Yves Bonnefoy

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The Poet and the Voice

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SOURCE: Caws, Mary Ann. “The Poet and the Voice.” In Yves Bonnefoy, pp. 4-20. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984.

[In the following essay, Caws explores the major themes and images of On the Motion and Immobility of Douve and Hier régnant désert.]

L'Anti-Platon (The Anti-Plato [abbreviated AP]), an odd series of nine brief prose poems published in 1947, opens with a call to human specificity, in opposition to the realm of vague Platonic Ideas. Bonnefoy will never relax his concern with the particular, and even in moments of his greatest temptation toward another land, a crossroads to another life, he maintains his visible loyalty to the here and now, to this land and the range of things which are its furnishings, seen in detail or in a wider perspective.

“And now this object: a horse's head larger than life, containing a whole town, with its streets and its ramparts running along between the eyes, wedding the winding path to the length of the nose” (AP, 11). Like a contemporary vanitas, the object here is a stark reminder of mortality or memento mori, including a death skull, a candle, and a glass; a meaningful and typical assortment of symbols of everyday living and its necessary end, this vision is all the more terrible in that a horse's head replaces the ordinary human skull, as if in mockery. Moreover, the everydayness is intensified; the tiny model town is more “civilized” and organized than the usual assortment of miscellaneous things which would be placed upon the vanity table by the skull, while its insertion into the animal head sets up an anamorphic play between two ways of seeing, between the animal and the cultural. As for the balance between and real and the artificial, the town is constructed of wood and cardboard, but illuminated, on the bias (still the unsettling angle of “this thing”), by the real moon. Then suddenly the anamorphic play is accentuated by the skull's turning into a woman's head, turning on the disc of a phonograph. Multiple forms of intensification are used here: surprise, aggrandization (of the head by the town inside it), substitution (of the animal for the human), and then resubstitution (of the human construction for the animal). When a woman's head replaces the horse's head, more horrible still in its chaotic appearance with the hair streaming about the wildly turning head upon the phonograph, the music of harmony is replaced by this melodramatic disharmony.

The presentation is deliberately shocking in its offsets and contrasts: this initial image is followed by the peace of the reeds, the stone, and the water of the countryside, the calm suddenly interrupted by the last images: “robes tachées” (“spotted dresses”), blood-covered laughter, and the absence of any gaze whatsoever. Such a horrible absence and equally horrible presence provide an unequaled combination of “choses d'ici,” or earthly things, weighing in the long run more than the perfection of Ideas. The anti-Platonic theme initiates a violence full of uneasy and monstrous forms: a hatchet falls, the woman's head is thrown into flames, and a statue of blood is sacrificed by knife edge to a “funereal dialectic” or rebirth and division (13). The country, once seen with its water and stones, is now composed of blood, blackened flesh and death: death as the illuminating wound, which, by the certainty of suffering, clarifies all about it, including the subjective and occasionally ambivalent world of poetry. Here it provides also a theater for the struggle of love and death, a dramatic liebestod to be taken up again in a broader sweep, within the nineteen parts of the Mouvement et immobilité de Douve, for which this earlier poem is in some sense a preparation—a few images recur: the penetration of the body into summer, the black grass “like a funereal cloak,” a cry, the fissure in the earth. Illumination also, because, surrounded by a set of teeth buried in the earth, this stone at the middle of it all, this touchstone of sacrifice, lies at the very center of the turning world: “From having touched this stone the lamps of the world spin, the secret lighting circulates” (19).

