‘La neige piétinée est la seule rose’: Poetry and Truth in Yves Bonnefoy
[In the following essay, Lawler underscores the search for truth in the poetry of Début et fin de la neige.]
Can poetry aspire to a kind of truth? Is it possible, two hundred years after Goethe, to think of a convergence? Do we not know that the gods have disappeared, that the myths have small virtue, that language is deceptive? Char calls poetry and truth “synonymous,” but his vision is as unarguable as the Sorgue. On the other hand, Yves Bonnefoy, from as early as his Traité du pianiste (1946), plies the status of poetry with searching questions. He recognizes that he had to break his allegiance to Surrealism, for the Surrealists erred in confusing dream with illumination. Yet they were right in their pursuit of a vraie vie. Bonnefoy demands of himself a poetry that will advance, in the greatest openness of the sensibility, to an achieved perception. Dream is a necessary resource, but he will be alive to the lures of the seductive image, the facile rhythm. If the origin is desire, the end is awareness, each poem being qualified by the next in the way that each of his collections takes up the earlier ones. Thus, when he describes the life of a writer, he does so in terms of an existential pursuit. “Il n'y a pas que des livres,” he observes in his Leçon inaugurale au Collège de France (1982); “il y a des destinées littéraires, où chaque ouvrage marque une étape: ce qui semble indiquer un désir de mûrir à soi.”1
To come to maturity: nothing shows this process more clearly than Début et fin de la neige which was published by the Mercure de France in the spring of 1991. It is the most recent of fourteen books of poetry, to which nineteen volumes of essays and narratives serve as complement. The mass of Bonnefoy's work is splendid, especially when one compares it with that of other French poets in the second half of the twentieth century. Yet I would wish to emphasize not only his productivity and formal breadth and reach, but his growth as artist and thinker. La Vérité de parole (1988) and Entretiens sur la poésie (1990) offer the most sustained discussion of poetry and poetics since Valéry; while the latest collection shows him writing at the peak of his art.
Début et fin de la neige comprises twenty-four poems arranged in five sections. (It is followed by a short piece, “Là où retombe la flèche,” linked to it by more than one trait but of a different inspiration; I shall therefore limit my remarks to the major work.) The title brings to mind Bonnefoy's use of oppositions in naming his books, whether these are explicit—Anti-Platon, Du mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve—or implicit—Hier régnant désert, Dans le leurre du seuil, Ce qui fut sans lumière. Attention is directed to a division as fertile as a Claudelian “partage.” Petrarch (the epigraph to Début et fin de la neige is taken from the Canzoniere), the Renaissance architects (“O mes amis”), the ancient philosophers (Aristotle, Lucretius) propose a balance like a childhood of the spirit. The poet, however, must live with other premises as he inscribes a ceaseless dialectic.
The intertext is obliquely suggested. Certainly Baudelaire is present in the course of a verse paragraph that refers to a train journey through a snowstorm, at one point of which the poet happens to see in the pages of a neighbor's newspaper a large portrait of Baudelaire—“Toute une page / Comme le ciel se vide à la fin d'un monde / Pour consentir au désordre des mots” (36). Disorder, not order, since the photograph is a manner of epiphany, or a Surrealist lucky chance. Baudelaire is a sign; but Début et fin de la neige seems to me to record the passage of another poet who left his mark. Saint-John Perse published Neiges in 1944, at a time when France was still occupied and the world at war.2 Perse turns to snow to tell of patience and expectancy: “Epouse du monde notre patience, épouse du monde notre attente! …” We know that Bonnefoy considers Perse to be one of the very few modern French poets who have found a truth in nature—“la réalité naturelle dans son évidence glorieuse,” “une immédiateté, ‘autrefois’ donnée, aujourd'hui lointaine et comme interdite.” The homage is significant. Bonnefoy, although not an “Atlantic man” as Perse called himself, could admire the solemn sweep of the Perse apostrophes, like those of Neiges:
Et nous ravisse encore, ô monde! ta fraîche haleine de mensonge! …
The gravity, the self-awareness are close to Bonnefoy, even the ceremonial syntax of inversion, whose analogue occurs in Début et fin de la neige: “Te soit la grande neige le tout, le rien …”, “Te soient ces branches qui scintillent la parole …” (43).
On the other hand, we can hardly be further from the central thrust of Perse. Bonnefoy does not seek Perse's hieratic grandeur but goes to the opposite extreme: not solemnity but intimacy, not incantation but reflexion, not the untrodden but the trodden snow that tells the tensions of reality and desire. It appears to me that Début et fin de la neige sublates Neiges in the way of a calling heard and answered in the most personal terms.
