SOURCE: "The Language of Flowers in Senghor's Lettres d'Hivernage," in French Studies in Honor of Philip A. Wadsworth, edited by Donald W. Tappan and William A. Mould, Summa Publications, 1985, pp. 29-39.

Published in 1973, Lettres d'Hivernage constituted a new phase in Senghor's poetic career which had hitherto been dominated by works that, on some level at least, carried a strong political or cultural message. Every previous collection illustrated various facets of the writer's theory of Negritude or recounted one of the stages in Africa's postwar identity crisis. In Lettres, however, the dominant inspiration is the poet's love for a woman, and, while not entirely abandoning the familiar dichotomies of black and white or African and European, he relegates the social issues to the background and concentrates instead on the expression of emotions which are common to us all. R. J. Sherrington describes the new orientation of these poems as "… une véritable rénovation, d'une poésie plus personnelle quoique moins ouvertement autobiographique, plus intériorisée et partant plus authentique; ce qui ne l'empêche pas, bien au contraire, d'être aussi plus universelle."¹ Not only does this collection differ from its predecessors in its subject matter, but, perhaps as a consequence of its unusual perspective, it also speaks in its own personal idiom, an immediately obvious characteristic of which is the poet's consistent use of floral imagery.²

Certainly, an abundance of nature images is a distinguishing feature of Senghor's style in all of his works, but in Lettres d'Hivernage, his references to specific flowers, flowering shrubs, and fruit- and flower-bearing trees are both more frequent and more varied. An actual count has been made which shows that from Senghor's first collection of poems through Lettres d'Hivernage there are allusions to thirty-three such plants (including wild jasmine as a flowering shrub), twenty of which appear in Lettres and eleven of which, an exact third, appear only in Lettres. Furthermore, more total references to flowering plants occur in Lettres than in any previous collection.³ The use of flowers in poetry dedicated to love and feminine beauty is a standard literary device, but Senghor's images rarely serve only as decoration. He repeatedly affirms his concept of the function of images in his discussions of the African esthetic: "L'image dépasse naturellement les apparences pour pénétrer les idées. C'est, du moins, ce que fait, presque toujours, l'image négro-africaine, qui est analogie, symbole, expression du monde moral, du sens par le signe."⁴ Thus, we should expect a more complex use of images in Lettres, one which requires a reading on a deeper level. Although no serious criticism of this work has missed the point that nature images figure importantly in the collection and some have even noted the profusion of flower images, neither has any previous study sought to examine in depth the reasons behind this peculiar feature or to establish its consequences for the work as a whole.⁵ It is therefore my purpose here to demonstrate the function of these images, to show, in effect, that, far from simply ornamenting the poems, they play a key role, the understanding of which is essential to an appreciation of the literary strength of Lettres d'Hivernage.

The thirty poems which comprise the collection take the form of letters written by the poet to the beloved during a period of separation which coincides with the West African rainy season or "hivernage." The woman, while never named directly by the writer and normally left politely in anonymity by the critics, must surely be Senghor's second wife, Colette Hubert, who regularly chose the humid months of late summer and early autumn to return for a visit to her native Normandy. Her physical description, age, nationality, and relationship to the narrator in the poems leave little doubt as to her identity, but, like the poet, I shall refer to her only in impersonal terms or as Sopé, an African term of endearment by which he identifies her. The major themes of the collection are the poet's love for the woman, their relationship, her absence, his longing. Such simple, intimate concerns stand in marked contrast to Senghor's usual preoccupation with the problems of racism and nation-building. The cycle begins with the woman's departure and the onslaught of the rains; the closing poem announces the arrival of the gentle tradewinds which coincide with the end of the tempests and the promised return of the beloved.

