Memory plays an important role in the collection, as Hugo was experimenting with the genre of autobiography in verse.

The poet expresses nature and love in the form of short poems, as if Hugo was more trying to capture a fleeting moment than to give a long picture of his feelings.

Hugo concentrates on a few parts of reality, thus giving a fragmented image: he does not portray the woman he loves from head to toe, but evokes her neck or her feet and her hair.

Poetic constraint is a way of channeling affect by casting the informal as into a mold of pre-existing forms; the sonnet or the rhythmic structures.

The poet, who no longer seems able to understand the designs of God, also addresses other men because his sufferings are those of all: “homo sum” he writes in the preface.

He avoids exaggerating his personal lyricism, writing for example in: "I will not watch the gold of the falling evening / Nor the sails in the distance descending towards Harfleur" as if to reject easy sentimentality.

This experience allows the poet to form a new religion, very precisely evoked in the poem of the Contemplations entitled "What the mouth of shadow says".

The very idea of "contemplation" (from the Latin contemplari, meaning both "to gaze attentively" and "to consider in thought") plays on the religious origin of the word (which in ancient Rome belongs to the augural language) : it is, for the dreamer (because "to dream", "to dream" and "to contemplate" are used almost interchangeably in the collection), to fix his gaze on nature until he perceives, beyond the visible, the abstract meaning it delivers.

In the pan of reality delimited by his gaze, the contemplator strives to interpret signs: nature is a book where the divine text is given to decipher.

Hugo's god is neither entirely impersonal nor entirely anthropomorphic: rather, he is the voice of conscience, an intimate and living form of moral law.

It is an all-powerful but unknowable god for man, and of which Christianity would offer only an approximate image, because it would be a question of a universal entity and freed from all religion.