SOURCE: "St.-John Perse: Poet of the Marvellous," in Encounter, Vol. XXIX, No. 4, October, 1967, pp. 51-61.

[In the following essay, Raine explores the defining characteristics of Léger's verse.]

In conversation the author of the poems published under the pseudonym St.-John Perse once said to me what a pity it was that whereas up to the beginning of the last war English and French poets knew one another's work as a matter of course, this was no longer so. The context of St.-John Perse's poetry is by no means limited by the language in which he writes. His earliest master was Conrad, whom as a young man he knew intimately, and who introduced him also to W. H. Hudson and his writings; one of his earliest poems (Images à Crusoe) is an evocation of Defoe's hero by a poet whose boyhood was lived in the tropical archipelago of the Antilles. He was associated, in the period between the two world wars, with the American-born Duchess of Sermoneta, Marguerite Caetani, in the editing of the magazine Commerce; as was also Paul Valéry. His latest—and finest—work has been written in America, in whose natural features and majestic scale he has found the correspondence of his characteristic themes. Alexis St.-Léger Léger, one-time Permanent Secretary of the French Foreign Office, has lived in the United States ever since the destruction of the Third Republic; at which time he lost, with everything else he then possessed (including the manuscripts of several unpublished poems), his French citizenship; he has now once again a house in France, but (though no longer as an exile) continues to reside in America, where his work is known and better understood by poets of the New World and the heirs of Walt Whitman than it is in England.

Like most of my generation I read Anabase because it was translated by T. S. Eliot, in 1930. Even in this early poem (first published in 1924) and indeed in the earlier Eloges, his inimitable style ("Innumerable the image, and the metre prodigal") was already formed. But I remember being puzzled where to fit this poet into the picture my generation was at that time building up of what modern poetry was and should be. Surrealism was easy to understand, being little more than avant-gardism as such; Joyce and Proust had obvious contemporary points of reference; but its very originality made the Anabase seem the more strange. Its theme—the setting-out of a nomadic prince on an expedition of conquest—was in no obvious way related to contemporary experience although the images (exotic in the style of Gauguin) were, as such, pleasurable. The great sweep of the rhythm had no obvious similarity (other than not being confined within any traditional metrical form) with the Free Verse of Pound or Eliot; (it is in fact nearer to Rimbaud and Claudel). It was not clear what affinity such poetry had with Eliot's own theory and practice as a poet; nor do I even now know the answer to that question.

Twenty years were to pass between the first publication of Anabase and the appearance of Exil, Poème à l'Etrangère, Pluies, and Neiges in 1942. These poems were written in the United States, and in France first published on the presses of the Résistance, without the name of the author. During the intervening years the diplomat had kept "his brother the poet" in abeyance. We shall never know (unless those lost manuscripts should be recovered) how St.-John Perse developed from the author of the romantic epic Anabase into the poet of Exil and the greater poem of exile, Vents (written in the United States in 1945 and published in 1946). With these poems, the poet and the times moved into conjunction; what had formerly been a personal voice became a voice of the age. If Vents is his greatest poem this is surely so in part because the vision of these "very great winds over all the faces of this world" ("de très grands vents sur toutes faces de ce monde, " Vents, I) whose storm tore down the edifice of European civilisation and carried the poet into the New World was experienced so immediately by "his brother the prince," Alexis Léger; as Dante, Milton, Byron and Yeats, whether as rulers or as exiles, played their part in and shared the suffering of their cities. No more than these is he a political poet; but like them, political concern and knowledge is part of the structure of his thought, giving authority to his prophetic speech. There is no longer, in 1945, any question of how St.-John Perse's poetry relates to the contemporary experience: the migrant tribe is ourselves, the country we must leave, our own past, and western civilisation; whether as conquerors or exiles—and there is little difference—we must set forth again into that future open alike to all.

The state of exile, in many cases physical, but above all spiritual exile, is the typical condition of poet and prince alike in the new dark age of barbarism and the reversal of the natural hierarchies with all their values; the state to be explored.

Claudel, writing of Vents, pointed out that whereas the Odyssey is an epic of home-coming, Vents, an epic description of the fall of the civilisation whose beginnings Homer scarcely saw, is a poem of setting-out; as that other epic, Finnegans Wake, ends, like the Götterdâmmerung, with a purification by re-immersion in the source. But for Perse, this purification, re-immersion, and settingout is not cyclic, but at every moment to be enacted as life moves always into its future.