The limited subject and the strictly delineated period of time in which the "drama" unfolds work together to give the poems the extraordinary unity commented on by Hubert de Leusse: "Senghor a mis un soin particulier à la composition des Lettres d'Hivernage. Nul de ses ouvrages antérieurs—sauf peut-être Hosties Noires—ne possède une telle unité dans la variété."⁶ To keep us reminded of the seasonal framework which contributes so much to this unified organization, Senghor regularly refers to the way in which the changing weather affects the flora and fauna. The use of floral imagery, at least in this context, cannot be construed as gratuitous but must be considered as a necessary, underlying structural device. In the fourth poem of the collection, for example, the rains have only just begun as the poet observes the changes in nature which parallel their arrival:

Les roses altières les lauriers roses délacent leurs derniers parfums
Signares à la fin du bal
Les fleurs fanent délicates des bauhinias tigrées
Quand les tamariniers aux senteurs de citron allument leurs étoiles d'or.
Du ravin monte, assaillant mes narines, l'odeur des serpents noirs
Qui intronise l'hivernage.7

The roses and the bauhinias in decline confirm the poet's mood as established in the preceding poems, for, from the beginning, the woman's absence is a source of anguish tempered chiefly by his thoughts of her. The rose, too, is particularly significant, since, in the course of the collection, it becomes the woman's emblem, and thus it is appropriate that the fading of its flower should occur during the early stages of her absence.

Toward the end of the collection, the first indication that the woman will soon be returning also comes with the poet's noticing yet a further change in nature: "Mais déjà tu t'es annoncée aux marées de Septembre / Forte houle d'odeurs du côté des menthes sauvages." Here, the writer associates the scent of wild mint and advancing of the season which it implies with the time when his separation from the beloved will be ended. In contrast with the earlier passages, however, those images which parallel the arrival of the tradewinds are of a joyous nature:

Et s'en vinrent les Alizés, et sur leurs ailes lent rythmées
Comme des pétales de neige et de grâce
Des papillons blancs axés de noir …

Instead of the falling blossoms and threatening serpents in the fourth poem, we have a cloud of graceful butterflies. There are no flowers here, of course, but the poet describes the butterflies as petals and therefore as flower-like.

In the final poem of the cycle, light images, bird song, and the flight of bees herald the return of Sopé, and, along with a repeated reference to the odor of wild mint, there is one last floral image: "Ton parfum toujours ton parfum, de la brousse bordonnant des buissons / Plus exaltant que l'odeur du lys dans sa surrection." The surrection of the lily here in the final lines of the concluding poem mirrors the trope of the dying rose at the beginning of the letters and again reflects the new mood of the poet, elated this time at the prospect of the woman's return. In terms of the season, however, the image of the lily is out of place, and unlike the references to the roses or the wild mint which are real and present, this allusion seems to exist exclusively for its symbolic value. Like the rose, the lily, too, is a plant which denotes Europe rather than Africa; additionally, it is one by which poets traditionally describe faircomplected mistresses. A suitable symbol, then, for the poet's Norman wife, the lily also bears significant association with spring and especially with Easter, and this association has been amply foreshadowed by Senghor in spite of the fact that the actual season here is early fall. He has, indeed, already said that the end of the rainy season reminds him of spring in Europe, and in several instances, he has linked the woman's absence and the time of year with thoughts of death. In "Et Le Sursaut Soudain," for example, he cries out with anguish that he is torn between his fear of death and the horror of living; only the woman's presence can save him: "Toi seule peux me sauver mon espoir …". Elsewhere, her eyes are depicted as "forteresses contre la mort," and in yet another poem, he calls her his very being: "Lumière musique senteurs, sens sans qui je ne serais pas." That the poet's imagination should cause him to equate the woman's return with spring, the season of rebirth, and the paschal symbol of the lily provides a fitting finale for the previously developed configuration which linked death, absence, and the season together.