The theater of the death of Douve, the name signifying at once a depression in the ground and woman's proper name, is sketched in the opening section of Du Mouvement et de l'Immobilité de Douve (Of the Movement and the Immobility of Douve, 1953), which enlarges upon the nine sections of the poem just mentioned. Douve is surely one of the most haunting of contemporary literary creations, for she takes shape all at once in an unforgettable scene of violence and pathos and love. She is seen running, battling the wind, and being torn apart by the forces of death. It is once again summer, and the sun and wind spotlight specific gestures, as the ivy, this simple image torn and bruised, appearing in the essays as the very signal of presence itself, is chosen over any vague Idea: (“rather the ivy”). We remember from the preceding volume that Platonic Ideas cannot approach the strength of the specific object, either for violence or for affection, and can “only tinge the lips.” It is only in the small details—a sunny patch left on a windowpane at the coming of night, a spot of light upon a mountain, or a single leaf of an unnamed tree or its accompanying ivy—that life is felt as something beyond a generality, and as the transcendence, already, of the death to come. And yet the specificity is accompanied by the very incompletion of such statements as “Rather the ivy. … Rather the wind. … Rather, on some mountainside. …” They are left open to all possible comparisons. Rather than what?—the choice may be made elsewhere, but it need not be specified here, and the preference seems all the stronger for the incompletion.

The poem is anything but gentle: the wind is stronger than any memory, so that the present occupies the entire scene. The dress blows about, in tongues of flames, until the beating wings of wind and their exultation are perceived as celebrating both death and life. But directly after this violent “beating” wind, the poet describes the rain beating down, as the heart beat before. Wind and rain, dream and vision mix in a natural metaphor and a human reaction. Douve's gestures, immemorial and luminous, those of deathless beauty and ceaseless birth, then slow down: “Gestures of Douve, already slower, black gestures” (27). In seeking death, she somehow clarifies life. For the opposites will always meet within Bonnefoy's vision, especially in this period: with rain and a subterranean river there mixes the “fire” of her gestures; this arm inflames, is raised, and falls; the shadow and the mist cover over the gaze shared by the woman and the poet.

Now the pounding of the arteries, within which are felt the beating down of rain and the roll of drums, is replaced by a terrible and disintegrating music in her hands, knees, head, as the facial muscles dislocate, the eyes are ripped out, and the body is extended horribly under a swarm of insects. Even the dress, once pure and flaming, is now soiled from the oil of the lamp: the morbidity of the imagery prepares the rôle of the poet as watcher, as the observer of her secret knowledge—of the ceaseless corruption of her eyes, now clouding over. The strident “exultation” of insects is now heard in an atrocious music, displacing all images to leave behind only an imageless truth, as the insects advance in an endless pitiless assault upon the body. Resplendent with a somber fire, she has access to regions lower and lower as the violence and the horror subside.

Solemnly and not without grandeur, an incantation in the form of a hymn to death now rises, marked by anaphoric final repetition: now, now, now, drawing attention to the vividness of the moment, this “présence exacte”:

Le ravin pénètre dans la bouche maintenant,
Les cinq doigts se dispersent en hasards de forêts maintenant,
La tête première coule entre les herbes maintenant
… et c'est nous dans ce vent dans cette eau dans ce froid maintenant.

(39)

(The ravine penetrates the mouth now,
The five fingers are dispersed in forest random now,
The head first of all slips among the grass now,
… and we are in this wind in this water in this cold now.)

The observer and the reader are drawn into the salutation of earth, which appears to have neither sadness nor resignation to it. The blood, appearing exactly where the poem is said to tear apart, renders the poem living, and in the intensely oxymoronic atmosphere already pointed out—flame/cold, birth/death—tension marks the fitting site for trial. As if the poem were some matter to be rent asunder, on which to inflict damage and thus prove the vitality of the stuff inside: “You had to appear at the secret border of a funereal place where your light dims; you had to submit to trial” (40). Along with the dying figure in the poem, the poem undergoes the trial of death, in order to live. Even the death “infused in her laughter” only contributes to the dazzle and brilliance of her theatrical gestures: she, and the poem, pass the test.