He chooses for his symbols those freely-moving elements which traverse and unite all times and spaces—seas, winds, birds, the perpetual setting-out of migrant swarms, flocks, human tribes; an "open" poetry in which all spaces and times coexist in a single present. No theme could be more true to one of the as yet unformulated experiences of this time. The scope of his poetry is coterminous with the earth in its single and continuous space-time.

The English reader may be alarmed by the initial difficulty of a poetry whose vocabulary is full of unfamiliar words, many of them not to be found in a dictionary, which in any case tells us little. The writings of Darwin, the paintings of Audubon, or a text-book on boat-building could tell us more, an acquaintance with the things themselves more still. Knowing that his translator Eliot was interested in words and read largely in the Oxford Dictionary, I asked if this was a meeting-point between the poet and his translator. But this was not so, he said; for Eliot's interest in words was literary and philological, whereas his own vocabulary comes from his knowledge of many skills, his travels in many places, his knowledge of plants and their products and uses, the flora and fauna of many coasts, the ethnography of outer Mongolia; of whatever mankind has made or valued; objects rather than myths, all that can be handled rather than what has been thought. His interests are not primarily literary, less still academic; a man of wide experience, he is able to create those astonishing syntheses and analogies which could occur only to a man of trained sensibility and many kinds of exact knowledge. Only if "exotic" and "tropical" are synonymous can even his early imagery be so described; but in so far as the word implies a certain artificiality (as in Beardsley) this is not so. Those immense random samples of the wonders of the world ("La terre enfante des merveilles "), miraculous drafts from that thalassic fecundity are all taken from the real, and the accessible. Modern mankind inhabits, as did no former generation, the earth as a whole, whose flora and fauna with all the regions they inhabit, have for the first time become a book open to all.

All the land of trees, out there, its background of black vines, like a Bible of shadow and freshness in the unrolling of this world's most beautiful texts…. The land in its long lines, on its longest strophes, running, from sea to sea, to loftiest scriptures…. And this great winter prose that is, to the Old World's flocks, the wolf-lore of the New World…. Those flights of insects going off in clouds to lose themselves at sea, like fragments of sacred texts, like the tatters of errant prophecies and the recitations of genealogists and psalmists….

Toute la terre aux arbres, par là-bas, sur fond de vignes noires, comme une Bible d'ombre et de fraîcheur dans le déroulement des plus beaux textes de ce monde…. Et la terre à longs traits, sur ses plus longues laisses, courant, de mer à mer, à de plus hautes écritures…. Et ces grandes proses hivernales, qui sont aux laines du Vieux Monde la louveterie du Nouveau Monde…. Ces vols d'insectes par nuées qui s'en allaient se perdre au large comme des morceaux de texts saints, comme des lambeaux de prophétieserrantes et des récitations de généalogistes, de psalmistes….

[Vents II. 1-4]

Our generation has become intellectually, but not imaginatively, habituated to the retrospect of natural evolution, to the new spacious simultaneity of the relativity of time and place. In reading the poetry of St.-John Perse we experience this new freedom, familiar to the scientist, which poetry has been slow to enter. Plato called the world a happy and immortal animal, one immortal joy sweeping through its myriads of component lives; and all Perse's poems are (as one is entitled) praises, éloges, of this "moving image of eternity." His prodigality of image both illustrates and suggests an infinitely various and inexhaustible fecundity.

When we come to examine those "marvels" which are ever before the eyes of the poet, we recognise, with some astonishment, that they are such as are everywhere present but generally unheeded; the moon "thin as the ergot on a white rose" (the English translator—Hugh Chisholm—has missed the beauty of this comparison of the misty moon with the familiar fungoid blight to which white roses are particularly subject); or, from one of his earliest poems, Images à Crusoé,

Hear the hollow creatures rattling in their shells—Against a bit of green sky a sudden puff of smoke is the tangled flight of mosquitoes … and other gentle creatures, listening to the evening, sing a song purer than their announcing of the rains: the swallowing of two pearls swelling their yellow gullets.

Entends claquer les bêtes creuses danseurscoques—II y a sur un morceau de ciel vert une fumée hâtive qui est le vol emmêlé des moustiques…. Et d'autres bêtes qui sont douces, attentives au soir, chantent un chant plus pur que l'annonce des pluies: c 'est la déglutition de deux perles gonflant leur gosier jaune….