Carrying this analogy a little further, we have little difficulty in seeing in the Lettres a variation on the archetypal myth of the dying and reviving god or goddess. In Europe, such myths explained the barren seasons of the year as periods of mourning or sorrow for a dead or absent deity who governed fertility and the crops. Frazer's The Golden Bough abounds with examples, but the story of Demeter and Persephone is one of the most familiar. The myth cannot be derived from Senghor's poems with complete satisfaction, however, because of the differences in climatic conditions. In spite of the poet's obvious sadness, the tropical foliage remains lush and green as indicated by his frequent references to the heavy perfumes of exotic plants, feminine scents which trouble him by their association with the absent woman. The notion of sterility necessary for the archetypal reading is conveyed only by the poet's attitude toward the season—in the midst of this tropical paradise, he chooses to emphasize the dying roses—or in metaphorical terms when he describes his spirit as "plus désert que le Sahara" or his heart as "une fleur séchée" due to the beloved's absence. Obviously, the floral images are essential here to support the depiction of even a figuratively dormant landscape.

In a similar vein, another myth (or type of myth) seems also to have served as Senghor's inspiration for at least one of the pieces in the collection: the myth of Adonis. Tradition has it that when Venus mourned the death of the beautiful young man, either her tears or drops of his blood—depending on the version of the story—were transformed into a new flower, the anemone. (Interestingly, Adonis was also the object of an extensive fertility cult, and Frazer devotes considerable space to his rites.⁸) The reference which recalls the story of Adonis appears in the initial letter where, in the poet's lamenting of the woman's departure, his tears have caused the flowering of the wild jasmine whose scent reminds him of her:

Et montaient alentour, jaillissant de la lumière de l'ombre
Blanches et roses, tes odeurs de jasmin sauvage: la Feretia apodanthera
Que dans la nuit mes larmes avaient arrosée.

The implication that the lover's distress might have some creative potential provides a means for understanding the inspiration of the collection as a whole where each poem is, in a sense, a flower born from the writer's longing for the beloved. Here, at least, the floral motif takes on a dimension somewhat beyond its association with the woman and becomes a metaphor for the poetry she inspires.

In addition to the careful meshing of the writer's drama with the arrival and departure of the rainy season, a sec ond unifying feature of the Lettres arises, on yet another axis, from the imagery of place. The locus for the writer is Dakar and for the woman, France. To convey these two opposing poles of the world as it is viewed from the standpoint of the poet's personal concerns, Senghor again relies heavily on nature imagery. The previously cited references to the use of non-tropical flowers such as the rose and the lily to denote the woman are indicative. In other instances, the European flora and the African flora are placed in contrast with each other as in "Ton Soir Mon Soir" whose very title (and opening line) pave the way for the parallel images: "De la haute terrasse, le parc à mes pieds flamboyant et la mer et Gorée / Et devant toi, les vagues bruissantes des blés sur le versant des terres hautes." In the first verse, the flowering tree, the flamboyant, situates the poet in Dakar, probably in the presidential palace overlooking the sea which, in the second verse, becomes the sea of grain, the French farmland, which meets the gaze of the woman as he imagines her, too, enjoying the evening but on another continent, in another climate. The juxtaposition of the two landscapes only serves, however, to emphasize the distance between the separated lovers and sets a tone in keeping with the rest of the poem where the man turns to contemplating—with a sense of longing—the lights of the ships in the harbor.

Occasionally, references to the landscape provide the signposts for following the meanderings of the poet's mind. In this sense, they again serve as a structural device. In "Ta Lettre," we are at one moment with the poet in Senegal as he is reading a letter from the woman, but, in the next instant the scene shifts, and he is imagining Europe:

Je sens le parc en fleurs, les promenades lentes et le sous-bois
Et les douces fleurs d'ombre, la lumière des cyclamens.
Je vois l'odeur des roses, l'arôme des vins vieux qui montent
Et de la plage monte le parfum de ta peau de pain brûlé
Ta peau d'or rouge. Sourdent les senteurs des jujubiers.…

The transition from one continent to another depends chiefly here on the flora, the mentioning of the cyclamen and the rose. Each is native only to the temperate zone, and each has varieties which bloom in France during the period in question—late summer and early autumn. The writer thus indicates to the woman that the intensity of his thoughts of her are so strong that for a brief time they seem to transport him to other regions, but soon the odor of the jujube, a tropical fruit tree which could not grow in Normandy, reminds him that he is separated from her, and the reader realizes that the poet's thoughts have once again returned to Africa.