Bonnefoy gives us a sequence in which the lyrical élan is constantly surveyed by an exacting eye. We are held by a language alert to errors of commission or omission. The unit is not the well-made poem, the four-square piece, the text woven with an unbroken thread, but rather the total collection with its diverse moments of time, mood, thought. Poetry becomes a self-qualifying whole, free in form—unmetered, unrhymed—and composed in the way of a Symbolist book or a musical composition. So the fifteen sections of the long first part chronicle the day, from one dawn to the next, of the first snowfall of the season (“La grande neige”), like the successive strands of an ample movement in which “enchevêtrer,” “se désenchevêtrer,” “enchevêtrement” signal points of junction and disjunction; or the repetitions of “écharpe,” “feuilles,” “lumière”; or the gamut of colors—white, green, yellow, blue, red.
The opening lines have the brevity of a haiku in which the poet discovers the drama inherent in nature:
Première neige tôt ce matin. L'ocre, le vent
Se réfugient sous les arbres.
(13)
Time writes an instant of vulnerability that is also perhaps an intimation of eternity, a flight that is also stillness, a shadow that is also dream. It is the meeting of two worlds:
Un peu de vent
Ecrit du bout du pied un mot hors du monde.
(13)
The small (“un peu”), the tangential (“du bout du pied”) are a deferred revelation. Words dissolve into the whiteness of the page before beginning again on a moment of reflexion—the poet recalls the day before—and retrospection—he looks at the mirror behind him. The world has become pale like a snow-charged sky or a glass that allows fresh perceptions:
Neiger
Se désenchevêtre du ciel.
(14)
Snow untangles itself from the sky, the present from the past, thought from dream, image from mirror. The sound of voices, a plough transformed by snow, stir the house of memory in which the poet is a child again, enchanted by the play of his breath on the windowpane as he looks out on the features of nature. In a few lines he relives the wonder of infancy: “A ce flocon / Qui sur ma main se glisse …” A surge of emotion causes him to want to dedicate his life to the beauty of a snowflake. He would wish to be no less pure—“Un instant simplement: cet instantci, sans bornes”—so as to translate the welling heart. Yet the poem swerves on an adversative by which gain becomes loss like the melting flake:
Mais déjà il n'est plus
Qu'un peu d'eau qui se perd
Dans la brume des corps qui vont dans la neige.
(16)
The hendecasyllable has a Dantesque resonance: mortal forms vanish, gray on gray, snow to water. Whereas the poet could imagine, a few lines before, his happiness unlimited, he sees now the finitude of happiness.
The word “illusion” must be pronounced—illusion of this flake, illusion of the poppy growing last summer among dry stones. The lyrical moment has led to disappointment. Yet is there nothing left but illusion? If illusion there is, then there is also promise like that of the apples of the supreme enchantress:
Circé
Sous sa pergola d'ombres, l'illuminée,
N'eut pas de fruits plus rouges.
(17)
The injection of myth takes the poem to another register. We recognize the eternal drama of promise and reality, which the poet is called to live ever again. He finds in the snow not only a mythical aura but a properly religious one that leads him to a Christian frame of reference: “Madone de miséricorde de la neige” (18). Lightness, mist, embroidery: snow becomes the goddess of mercy in whose praise language echoes the return to a mother's breast:
Contre ton corps
Dorment nus
Les êtres et les choses, et les doigts
Violent de leur clarté ces paupières closes.
(18)
The divine figure is warmly consoling, discreetly sensual.
Is this ultimate reality? Can the poet enter the rose-garden? The medieval imagery evokes the quest for the paradisal gate and the lost mother:
Il neige.
Sous les flocons la porte
Ouvre enfin au jardin
De plus que le monde.
(19)
All seems to have come to ripeness since the gate is open. But at this very time the link is severed: a trivial happening interrupts the dream as the poet's scarf tears on some rusty metal; a fortuitous event is enough to destroy the exultant vision. He learns once more the irony indissociable from the world: “et se déchire / En moi l'étoffe du songe” (19).
However, the next poem (“Les Pommes”) does not give way to melancholy or regret. The laconic verse allows no indulgence in self-pity: the poet refuses to linger, resolutely begins again, asks himself a question which appears to be a non-sequitur but which in fact affirms anew his confidence in nature. Not by solipsism, but by a sensitive contact with the natural substance of things will a way be found:
Et que faut-il penser
De ces pommes jaunes?