Finally, this Douve is seen as an aperture, cut into the world, and into its thickness, an opening through which we learn to perceive. She is the first figure loved and lost as the drama opens, always, through her presence even at her most faraway instants, denying absence and unfeeling in the world about her, forcing awareness upon an erstwhile numbness: thus her description as an “ouverture dans l'épaisseur du monde” (“opening in the thickness of the world”). Nevertheless, the tragedy of this poem is essential: a nineteenth part, coming directly after the concluding encounter of poet and the dazzling vision, and written in two stanzas of free verse instead of the prose of the preceding eighteen parts, contains the history of an attempt at our own evasion of the everyday into another zone: breathing the initial cold, perceiving afresh, we rise into another atmosphere, but are only momentarily able to imitate a figure's flight, falling back again upon the ground like a wounded bird or an arrow whose feathers break at a touch, like some lesser Icarus or some Phoenix in utter failure.

The passing of the world's opacity into perception was, after all, only attempted through the gesture of another, and we cannot possibly imitate or reincarnate another's triumphant bareness; if, then, the final test of perception is to be identification with the flight and fate of another figure, no matter how close, we are to fail. Imagination, admiration, even union, are not the genuine mutual interpenetration of that denseness of the phenomenal world which we most passionately desired. Myths are not so easily transformed into realization: the essential solitude of this poem gives to the title its fullest poignancy: in a theater, one observes, identifies in imagination, but remains an observer. Poetic perception is not necessarily, at least not so far, action.

Of course, the volume does not end there, neither with the theater nor in the observer's failure as actor. The voice of the poet will from now on address itself to other things than to the failure of identification: the gestures of dying, once so dazzling to the onlooker, are now echoed in a section of “Derniers gestes” (“Last Gestures”). The travel of Douve beyond death on a path of trees, these closing after her in order to guarantee her continued brightness even as she becomes nothing, across the river Lethe of forgetfulness along the path she only can take, “this going / Along so much night and in spite of all this river” (43), links her fate to that of the narrator, through the mediation of nature and the word.

For these gestures of crossing and those made by the poet, like some ancient rite of passage, and the gestures of linking already signaled by the image of the threshold, which will be all-important in Bonnefoy's work and to which the last chapter of this book refers, are like the gesta of the medieval chanson de geste: deeds recounted, lending dignity to the telling word and guaranteeing both to teller and listener emotional participation. The brief verses following the grave salute to the parting gesture of Douve are eloquent:

Que saisir sinon qui s'échappe,
Que voir sinon qui s'obscurcit,
Que désirer sinon qui meurt,
Sinon qui parle et se déchire?

(44)

(What to seize but what is escaping,
What to see but what is darkening
What to desire but what is dying
Speaking and tearing itself apart?)

Silence is above all the object of desire, the word heard and seen as departing always. What is not repeated and not glimpsed again beyond its own temporary moment is infused with nostalgia and longing, as in Baudelaire's sonnet to the passerby, to which Bonnefoy so often refers: “Ô toi que j'eusse aimée / Ô toi qui le savais!” (“You whom I would have loved / You who knew it!”)

The single possible offering acceptable to the person departing forever, as to the dead, would be a speech cast in its very materiality like a blanket “over origin and night.” A Maenad consumed by fire in her dancing, Douve disappears by her name into her action to which the poet is the only witness, as she hurls herself into the flames of the sea. This clash of elements is responsible for her intense verticality lit from above, as if we were seeing the dance from some terrace or parapet far above the water where she is hurled. So contemplated, she is at once fleeting, as in a game, and in an attitude of supplication, as in the ancient representations of Maenads. The somber light and the flickering fire place her desolation in a still theatrical setting: “Tout se défait, pensai-je, tout s'éloigne” (“Everything is undone, I thought, everything takes its distance,” 50).