A final example of nature images used to depict the Europe/Africa dichotomy is to be found in the poem "Tu Te Languis." The poet opens this letter by reaffirming the obvious: she misses him and he misses her. He then tells how he anticipates her return at the end of the summer:

A la fin de l'été, pour chanter tes yeux tes senteurs beauté
Dieu! que je vête la chape d'or des marronniers, non! pourpre des érables sur les Laurentides
Ou sous la lune, le long pagne d'opale des peupliers au bord de l'eau.
Tu viendras, et je t'attendrai à la fin de l'hivernage.
Sous la rosée qui s'irise, tu seras comme le filao sous une neige de grâce.

Whereas in the previous examples the contrast between tropical and temperate helped to reinforce the theme of separation and the awareness of the distance between the lovers, in this poem, the opposing images have the effect of symbolizing the reunited couple, for the African has taken as his colors the blazing hues of autumn in a cooler climate, while the beauty of his blond mate is described, not by delicate French flowers, but in terms of the tall West African filao tree. Beyond their pictorial effectiveness, these lines in which both the man and the woman are each enriched by being depicted in figures normally associated with the flora typical of the other's country of origin, have a characteristically Senghorian message to impart. On one level, they aptly express the writer's philosophy of "métissage culturel," the synthesizing principle with which the proponent of Negritude early in his career replaced the notion of assimilation and which he used as a powerful defense against the Frenchman's assumption of his own cultural superiority. On another level, however, they reveal as well Senghor's idea of what love should be. In an interview which took place at about the same time as the publication of Lettres d'Hivernage, he spoke at length on the subject:

Je vous renvoie aux pages admirables que le père Teilhard de Chardin a écrites sur le couple et l'amour. Dans l'amour, nous dit-il, il s'agit, pour chacun des deux êtres, de répondre à l'appel de l'Autre, d'aller sur les ondes de l'Autre, de s'identifier à l'Autre, de se perdre dans l'Autre, et, ce faisant, d'assimiler l' être de l'Autre. C'est ainsi que les deux êtres se complètent, en s'enrichissant, se développant réciproquement.⁹

The stress which the writer places on mutuality and reciprocity between lovers makes it necessary to consider the passage quoted from "Tu Te Languis" as a great deal more than a circumstantially striking image and to read in it a poetic translation of Senghor's concept of love.

As witnessed by several of the poems previously cited, imagery related to the woman often involves flowers and especially the rose. In one poem, he dreams of her thinking of him as she stands "parmi les rosiers." Elsewhere, a mention of Tinchebray roses evokes an image of her as "une fille au coeur odorant." (Sherrington suggests that the youth of the woman in the image indicates someone else in the poet's life besides his wife, but there seems no reason why it shouldn't be merely a memory of her in days gone by, an idea which makes as much sense as the introduction of a new female interest in the middle of a cycle of poems dedicated to connubial love.¹⁰) Her hands are described as "pétales de laurier rose," and her letter is "floraison de roses." In conventional French poetry, the appearance of flower metaphors or references to flowers, including roses, in poems praising feminine charms—take Ronsard as a classic example—often operates as a means of calling attention to the ephemeral nature of those charms. In Lettres, however, Senghor explicitly announces in his "Argument" that one of his subjects is the figurative interpretation of hivernage to mean the woman in the summer or autumn of her beauty. This viewpoint provides yet another possible motive for linking the beloved with the rose, a flower which has a long blooming season and which can blossom even in the autumn. The poem "Tu Parles" reassures the woman, who is concerned about her age, that the poet continues to admire her beauty: "J'aime tes jeunes rides, ces ombres que colore d'un vieux rose / Ton sourire de Septembre, ces fleurs commissures de tes yeux de ta bouche." There is an awareness in these lines that time is passing but, unlike Ronsard, the African poet chooses not to make the woman its victim, and, through the use of floral images, he likens her beauty to that of the autumn gardens of France. Age, in fact, seems to add to her allure in the following passage: "Dans l'arrière-saison, avant que ne soient les vendanges / Jamais mais jamais tu ne seras plus pathétiquement belle." The reference to the harvest, the time which Senghor often associates with death, is unusual in this collection where autumn generally is not used to remind us figuratively of our mortality—as it might be in French Romantic poetry—but rather as a season which, like the woman in her maturity, has a special glory all its own. With respect to Europe, autumn is usually referred to against a floral background; the month of September, for example, is often mentioned in conjunction with the word "floraison" or with roses. Similarly, the end of the rainy season in Senegal has a positive connotation and even reminds the poet, as we have seen, of springtime. Thus, we have nature imagery functioning again in a way which is more than strictly ornamental, this time in a thematic role to convey the poet's admiration for the beauty of a woman who is no longer in her youth.