[Elogies]

You can hear and see the like on any shore or by any pond where the frogs make their continuous music. The exotic strangeness of some images (the "two pearls" in the frog's gullet, or "Anhinga, the bird, fabled water-turkey, whose existence is no fable … it is enough for me that he lives") ("Et l'Oiseau Anhinga, la dinde d'eau des fables, dont l'existence n 'est point fable … et c'est assez pour moi qu 'il vive—") is diffused upon all, reminding us that common and rare alike participate in the same marvel of existence, the magia. This world which seems remote and unreal to poets and their readers is one in which any naturalist would feel at home; the world of the scientists which often seems infinitely more poetic than the dull round of poets and their readers, who notice, as a rule, very little, and have lost the habit of regarding knowledge of many kinds—or of any kind—as the material of poetry.

At my first meeting with the poet, I listened with enchantment while he spoke of the wildest shores and deserts of the world (his conversation is like his poems, rich in marvels) and I asked if living in Georgetown he did not miss such things. He pointed to the sky where two vultures were wheeling, and spoke of W. H. Hudson who had studied dispersal of tropical plants and insects brought ashore at English sea-ports, and those fungi which thrive on the paste used for bill-sticking; for St.-John Perse the great cities are themselves only another wave-crest raised by the ocean of inexhaustible life. The "marvels," purified from all commonplace associations and the unreal values utility assigns, are, in his poetry, revealed in their absolute nature.

If at first sight the vocabulary of St.-John Perse seems difficult, his themes exotic, there is an underlying simplicity about this poetry of "the many," "the ten-thousand creatures." Its amplitude is tremendous but it is not as Joyce, semantically, or, as Eliot, in historical and literary allusiveness, or, as Yeats, in metaphysical and mythological import, complex poetry at all. That may well be part of its difficulty for readers more attuned to a trivial complexity than to a simple grandeur. It is "nature-poetry," that genre so dear to the English; but upon a scale which surpasses our national expectations: it is to the "nature-poetry" of the post-Wordsworthians as the ocean to a village pond.

In one of his very few prose statements [On Poetry, 1961] the poet defined certain attributes of poetry which are presumably those he would wish us to find in his own work. Poetry and science, he said, are alike ways of exploring an "original night" in itself unknowable.

If poetry is not itself, as some have claimed, "reality absolute," it is poetry which shows the strongest passion for, and the keenest apprehension of it, to that extreme limit of complicity where reality seems to shape itself within the poem.

By means of analogical and symbolic thinking, by means of the far-reaching light of the mediating image and its play of correspondences, by way of a thousand chains of reactions and unusual associations, by virtue also of a language through which is transmitted the very rhythm of Being, the poet clothes himself in a surreality to which the scientist cannot aspire. Is there, for man, any dialectic more compelling, or capable of engaging him more fully? When the philosophers themselves abandon the threshold of the metaphysical, it falls to the poet to take the place of the metaphysician; and at such times it is poetry and not philosophy which is revealed as the true "daughter of wonder," to use the phrase of the ancient philosopher who most mistrusted her.

Car si la poésie η 'est pas, comme on l'a dit, "le réel absolu, " elle en est bien la plus proche convoitise et la plus proche appréhension, à cette limite extrême de complicité où le réel dans le poème semble s'informer lui-même.

Par la pensée analogique et symbolique, par l'illumination lointaine de l'image médiatrice, et par le jeu de ses correspondances, sur mille chaînes de réactions et d'associations étrangères, par la grâce enfin d'un langage où se transmet le mouvement même de l'Etre, le poète s'investit d'une surréalité qui ne peut être celle de la science. Est-il chez l'homme plus saisissante dialectique et qui de l'homme engage plus? Lorsque les philosophes eux-mêmes désertent le seuil métaphysique, il advient au poète de relever là le métaphysicien; et c'est la poésie alors, non la philosophie, qui se révèle la vraie "fille de l'étonnement, " selon l'expression du philosophe antique à qui elle fut le plus suspecte.