And then it is a question of nomination: “Vrai nom” (“True Name”). The True Name given to the dead reminds us of the true place spoken of elsewhere, and leads to the “Vrai Corps” (“True Body”): the act of naming is the essential act of this poetry, and only the poet can effectively name. As a double act of love and hostility, of spirituality and materiality, of freeing and of tying down, the poet opposes her even as he names her: “I am your enemy who will show no pity” (51). Through interdependence of contraries, even the purest words depend upon matter, as spirit depends upon body, meaning upon naming, poetry upon presence and upon the acknowledgment of death inserted in life: “Il te faudra franchir la mort pour que tu vives, / La plus pure présence est un sang répandu” (“In order to live you must traverse death, / The purest presence is a blood spilled forth,” 52). The full sense of the epigraph from Hegel at the outset of the volume is understood at present: “But the life of the spirit is not frightened before death and does not keep itself pure of it. It is bearing death and maintaining itself within it” (21). In the privileged or true place of poetry for the accomplishment of the sacrificial ritual, the true act, preparatory to the successful flight of the Phoenix, is joyous, all-powerful and self-perpetuating as the Phoenix is self-resurrecting. With the bird, the poet's song endures, and the voices echo, one against the other: that of Douve, of the bird, of death and life. The meditation on naming implies in the same speaking voice the poet, the listener, and the respondent. Each is called upon to recognize this death or “lowest marriage,” which buries the bright destiny in the earth, Douve in death, and the poet in her knowledge and in her name: “Douve, je parle en toi; et je t'enserre / Dans l'acte de connaître et de nommer” (“Douve, I speak in you; and I hold you close / In the act of knowing and of naming,” 55). Douve answers, in self-containment, within her own silence and lack of sight: “Pourtant ce cri sur moi vient de moi, / Je suis muré dans mon extravagance” (“Yet this cry upon me comes from my own self, / I am walled in my own extravagance,” 57).

But against the charged dialogue of poet and victim—whether a victim of destiny or of self or of the act of poetry itself—other voices are raised. Unspecified except as “a voice, another voice,” they serve at once as parts of a tragic chorus, representing outside and in, exteriorising Douve's point of view upon herself, the poet's other aspects, and, perhaps above all, a questioning of the gestural and verbal signs uttered so far. “Long have I retreated before you, signs,” says one voice, and another: “What sign are you bringing on your black lips?” I shall inhabit you, it continues, lifting you to yet another emptiness. But these are not negative cries of death and distress, rather, “distant beneficent voices” of dawn and rain, waking the clay figures along the longing earth, expressing fruitfulness even in the act of dying.

Douve, waking from her hypnotic state as stone, having shared its blindness, now sees her own drama clarified in the dying and suffering which is the sure way to the mind. Reassured by day, by the summer and the naked earth, she calls upon silence once more after these voices are heard, forged as they are in the hearth of contraries. Her invocation to cold and death is ardent in its tone, made with “reddening words”:

Que le verbe s'éteigne
Dans cette pièce basse où tu me rejoins,
Que l'âtre du cri se resserre
Sur nos mots rougeoyants.
Que le froid par ma mort se lève et prenne un sens.

(63)

(Let the word die out
In this low room where you join me,
Let the hearth of the cry narrow in
Upon our reddening words.
Let cold through my death rise up and take on meaning.)

The imploration gathers up all the strength of the preceding voices, and is answered by a further sign of the interdependence of perception and of speech (64). The watcher keeps vigil in the speaker, as death in life and life in death. He implores for Douve the destruction she has already invoiced, echoing her speech act: “Demande pour tes yeux que les rompe la nuit” (“Ask, for your eyes, that night shall break them,” 66). But the verbal command is followed by a doubt as to the efficacy of the word, expressed by one of the voices: “Oui, c'est bientôt périr de n'être que parole, / Et c'est tâche fatale et vain couronnement” (“Yes, being but word means to perish soon, / And is a fatal task and vain coronation”).

