"le mal est sur la terre."

For the honest man who would remain the optimist this world lays traps at every turn. Voltaire was sixty one years old in 1755. He had never been physically strong. We can only guess what the burden of personal physical decay might have added to the disappointments borne as he surveyed a crumbling philosophical landscape.

The greatest blow was the disaster at Lisbon. On All Saint's Day, 1755 a violent earthquake struck the city which was filled for the holiday. Gaping streets engulfed citizens and pilgrims, and churches collapsed on the massed celebrants. The destruction was unprecedented in modern Europe, and the tragedy was acutely sensed by the intelligentsia of the day. Voltaire was deeply disturbed - not only by the tragedy, but also by the modern thinker's responses to it. His troubled thoughts are expressed in his work Poeme sur le desastre de Lisbonne. Here are a few lines:

Nay, press not upon my agitated heart
These iron and irrevocable laws,
This rigid chain of bodies, minds and worlds,
Dreams of the bloodless thinker are such thoughts.

Much of the poem expresses the difficulty of the continuation of evil in the presence of a just God. In Voltaire's poem the problem is unresolved.

Whatever side we take we must needs groan,
We nothing know, and everything must fear,
Nature is dumb, in vain appeal to it,
The human race demands a word of God.

What is man?

Tormented atoms in a bed of mud,
Devoured by death, a mockery of fate.
But thinking atoms, whose far-seeing eyes,
Guided by thought, have measured the faint stars,
Our being mingles with the infinite;

Toward the end, we see a significant renouncement of the popular Enlightenment optimism. I see an interesting replacement:

All will be well one day - so runs our hope.
All now is well is but an idle dream.

('All is well' was the idiotic axiom of the day, universally applicable to every inconvenience or happy accident. Voltaire was through with it.)

The poem ends with hope.