Claudel wrote of the eyes of the poet as "two round holes which I am tempted to refer to as magnets." My own first impression of the poet—whose appearance for the rest is correct and somewhat retiring—was of those eyes, as of a man enchanted by what he contemplates. St.-John Perse's poetry has been described (by Gaëtan Picon) as "a magic positivism and pragmatism"; it is true that a materialist might (disregarding his own confessed concern with the metaphysical) so read it; but his "marvels" are more akin to maya than to matter, and suggest Conrad's "a man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea," or (from the preface to The Shadow Line)—

All my moral intellectual being is punctuated by an invincible conviction that whatever falls under the dominion of our senses must be in nature and, however exceptional, cannot differ in its essence from all the other effects of the visible and tangible world of which we are a self-conscious part. The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state.

For St.-John Perse it is true, as Blake claimed for himself, that "I see everything I paint In This World." Blake also said that "to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself; and that the world perceived by the senses is the fourth region of consciousness, externalised by the illusory philosophy of materialism: "although it appears without, it is within, in your imagination." In the poetry of Perse, the sensible world is restored as a region of the imagination; for the content of his imagination is "nature" itself.

The unbounded nature of the poet's theme, free in time as it is uncircumscribed by space, determines the prodigality of his metre. Accustomed as we are to minimal vision, our attention solicited by, and for, the pathological, the criminal, the immature, the uneducated, the ignorant and the unskilled of all sorts presenting the articulations of ignorance as communications of knowledge and achievements of art, we have all but lost the capacity for the total response his poetry demands. The "self-expression" of the individual (always more or less handicapped in one or more of the above ways) has no place in his art. Claudel called him "a Mont St. Michel immensely accentuated in an ebbing tide"; and if this mountain is generally unnoticed in post-war England this may well be because, by standards designed for measuring mole-hills, mountains are unperceived. Yet his unbounded vision of "the visible and tangible world of which we are a self-conscious part" is a liberation offered to whoever is willing to entrust himself to the great open sea ("le mouvement même de l'Etre") of the poetry of Perse.

As against the continuous and relentless attrition, the dwindling of knowledge, the coarsening of sensibility, the abdication in thought, feeling and conduct of even the conception of the best, tacitly demanded and too often accorded in defence to the all-too-common man, St.-John Perse summons to an expansion of consciousness, to a total realisation of being. He speaks as the "free man of high caste," reminding those who are determined to forget how great are the demands made by the aristocratic view of man, which alone protects and fosters the highest human potentialities: knowledge, and the freedom to translate knowledge and imagination into action (the prince) and into art (the poet, who is "brother" to the prince). For Perse, as for Plato, and Manu, the superiority of the "man of high caste" lies not in his status but in his quality of being; his superior knowledge and freedom of action. Whether as acknowledged leader, or as exile from a fallen civilisation, "the superior man" remains such by virtue of what he is. The prince-poet has given himself totally to the fullest attainable human experience, accepting those hard terms upon which alone freedom of act and of thought are given. We are again reminded of Conrad, whose heroes also are "free men of high caste," and of his phrase about "the unknown disciples of the self-imposed task." Sex and the dead, Yeats somewhere said, are the only matters serious enough to engage the thoughts of an ageing poet; and erotic love and death are the frontiers which bound the world of St.-John Perse's prince-poet: mortal, we are possessed by, but cannot possess, the immortal life which the sexual mystery confers, and death takes away; no other limits can impede the freedom of act and thought of whoever fears neither the loss of life nor of possessions; courage, magnanimity and wisdom—the aristocratic virtues—are the fruits of this proud detachment. The plebeian whine comes from those (of whatever social class, since caste and class are not coterminous) who have not looked at life and death. The sense of immortality is lost precisely when we seek to bind it to ourselves. "Il faut que vous mettez la tête dans la gueule du lion " was the memorable advice the poet once gave me; for such is the condition accorded by reality itself, that lion's-mouth ever open before us.

The sea, ancient and universal symbol of material flux, impressed by the "breath of life," in the beginning is an image from Genesis acceptable alike to Platonist and evolutionist.

M. Léger admitted a certain affinity with the thought of Teilhard de Chardin, at the same time denying indebtedness and withholding that kind and degree of admiration for the Jesuit to be found in "certain Paris salons." Such ideas, he said, had long been in the air. Yet both are discemibly of the same generation, and the vision common to both lends to the modern experience of nature an amplitude, spaciousness and purity to be found in no living or recent English writer known to me. (It is characteristic that after disclaiming any indebtedness to Teilhard he added: "But for one thing I admire him: his Order offered him freedom from his vows of obedience, in all honour; and he refused." The admiration of the poet, like the action of the Jesuit, was that of the "free man of high caste.")