And yet this doubt is itself balanced by one of the most celebrated images recurring in Bonnefoy's work, that of the orangerie, that “site far off” where the salamander acts as Phoenix, assuring presence and resurrection, living through the fire. It is appropriate that after the ways of death and their insertion into life, the place of poetry should appear again. The orangerie is allied, as both contrary and complement, to the Ordalie or medieval trial. This ritual and the orangerie itself allow easy access: the latter is marked by a vase on its threshold, placed in welcome to the wanderer as to the reader, for whom, also, “words of healing” will be recited: “Let a place be made for the one approaching, / A person cold and deprived of a dwelling” (85). The place is a true place, “un vrai lieu,” but also a place of combat: in its perfect form, the orangerie invites a meditation of the mythical. The salamander desired by Douve is celebrated in a luminously erotic series of prose statements. She desires penetration by the narrow animal, desires both blindness and possession; but at the same time she is herself the salamander, immobile and knowing. The single vigil kept over the dead and through the dying (“I keep watch in you”) leads to a double vigil at the summit of the winter's night. The wound (of knowledge, of love, and of their penetration by each other) marks the moment of sacrifice, and the woman as well as the hollow which she also signifies, receive once more their identical name: “Et maintenant tu es Douve” (“And now you are Douve,” 74); “Douve sera ton nom” (“Douve will be your name,” 82). “Justice” and “Truth” precede a poem called “True Place”, and in that truest place of the orangerie now named, Douve will be laid.

So the true place “where everything is unveiled” or disclosed (as in the Heideggerian sense of being made apparent or “called into disclosedness”) contains war and repose, specificity and abstraction. The orangerie can be represented anywhere, and it then becomes the true place; for instance, the Chapel Brancacci suggests the powerful image of “vigil-lamp of January,” casting its light upon the tiled floor, as the shadow all about and the dark frescoes provide a place suited to the search for eternity within what can be grasped here and now, in one of the privileged sites for the imagination: “Ce que je tiens serré n'est peut-être qu'une ombre, / Mais sache y distinguer un visage éternel” (“What I hold tight is perhaps only a shadow, / But discern in it an eternal face,” 86). The play of light and shadow here leads to the final poems of “lieu” or place concluding the volume: “Lieu du combat” (“Place of Combat”), where the knight of sorrow becomes the brother “whose face is sought near all fountains,” whose death is equivalent to nocturnal shadow, and against whose suffering the truth of dawn and day must be measured. And this is now the “Lieu de la Salamandre” (“Place of the Salamander”), whose awareness traverses fire and with whose purity and silence the poet is intimate, calling it his accomplice and his own thought, wedded to the flame in an allegory of risk and joy beyond wordlessness itself.

Finally, the “Vrai lieu du cerf” (“True Place of the Deer”) is charged with the weight of religious myth, recalling the medieval allegory of Christ as the deer pursued by hunters, and escaping. All that is implied in this ending of a volume on death and what traverses it in a deeply poetic consciousness: “Ô notre force et notre gloire, pourrez-vous / Trouer la muraille des morts?” (“Oh our strength and our glory, shall you / Pierce the wall of the dead?” 91).

Much of the strength and carrying power of Bonnefoy's work lies in its intense emphasis on polar opposites: for example, the movement and immobility in Douve's title, or the rest and combat visible in the poems, or the purity and the eroticism of the salamander, which are then absorbed each into the other. The poetic process is similar to the one by which the poet has his vision through Douve or speaks within her, or even lives in her (“I shall find out how to dwell in you,” 59); and yet the ambiguities remain. For instance, from Douve: “If this night is other than the night” (60), implying a tension between specificity and generality, and nevertheless also the common ground between them, that undeniably links night to night, beyond any specificity or distinction.

The ambiguous relation of the other and the same is stressed by Douve's question as to what voice is speaking near her or against her, naming her, and by her subsequent claim about being the origin of all she hears; “Yet this cry upon me comes from myself.” Furthermore, the words said by one of the unidentified voices could be said of this poem as a whole, and its coherence as an inseparable unit, for the voices are, all of them, part of the rhapsody. The volume, rewritten with several linking passages for its final form in 1978 after its initial publication in 1953, makes now a complete narration whose harmonies are complex, moving, and ardent: “I have borne my word within you as a flame” (67). The very speaking and narrating of the Death and poetry of Douve into the arduous shadows, like consciousness into dark, compose this elegy, like the name Virginia Woolf was tempted to give to her novels, which sets ablaze by its spirit the silence before and after.