Hier, elles étonnaient, d'attendre ainsi, nues
Après la chute des feuilles …
(20)
The religious apprehension is set aside for a lovely encounter with apples as crisp as Williams's wheelbarrow. They are women naked on the bare trees of winter, but the snow clothes them in delicate fashion:
Aujourd'hui elles charment
Tant leurs épaules
Sont, modestement, soulignées
D'un ourlet de neige.
(20)
“Charment” reminds us of Circe, yet establishes the difference: the image is no longer mythical but humanly close. The question asked—“What are we to make of these yellow apples?”—is not answered, though we know that the rift between poet and snow is healed, for “charment” calls as much on Greek karis as on Latin carmen.
“J'avance … je perçois … on ne comprend pas … l'on voit …”—the movement is toward the abstraction of a universal self. The poet's eyes, closed to apples and snow (“J'ai fermé les yeux …”), are open to the words he is using as if they were as random and as potentially fruitful as the snow, “Qui tourbillonne, se resserre, se déchire” (21). They speak to him with all the memory they contain like leaves beneath flakes, or earth beneath the winter cold, or a mind barely visible beneath the faded ink of an old letter. It is as if he were spoken to by a person he cannot name or explain. The language of this internalized snow has many mute e's—musical rests, mental pauses—like a poem in which the metaphors foreshadow rather than state a meeting. At the same time it bears the presentiment of fingers that touch:
On dirait,
Dès qu'il neige plus dru,
De ces mains qui refusent d'autres mains
Mais jouent avec les doigts qu'elles refusent.
(22)
The poet multiplies analogies in an effort to define a presence that teases, rejects, connects no less elusively than the snow.
Can there be a final sense? The fine tissue of familiar reality has disappeared in the snowfall. But the poet, this self-conscious user of language, refers to the Poetics to confirm the value of playfulness, the worth of clarity. For Aristotle language works to a purpose like snow or bees or water. “Comme” occurs three times (23), affirming by the emphatic use of simile that criticism reads Aristotle awry when it treats him as a mere rhetorician. The philosopher, like the poet, does not refuse the simple, which for him is not a pre-conceptual revelation, but the coincidence of language and being: “C'est la transparence qui vaut …” (23).
Another philosopher bears witness in the domain of words and things. Lucretius described the physical universe in a way suggestive of modern atomic theory:
Lucrèce le savait:
Ouvre le coffre,
Tu verras, il est plein de neige
Qui tourbillonne.
(24)
The Epicurean vision of atomic dynamism is put in the metaphorical frame of the modern poem; fusion and diffusion become the life and death of two words, two shadows, night and dream, white and red—carefree and joyful in the manner of flakes that melt in their “peu de mort” (24).
What anguish can resist such limpidity? In one of the most beautiful moments of the sequence, the poet sets aside philosophers and abstract thought to address his soul, for he is able to declare the existence of this animula blandula: “Ame, que voulais-tu / Que tu n'aies eu de naissance éternelle?” (25). The world, for the religious sensibility, is decked for a feast comparable to first love, when flowers, leaves and music hold the heart. The self believes itself to be born to happiness like snow-covered nature:
Mais des corolles, des feuilles y sont brodées,
Et déjà la musique se fait entendre
Dans la salle voisine, illuminée.
Une ardeur mystérieuse te prend la main.
Tu vas, le cœur battant, dans la grande neige.
(25)
The poet beckons to medieval lyric on the one hand, to Wordsworthian elegy on the other. Nature is the mistress of long desire.
The next poem, “Noli me tangere” (26), deepens emotion by a religious insight more poignant than that of “La vierge de miséricorde” (18). The words of the title are those of Jesus to Mary Magdalene after his resurrection, which designate in Latin as in the French form given in the ninth line (“‘Non, ne me touche pas’, lui dirait-il”) a sacred inviolability. Yet the speaker is not the poet but a snowflake, the most holy being the most fragile. (I think again of Claudel in Cent phrases pour éventails: “Seule la rose est assez fragile pour exprimer l'Eternité.”3) The imagery of the garden returns, and it seems that the soul can at last gain admission to a domain in which the past is without loss, the present without sadness, the future without grief:
sans souvenir
Du tombeau, sans pensée que le bonheur,
Sans avenir
Que sa dissipation dans le bleu du monde.