"One law of harmony governs the whole world of things." The amplitude of that harmony, of the free-flowing "wave throughout the world" characterises the cadences of the verse of St.-John Perse; for verse it is (so he insists) though of very long lines, and in no way to be confused with prose-poetry; or, in England, with the cadenced poetic prose of David Jones. (Readers of Proust will remember that the two maids at Balbec were incredulous when Marcel, reading—was it?—Eloges, told them that this was "poetry.") It is difficult to attune a foreign ear, not to the sweep of the larger pattern, but to the very subtle internal cross-patterns (again like waves, whose regularity of rhythm breaks down into such variety) of rhythm, assonance, even internal rhyme. The ruling pattern is liturgical, with returning phrases which, as in an Introit psalm, define and continually reaffirm the theme.

In Vents (the "très grands vents sur toutes faces de ce monde, " "sur toutes pistes de ce monde ") recurring themes are "S'en aller! S'en aller! Parole de vivant!" and "Parole du Prodigue "; "Eâ, dieu de l'abîme "; "Et le poète aussi est avec nous "; "O vous, que refraîchit l'orage. " (St.-John Perse makes ridiculous the timid fear of the orator's vocative.) No two poems are alike, nor their imagery interchangeable. A superficial reader of Perse will be impressed by the consistency of his inimitable style, his "breath," but a closer reading reveals the architectural unity of theme, imagery and even metre within each.

Concluding his analysis of Vents, Claudel (after quoting long sections of particularly magnificent evocations of that spacious cosmology of Perse's world) exclaims, "We are a long way from Marcel Proust." Guadeloupe with its swarms of green insects and boats with white sails on tropical seas may be a long way from Combray with its lilacs and its hawthorn, the nomadic horde and the anonymous exile from the Boulevard St. Germain. St.-John Perse is himself by no means a Proustian; yet certain themes belong to the period to which both have given expression. Both are impressionists, imaginatively recreating the "minute particulars" of the sensible world; above all both are concerned with palingenesia, the restoration of all things to their primal perfection, the state of Paradise: Proust by the emancipation of memory from the bondage of time; St.-John Perse by the freedom and simultaneity of all existence within nature's long present and single now. For Proust, the element in which all is freed from time is mind itself, the only paradise the paradise we have lost, for only when twice-born in memory do things enter upon this timeless and immortal contemporaneity. For St.-John Perse all in nature is immortal and contemporaneous in so far as the many participate in the one. Like Proust, too, the poet places the supreme value not in the qualities of things but in their mere existence. In a passage in Jean Santeuil (a hundred others may be found, but I happened to be reading the lesser book) the narrator, sitting in the kitchen of the family house at Etreuilles (Combray) is speechlessly happy as the cook stirs her pans on the open fire and takes his damp shoes to dry them:

At such moments the sound of the cook's voice, saying "I should just think those shoes of yours are wet!" is pleasant in your ears, because it is something that exists, as, too, the sight of the old chemist standing by his window, absorbed in the concoction of some mixture and brightly illumined by the lamp, is also full of charm because he is.

Dans ces moments le bruit de la voix de la cuisinière disant: "Ce qu 'elles étaient mouillées, tout de même, vos chaussures, " vous impressionne agréablement parce que le bruit de voix c'est une chose qui est, comme par la fenêtre le vieux pharmacien absorbé dans un mélange et vivement éclairé par la lampe vous charme aussi parce qu 'il est.

If this be existentialism both Proust and Perse are existentialists in the existential not in the theoretical sense: for both the marvel of "les merveilles" is that they are.

But if Claudel's phrase is intended to praise the poet at the expense of the novelist, admirers of both may well see in the passage quoted an element entirely absent from the writings of St.-John Perse—the human as such. The poet stops short, in his account of man, precisely with what is (in terms of all the higher religions) precisely human in man, his individual being. The gods whom he invokes are the old pantheistic gods, "Eâ, dieu de l'abîme, " "mer de Baal, mer de Mammon, " Dionysus with the rigging of his ship entwined with vines; the many-armed, skull-adorned fertility goddess of southern India; nor does he shrink from those more barbaric Mexican deities to whom blood sacrifice was made, from a sense (so I remember the poet saying) of the inexhaustible abundance of life. Some might see in this re-immersion of man in the pre-human a post-Christian vision (if we may so describe a mode of apprehending life which Teilhard's Alpha and Omega perhaps insufficiently consecrate) essentially nihilistic. Upon the charge of nihilism this most life-praising of poets must be acquitted; even though (as Edwin Muir said also of D. H. Lawrence) the "life" he praises is "not human life as such." It is, however, a "divine" life, not some mechanistic nihil. But the creator of the Baron de Charlus is within the Christian tradition, the poet of Amers outside it.

