Riassunto
Riassunto di Le contemplazioni, Volume 2: Oggi
A chi è rivolto
For readers who love poetry about grief, faith and doubt, and anyone drawn to French Romantic writing or to Hugo beyond his novels.
Che cos’è questo libro
Today is the second half of The Contemplations, the poetry collection Victor Hugo published in Paris in 1856. Hugo arranged it as the story of one life, with the poems dated from 1830 to 1855. He called the whole work the memoirs of a soul. The first volume, called Formerly, looks back on youth, love and play. This second volume, called Today, covers the years after a death that broke him.
In September 1843 Hugo's daughter Léopoldine drowned in the Seine at Villequier, only months after her wedding. Twelve years later Hugo was living in exile on the island of Guernsey, driven from France by Napoleon III. Volume two moves from that grief, through exile and struggle, to a vision of God, souls and the universe. You get three books of poems. They are called A Few for My Own, On the March, and On the Edge of the Infinite. Let us begin with the poet and the shape of the volume.
In questo riassunto
- 1A grieving father builds a monumentFree
- 2Book Four mourns Léopoldine directly
- 3Exile turns grief into struggle
- 4Book Six looks into the infinite
- 5Images, forms and sounds that return
- 6How to read these poems and what they say
Punto chiave 1 di 6
A grieving father builds a monument
The Contemplations was written over twenty-five years, but Hugo shaped it as a single book with a hinge in the middle. The first three books belong to Formerly. The last three belong to Today. Between them he places the date of Léopoldine's death as a dividing line. He writes that a gulf lies between the two halves, and the reader is meant to feel it.
Hugo was already the most celebrated writer in France when she died. He was travelling in the southwest when he learned the news from a newspaper. He had not known that her boat had capsized, and her husband Charles Vacquerie had died trying to save her. Hugo was devastated, and for a long time he wrote almost no poetry at all.
When he returned to verse, it came out of that silence. The poems of volume two were written over twelve years, through mourning, politics and flight from France. He gathered them in the Channel Islands, where he lived with his family and a few other exiles. The book was published in 1856 and sold well enough to buy him a house on Guernsey.
That is why the volume reads like a diary written in verse. The poems are dated, and the dates matter. A reader sees the same man at different moments of loss, anger and slow recovery. The book is a record of what grief did to him over time.
That’s 1 of 6 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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