Over and above its relevance to the unity of the collection or these particular themes, the depiction of woman as flower or in a setting of flowers is predetermined by at least two other factors peculiar to Senghorian poetics. The first of these derives from the poet's tendency to build his verses around a series of associations normally linked by sensory images. From the first through the last poem of Lettres, a triad of sensations—light, music, and perfume—helps to conjure up memories of the beloved. In the case of perfume, the scents of flowers and fruit-bearing trees become the triggering mechanism for inspiring the poem and are instrumental in guiding the poet's thoughts. As a consequence, the allusions to flowers are often olfactory rather than visual, as in the following examples: "les odeurs de jasmin sauvage," "la fragrance des mangues," "les tamariniers aux senteurs de citron," "des jujubiers, ton parfum," "l'odeur des roses," "des orchidées odorantes," "l'odeur du lys." In contrast with the traditional device where the beauty of the woman demands to be depicted in floral similes, in Lettres, it is frequently the fragrance of the flower which reminds the poet of the woman and thereby brings the poem into being.

Not only do the flower references emerge naturally out of Senghor's penchant for the use of sensory images, they also result logically from his agrarian background and upbringing and the view of the world they imply:

The constant recourse to organic and especially vegetal imagery is an indication of a consciousness formed by an agricultural society, and shows the same kind of preoccupation with growth, with an immediate sense of the surge of life in the natural world, characteristic of an animist outlook, to which Senghor's deepest poetic inclinations approximate.¹¹

The perspective which Irele describes in the above passage suggests a further function for the nature imagery used to depict the woman in the poem; it also provides a basis for understanding the many other references to flowers and plants throughout the collection, references which do indeed appear to transform the universe into a green and growing thing. Other women besides the beloved are also described as flowers. In his reveries, the man dreams of faraway places which might give him a change of scenery, of Brazil where "les mulâtresses sont des orchidées odorantes." A memory of spring processions during his childhood depicts the women as "froufroutant dans la floraison de leurs rubans." Elsewhere, he imagines sunbathers on French beaches: "le premier soleil sur les corolles des corps blonds." The poet even speaks of himself as if he, too, had affinities with the plant kingdom; he mentions "la sève de mon sang." and tells us that his heart, in the absence of the loved one, bleeds "sur la vigne vierge," that it is like "une fleur séchée" or is the "couleur d'ampélopsis." Flower tropes are not limited, however, to human beings but are liberally scattered throughout the cosmos. He describes the sky as "les espaces noirs fleuirs d'étoiles" and the sea as "la mer prodigieuse, où fleurissent tous les poissons." Birds and butterflies are both likened to flowers, and Senghor longs for a child who might draw him pictures of flower-birds ("oiseaux-fleurs"). A relationship seems to exist in the poet's mind between happiness and flowers: Sundays are "une guirlande de bonheurs mêlés," and the promise which the woman asks the poet to make that their life together would be a happy one is depicted as a request for, among other things, "des après-midis en fleurs." Not only does the poet picture the world as a vast garden, but he also describes himself, on occasion, as a simple tiller of the soil. It is only in this humble guise that he allows himself in "Toujours 'Miroirs'" to brag a little about his own achievements: "… des mots inouis j'ai fait germer ainsi que des céréales nouvelles, et des timbres jamais subodorés / Une nouvelle manière de danser les formes, de rythmer les rythmes." Maintaining the analogy between himself and a farmer or peasant which is suggested by the verb "germer," the father of Négritude, architect of African independence, and first president of the Republic of Senegal figuratively sums up his contribution: "… je fais mûrir les rêves."