Erotic love (and Amers is the most splendid poem known to me upon that theme) celebrates the re-immersion of man and woman, in the act of love, in the "one same wave" of the immortal and indivisible life of the cosmos: "In the divine promiscuity and man's depravation in the gods" ("Dans la promiscuité divine et la dépravation de l'homme chez les dieux….") who here represent the immortal cosmic life. For the poet man is but the crest of the advancing wave of nature; the life and the joy in which he participates is impersonal: "In the destructive element, immerse"—such, following Conrad (whose Stein was quoting his Goethe), is the invitation of his poetry.

Individual woman is but an aspect of that "universal bride," the fecund sea of life:

A long way—Claudel might have said—from the vision of Dante; yet it is a sacred poem. Having in Vents said all he (and through him the former diplomat) wished to say of our "rendez-vous avec la fin d'un âge," the poet like some modern Antony who has risen out of his own defeat, divests himself of the prince and becomes the lover. There is in Perse's erotic poem some of that dazzling quality of the barge of Cleopatra, as she, mediating the goddess Isis herself, advances to meet her lover (worthy, in the eyes of her love, to be set at "Jove's side" and attended by the page Eros). (His imagery is at all times of truly Shakespearean fertility.) In Perse's poem woman is herself the ship in which the lover puts to sea upon the occasion of existence, carried by that "one same wave" in the act of love, obscene and sacred, in which every mortal creature participates, in the hieros gamos with "l'Epouse éternelle. "

We may reflect, in passing, how little, for all the current obsession with "sex," has been written on this theme, in English, which, beside Amers, does not seem vulgar and trivial. Is it an after-image of Protestant puritanism that in place of the erotic, in Anglo-Saxon countries, has left only the pornographic?

The sea as symbol of material existence and its flux is ageold and universal—Hebraic, Neoplatonic, Hermetic, Vedantic; and woman as the foederis area who in her body bears immortal life over those dangerous waves where Odysseus sailed among marvels and perils. But in the poetry of Perse it is the existential reality rather than the symbolic analogies on other planes of the real, which are made apparent. The wave of the sea that with "such a surge … rises and finds its way up into us" might be (like the hot heart of the bird in Oiseaux whose burning is its life) the "simple fait biologique"; for the salinity of blood biologists relate to the salinity of the sea where all organic life originated;

Neither of St.-John Perse's two subsequent poems is on the same scale, or so magnificent, as Vents and Amers. Chronique (1960) is on the theme of age; and the approach to death is still a setting-forth, an éloge. Oiseaux (1966) illustrated by four lithographs by Georges Braque, a collaboration in which the poem existed first, is the poet's definition and exploration of the relation of art to nature, nature to consciousness. Classical, economical ("laconic") in contrast with the superb prodigality and amplitude of Amers, this poem is not an essay in criticism but itself exemplifies what it explores in an existential iden tity of thought and expression, comparable with the identity, in nature, of existence and being, form and life.

Of inner and outer worlds the bird (a symbol especially apt perhaps because of all creatures the bird is the most free to move in all elements and to "lose its shadow") is the unifying image. In the immediacy of primitive art, related rather to the skills of the hunter than to aesthetics, the poet finds the very point at which, in the transition from sky to eye, the image passes from nature into art; and as for Proust memories are alone freed from the restrictions of time and place, so for St.-John Perse whatever enters art enters the paradisal state of coexistence and unity; while at the same time art is itself but another region of nature. In this superb image we see what the ars poetica can achieve by means of the "mediating image and its play of correspondences, by way of a thousand chains of reactions and unusual associations" without being symbolic. Again we may think of Proust, whose rejection of "realism" was not on metaphysical grounds, but because it is in the nature of sensations to evoke those thousand associations. It is these alone, their resonances and evocations, which enrich and give meaning to the sensations which occasion them. Or again,

In entering consciousness, multiplicity enters the state of unity.

