Contemplations
A hundred and fifty-eight poems in six books, split into Long Ago and Today by a gap the preface calls a tomb: the poet's married daughter Léopoldine drowned at nineteen when a boat overturned on the Seine at Villequier. The early books hold childhood, schoolrooms, spring in the woods and old quarrels with the classicists; the later ones hold grief, an argument with God, and the voices the exile believed were reaching him at the turning tables. Assembled over twenty-five years and published from the Channel Islands while Hugo was refusing Napoleon III's amnesty.
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Closest analogues
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- 53% · 10 shared