The many references to flowers and other plants which occur in Lettres d'Hivernage do indeed have the effect of rendering the poems suitably feminine and decorative. As I have shown, however, their function in this particular collection is considerably more sophisticated. In addition to serving as an appropriate emblem for the woman on several levels, floral images help to convey the necessary notions of time and place against which the letters are exchanged and which help to give the poems their remarkable unity. They further provide the writer with a mechanism by which he can give full play to his preference for sensory images, especially olfactory images, and pursue his creative technique of constructing the individual poems by means of a series of associations. Finally, the prominence of botanical terms gives us a glimpse of the way in which Senghor's formation in an agrarian society influences his perception of the world. The special focus of this study has required that some aspects of the collection be neglected or ignored, and, certainly, its beauty and effectiveness depend on a variety of techniques and images. Nevertheless, this analysis clearly proves that an understanding of the role of floral imagery in Lettres d'Hivernage contributes substantially to an appreciation of the poems and constitutes an interesting direction from which to approach the collection.

Notes

¹ R. J. Sherrington, "La Femme ambiguë des 'Lettres d'hivernage,"' in Hommage à Léopold Sédar Senghor: Homme de Culture (Paris: Presence Africaine, 1976), p. 278.

² See Hubert de Leusse, Des "Poèmes" aux "Lettres d'Hivernage" Senghor, Profil d'une oeuvre. No. 50 (Paris: Hatier, 1975) for a discussion of other stylistic elements which distinguish this collection, i.e., its vocabulary, pp. 83-84, and its strophic structure, p. 88.

³ See tables in Gusine Gawdat Osman, L'Afrique dans l'univers poétique de Léopold Sédar Senghor (Dakar. Les Nouvelles Editions Africaines, 1978), pp. 117-120.

⁴ Léopold Sédar Senghor, "Langage et poësie nëgro-africaine," in Liberté I: Négritude et Humanisme (Paris: Seuil, 1964), p. 161.

⁵ In addition to the article by Sherrington and the book by Leusse cited above, another work which deals in a major way with Lettres d'Hivernage is Lamine Diakhaté, Lecture libre de Lettres d'Hivernage et d'Hosties Noires de Léopold Sédar Senghor (Dakar: Les Nouvelles Editions Africaines, 1976).

⁶ Leusse, p. 86.

⁷ Leopold Sédar Senghor, Poèmes, Collection "Points" (Paris: Seuil, 1973), p. 222. Although Lettres d'Hivernage also appeared separately in 1973 through Editions de Seuil, I have chosen to cite from the edition which includes most of Senghor's previous works as well because it is more widely available. All further references to Lettres d'Hivernage will be taken from this edition and page numbers indicated in parentheses in the text.

⁸ See James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (1922; rpt. New York: Macmillan, 1958), pp. 376-403.

⁹ Léopold Sédar Senghor quoted in Mohamed Aziza, Léopold Sédar Senghor: La Poésie de l'action. Conversations avec Mohamed Aziza (Paris: Stock, 1980), p. 152.

¹⁰ Sherrington, pp. 287-288.

¹¹ Abiola Irele, ed., Selected Poems of Léopold Sédar Senghor (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977), p. 26.