None of the poet's translators is in all ways excellent; Eliot's knowledge of French seems the most perfect; his polished renderings are faultless, linguistically, though his own dignified and processional lento at times slows down Perse's "rhythm of Being itself." Sometimes he misses the naked simplicity of St.-John Perse's images, as in the sedate 17th-century "earth is brought to bed of wonders" for "la terre enfante des merveilles "; Eliot's own practice as a poet is to evoke literary overtones and to call up the past echoed in every word and image; whereas St.-John Perse's images all alike seem to belong to a "nature" which has no past, no history, in which fossil, ephemerid, or modern city alike belong to the one here and now. His language is without echoes or penumbra. Hugh Chisholm's Vents seems to me best to catch the rhythm of the original, while Wallace Fowlie's Amers fails to do so. Denis Devlin's Exil is perhaps (after Eliot) the most poetic. Robert Fitzgerald (whose knowledge of French seems less good than any of these) does nevertheless (as in the above quotations from Oiseaux) capture the poet's absolutely modern quality, places his work in the present of the 1960s and not of the 1920s. It is not for an English reader to discuss the many untranslatable aspects of his style; every language places on reality itself different contours; even simple nouns are untranslatable; but the "play of correspondences" of his "mediating image" is generally not semantic, and is therefore not greatly weakened in translation. As in (to take another example from Oiseaux):

The complexity here is not verbal, yet the internal so-tosay valencies of the figure are as firmly established as the forces which hold together a molecule. The "long day" of the birds who follow the sun; the strength of the instinct which urges the migrant on is implicit in the "brows like new-born infants," doubly apt from the projecting rounded form of the bird's head, and the implication of a perpetual setting-forth, the creature at every moment new-born into the future. The beautiful modulation to the brow of the dolphin (bulbous also) and the swiftest-travelling creature of another element is introduced like a change of key in music. The poet (a man of the sea) has doubtless seen many dolphins in the water; but the deliberate evocation here of the dolphin of art ("old fables") brings in the legend of Arion and the dolphin as the vehicle of the poet, and of poetry itself; so that the bird with its "longue propos" (and we are here reminded that Braque's birds belong not to nature but to art) becomes also the vehicle of imagination and its "long purpose." None of this is stated yet all is implicit in the configuration of the image. Such poetry is, in Shelley's full sense, "the language of the imagination," expressing essences and relations entirely qualitative.

St.-John Perse's existentialism (if such it is) might seem opposed to the symbolist tradition which (under whatever name) stems from some form of Platonism. Neither poetic practice can be detached from that view of the nature of things in which it is grounded. The symbol presumes multiple planes of being linked both by cause and by analogy; without understanding of this metaphysical ground, symbolist poetry becomes meaningless. In Perse's existentialist use of the image a metaphysical ground is no less implicit, by his own confession. No less than the poetry of Yeats his work must remain opaque to vulgar positivism, for he too uses the term "divine," though for him divinity is existentially implicit. Perhaps the two apparently opposite modes may be compared to different phases of waves; at their point of intersection we have the existential image; at the limit of their amplitude, the analogies and resonances of the symbol. And like the symbolists, St.-John Perse not only assumes but affirms and uses as the instrument of his art the law of harmony which subsists in and unifies the cosmos; his universe is neither arbitrary nor indeterminate; and is governed by that symmetry, unity and accord in which Plotinus discovers the essence of "the beautiful."

The symbol is, besides, itself rooted in nature, and in that reading of the great Bible of the world which precedes all written books, those remote copies of the intrinsic meanings of things. I was myself dramatically reminded of this when in the summer of 1966 I saw flying over the Temple of Aesculapius at Epidaurus (of all places) an eagle with a writhing serpent in its beak. This symbol, first used as a metaphor by Homer, has accompanied European poetry and symbolic thought throughout its history, gathering on its way symbolic associations profound and various. The alchemists made of eagle and serpent figures of their mythology; Ovid, Spenser, Blake and Shelley have in turn clothed the image in literary form and symbolic connotations. But seeing the thing itself (as if a piece of writing in the sky torn loose from all these books) I thought of St.-John Perse; whose poetry re-immerses all our used images in "that original night" of Orphism, contemporaneous with every period of history and every moment of life, and gives back to us a world at every moment newly created.