yes." The people voted yes by an 80% majority.

Hugo's poem is an agonized questioning about "the people" versus "the masses," asking why people would vote against common sense and against their own interest. Hugo calls up the vision of patriots and liberators across history and from many cultures, even bringing in Washington, Bolivar, and Garibaldi. He insists there is a higher standard that mass culture must be reminded of, or be educated about, so that they would choose freedom. It is today's lament a well as yesterday's, and every intellectual knows the irony of feeling that she or he knows better than the people, what is good for the people.

 

Although this poem will require many footnotes for today's average reader (the sad plight of our culture), it also has many direct and powerful images in plain and direct language.

At the end, as if exhausted by the range of his own tirade, Hugo adds a short lyric poem that can be interpreted as the anxiety of waiting for the votes to be counted. It is a landscape with snow falling, and he says it all with the simplest of stark images.

Here I have adapted these closing lines, as a freestanding poem, about our election, your election, the next election. Poetry matters.