Readers tend to be greatly divided as to their opinions of the successive volumes of Bonnefoy's poetry, some preferring Douve for its incantatory power and dramatic sequence, some preferring the condensed inscriptions of Pierre écrite (Written Stone), some the continuities and imagery of the massive Dans le Leurre du seuil (In the lure of the threshold), Bonnefoy's most recent long poetic work at the time of this writing. The brief volume about to be discussed, Hier Régnant Désert (Yesterday the desert reigning, 1958), might, on the other hand, appeal to the reader who would choose brevity, depth of feeling, and an indescribable tone of melancholy conveyed by an essential understatement. The poem of yesterday never leads to a statement entire, but only to the threshold of a place where it might have been made.

The title of the initial poem here, called “Menaces du témoin,” places the reader immediately at risk, for the observation itself leaves no place for uninvolvement. The fear and blindness within the poem as stated come to paralyze the watcher also, even the one who would by choice remain upon the sidelines. In this text, destruction is paired with the cessation of combat, age with immobility and loneliness, made parallel to the retraction of mental and physical warmth by the image of the fire receding. The withdrawal of the flame, but also of such strength as the emotion of fright might itself bring, enables the growth of the person, and implicitly, the deepening of the poem equated with the interior experience of language at its most profound. But the static menace hangs heavy in the cessation of all things, in the decrescendo of the dying down in word and wind: “Puis j'ai vieilli. Dehors, vérité de parole / Et vérité de vent ont cessé leur combat” (“Then have I aged. Outside, truth of word / And truth of wind have ceased their battle,” 95).

After the first-person lamentation, the narrator addresses a second bystander implied in the battle with questions as to motivation and identity and place: (“Où es-tu, qui es-tu?”) associated with the garden of memory and the shadow included in the shadow, presumably within the watching self. The notion enframed in the poem comes to a halt abruptly, as the poem is haunted by its own closure, encapsulated in the repetition of “même … même”:

Vois, déjà tous chemins que tu suivais se ferment,
Il ne t'es plus donné même ce répit
D'aller même perdu. Terre qui se dérobe
Est le bruit de tes pas qui ne progressent plus.

Tu cesses de venir dans ce jardin,
Les chemins de souffrir et d'être seul s'effacent. …

(96-97)

(See, already all the paths you took are closing,
You are no longer given even this respite
Of going even lost. Earth which slips away
Is the sound of your steps which go on no longer.

You stop coming in this garden,
The paths of suffering and of loneliness fade out. …)

The gradual slowing down, the closing off of possibilities, the blinding of paths and former illuminations and revelations: “Il te suffit / De mourir longuement comme en sommeil” (“It is enough / For you to die slowly as in sleep,” 97), all these elements which could, from any traditional perspective, be seen as negative, are here transmuted by the tone itself, noble, resigned, but remarkably strong in the telling and narrating voice. Quite unlike the tone of the words addressed to Douve in her pilgrimage to a land beyond death and her laying-to-rest in the orangerie, the elegy—if it can be called that—to and of a lost being here includes an interrogation new in this poetry: “Es-tu celui qui meurt, toi qui n'as plus d'angoisse, / Es-tu même perdu, toi qui ne cherches pas?” (“Are you the one who dies, anguished no more, / Are you even lost, who do not seek?” 98).

The loss is far from certain, and there are no dramatic gestures, no disintegration such as is evident in Douve: only question and quiet, as the wind falls still and the fire of the word is laid. This is the continuation of Kierkegaard's “Knight of Sorrow,” whose premonition we heard already in Douve. The rod or the arm is and will remain the surest weapon for vanquishing in both the fields of erotic love and combat, and for the construction of a timeless, spaceless, limitless warmth and radiance, in the dwelling of poetry.