(26)
Four conditionals (“entrerait,” “pourrait,” “dirait,” “serait”) propose a bounding hope, in relation to which refusal is tantamount to consent. “Mais même dire non serait de lumière”: the adversative, the infinitive used nominally, the conditional designate an ideal resolution, although this dream is conscious of its own tenuousness.
Nevertheless the fifteen poems of “La grande neige” do not end on an imminent gnosis. The poet again finds real time (“Juste avant l'aube …”), real action (“Je sors …”), lucidity (“l'esprit … plus clair …”), but also new questions (“Dort-il … ?”). The snowfall has ended; the snow lies like a pool of blue water shining in the darkness. The poet goes down the stoop, feels the cold in his ankles, moves from speculation to sensation. But his night of poetry has not been lived in vain.
Il semble que l'esprit en soit plus clair,
Qui perçoit mieux le silence des choses.
(27)
The discovery is not what he thought it might be a poem ago. Awareness is achieved, whose sense he takes into himself rather than enunciates. Not for now, then, any conclusion, but the evocation of an unseen chipmunk which may have already gone out into the snow from under its woodpile. It writes a sign whose formulation is left unspoken: “Je vois d'infimes marques devant la porte” (27). By this littleness the poet calls up all of concrete nature. Does it perhaps signify trust, or simplicity, or acceptance of the rhythms of the seasons like sleep and waking, death and life? For now, he has no compulsion to gloss the image.
The second half of the book is made up of four parts that comprise nine poems more expansive than before. Tone and mood are meditative as if this were the echo and deep amplification of the previous pieces in the manner of recitatives after brief measures, musing after experience. In the first of these, “Les Flambeaux,” the poet invokes the snow that lies on the ground, his voice weaving a sinuous way in sentences as long as twenty-two lines. The time is that of silence between one fall and the next; the space is that of light between the “embuement” on the windowpanes and the “étincellement” on the white ground which is now spread out like a table of plenty—“la grande table.” The poet has seen torches burning beneath the snow-clad trees as for a banquet—lamps, mirrors—and he would wish his words to resemble them in brightness, freedom, sensibility. For a moment he thinks that a single word, like a whirling flake, might save the world. Can this possibly be? Is this what the snow wants to say? (I think of Mallarmé, who spoke of the vouloir dire of natural objects.):
Et tel plus lent et comme égaré s'éloigne
Et tournoie, puis revient. Et n'est-ce dire
Qu'un mot, un autre mot encore, à inventer,
Rédimerait le monde? Mais on ne sait
Si on entend ce mot ou si on le rêve.
(32)
Coming in the midst of simple words, “rédimerait” is as rare as the flake the poet imagines. The word refers to the payment of a debt, the repurchase of a privilege, but here it is also charged with the soteriological force of English “redemption.” Hope is great, even if tempered by the conditional tense and the subsequent adversative and negative; dream may be only dream.
The chipmunk in “La grande neige” has already shown the scene to be American. Now the title “Hopkins Forest” makes the reference explicit as a series of recollections is strung together like a personal memoir. The ample movement begins in a casual way:
J'étais sorti
Prendre de l'eau au puits auprès des arbres …
(35)
The narrative mode is a prelude to the expression of wonder as a group of stars as red as a brazier appear on the horizon; and similar wonder comes when the poet returns inside to his book in which the words resemble the sky he has just seen, or an abyss with indecipherable constellations, or a portrait of Baudelaire. Through a glass, darkly. The poet remembers this and other signs which became his objects of reflexion during one past autumn when he walked in the New England forest. (May we not fancifully surmise the special congeniality of a name that recalls a poet who celebrated sacramental nature in its particularity?) He learned to know non-conflictual oppositions in the forest's large embrace of life and death, heard laughter like a resurrection, saw the simultaneity of white and color:
C'était encore la couleur, et mystérieuse
Comme un qui sortirait du sépulcre et, riant:
“Non, ne me touche pas”, dirait-il au monde.
(37)
He learnt the continuousness of the visible and the invisible, present and past. Having lived by snow, he now can hear a whisper fertile in sense: “Et je revois alors tout l'autre ciel, / J'entre pour un instant dans la grande neige” (37).
“Hopkins Forest” is a moving testimony to past experience. The poet returns to the present in “Le tout, le rien,” whose title gives a philosophical bearing. The prosody finds the musical regularity of twelve quatrains arranged in three groups of four. Neither alexandrines nor decasyllables, the lines hover around the evasive hendecasyllable of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Verlaine, and Rimbaud. The poet speaks to the young child for whom this last snow of the season is the first snow of life. In the end is the beginning; in death are surprise, cry, laughter; the child is father to the man.
et l'enfant
Est le progéniteur de qui l'a pris
Un matin dans ses mains d'adulte et soulevée
Dans le consentement de la lumière.
(41)
Such happiness is not possession: the poet knows he must not try to hold the world or the child to himself, but rather to dispossess himself in the act of naming. Poetry is not seclusion but inclusion, and Bonnefoy's definition is memorable: “Une façon de dire, qui ferait / Qu'on ne serait plus seul dans le langage” (42). So the lesson, unarticulated before, can be drawn in the form of a blessing. May the child's desire be in the likeness of snow, encompassing everything, seizing nothing (“Les mains ne s'agrippant qu'à la lumière,” 43); may its words be a way of glimpsing and not appropriating (“Sinon tu ne dénommerais qu'au risque de perdre,” 43); may its values be light and shade and not any banal formula (“De la colline dans l'échancrure des arbres,” 43); may almond blossom and water relay the snow so that the dream of joy does not end. The anaphoras (“Te soit. … Te soient … Te suffisent …”) stylize the address like a litany.
The book concludes on the four sections of “La seule rose,” the title of which suggests a mystical finality. The poet has left the country for the city and, as he walks in empty streets still covered by snow, it is as if he himself were a child once more and the buildings around him worthy of the Italian Renaissance architects; as if man-made forms had become flowers—“D'un seul grand trait floral” (47)—and matter were free of gravity. To look at the city under snow is to experience hope like a growth of new grass (“regain”), to touch the snow is to discover oneself a child in an open field with the bees humming and the snowflakes changed to flowers or honey: “Ce que j'ai dans mes mains, ces fleurs, ces ombres, / Est-ce presque du miel, est-ce de la neige?” (48). Time disappears on this city threshold at which the poet stands, just as on a threshold linking memory and desire (“car peut-être / Je dors, et rêve, et vais par les chemins de l'enfance,” 49).
Is this, then, the goal? Will the book end with a palimpsest on which the adult finds the child, the snow a summer meadow in the manner of a Proustian “peu de temps à l'état pur” or an ultimate epiphany? The last page does not transcend contradictions for it affirms the distance that separates the world from golden numbers. Perfection lies on the other shore which the poet sees but cannot reach; it fortifies him but gives no guarantee. Whatever his dream, he cannot forget that the snow is not untrodden. Yet it is precisely the awareness of such imperfection that allows him to summon his energies. “L'imperfection est la cime,” he writes in Hier régnant désert (1958). The words on which his most recent book closes are analogous, but won in respect of this particular quest elaborated, this song-cycle completed:
La forme la plus pure reste celle
Qu'a pénétrée la brume qui s'efface.
La neige piétinée est la seule rose.
(49)
The virginal is not a place of refuge. Paradoxes encapsulate the tension by which the poet holds himself ready in mind and soul.
I take Début et fin de la neige to stand high in modern poetry for the purity of its commitment. Bonnefoy demonstrates an admirable poise that consistently chooses the lesser melody, the simpler word, the natural image—at once signified and signifier—of a rare measure. His poetry embodies a truth, which is alertness to the dual imperatives of lyricism and lucidity. As he asks in Le Nuage rouge (1977), in terms that underwrite his latest work: “Qu'est-ce qu'une foi qui doute de soi non par accident mais par essence?”
Notes
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The following works of Yves Bonnefoy are cited in the text: Du Mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve (Paris: Mercure de France, 1953); Hier régnant désert (Paris: Mercure de France, 1958); Anti-Platon (Paris: Galerie Maeght, 1962); Dans le leurre du seuil (Paris: Mercure de France, 1975); Le Nuage rouge (Paris: Mercure de France, 1977); Leçon inaugurale de la chaire d'Etudes comparées de la fonction poétique (Paris: Collège de France, 1982); Ce qui fut sans lumière (Paris: Mercure de France, 1987); La Vérité de parole (Paris: Mercure de France, 1988); Entretiens sur la poésie (Paris: Mercure de France, 1990); Début et fin de la neige, suivi de Là où retombe la flèche (Paris: Mercure de France, 1991).
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Saint-John Perse, Neiges. Œuvres complètes. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1972).
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Paul Claudel, Cent phrases pour éventails. Œuvre poétique. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1957).
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