In the next poems, the solitude remains, together with the silence; yet the oath of construction, recently sworn, is not undone. The knight renounces glory, fame, distinction, to choose obscurity and another kind of song, as yet unheard. The grey waters on the shifting earth match his renunciation, paralleled by the demythification of the Phoenix, who himself tires of being the self-resurrecting bird and gives in to his age-old wound, thus undoing himself and his legend as well as his lie, accepting in their place silence, age, and death: “L'oiseau se défera par misère profonde … / Il vieillira … / Il se taira … / Il saura bien mourir …” (“The bird will undo himself in deepest misery … / He will grow old … / He will fall silent … / He will know how to die …,” 102).

But renunciation by the bird of his myth, by the knight of his renown, do not rule out remorse: rather they increase it. The light of summer in its mingled sweetness and fear has left its radiant mark upon the poem and upon all it surrounds and contains: regret, remorse, and the deepest longing for what is no more. The summer is wounded in the greyest of its dawns, and the poetry, grave:

Ce fut un bel été, fade, brisant et sombre,
Tu aimas la douceur de la pluie en été.

Et ton orgueil aima cette lumière neuve,
L'ivresse d'avoir peur sur la terre d'été.

(105)

(The summer was lovely, pale, somber in its shattering,
You loved the softness of the summer rain.

And your spirit loved this novel light,
The excitement of fearing upon the summer earth.)

In the final invocation, a poverty contrary to all the former pride in poetry and in things previously loved brings about a difference. As bareness breaks and remakes the spirit, this voluntary renunciation in flames within the desert tables of writing, sets them afire with an inalienable loneliness: alone, the knight finds no appeasement (107).

The title “Le visage mortel” (“The Mortal Face”) designates death already inscribed upon the visage of being; by the poem, the flame is returned to the somber daylight, as if its ardor were to be undone by the light of day. Beauty is here dishonored and dispossessed as it ruins being and undoes the joy of the daily. All things are changed and oddly opposed in preparation for the Ordalie, that medieval trial (already compared to the other of the orangerie) where the voice falls into contradiction with itself, and then into the silence seen as the ultimate grandeur; so is belief to be tested. The sword is pulled from the stone, in a simple statement of a renewed Arthurian gesture. In the poetic universe where the interchanges of word and self are heightened, the essential “grayness of the word” is to be penetrated only by the ardent “red iron of being” for hospitality and communion: “Nous venions de toujours …” (“We were coming from always …,” 103); “Et j'ai rompu ce pain où l'eau lointaine coule” (“And I broke this bread where the distant water runs,” 116). The other surrounding gestures are simple, solitary, and therefore honored: praying, keeping the fire, standing guard, or waiting, gestures of the beseeching orante, the weeping pleureuse, the faithful veilleur watching, the dutiful servante, the mysterious Parque who controls our fate. The very simplicity of the tasks is moving: watching the fire and sweeping the hearth are the duties of a vestal virgin; just so, the protective gestures of the figure of large stature who comes to participate “in the stone,” holding the lamp and leaning over. Gray stones and cold trees surround these acts in which the observer shares also, as he too sleeps, trusts, ages, and dies, watching always.

Upon rereading these texts, old and new, as they are inserted now in this present edition, one cannot help being conscious of the relationship of the figures in some composite imaginary picture, distant and yet intimate, unsentimental and yet of distinctly emotional affective power. The gray stone surrounding the scene is the background and yet is at the same time the stuff of which the figures are composed, legendary and yet actual, dead and yet living, suffering and imploring: the stone, by its wounding, offers its own cry of anguish. The night of imagination and dread is long and tormented, and the path seems interminable; the poems of this section end quietly, in separation, bareness, and indeterminate time, as the figures withdraw into loneliness.

“Le Chant de sauvegarde” (“The Song of Safe Conduct”) returns to the figure of the Phoenix, to the scene of this death and shipwreck and passage by fire. Called by some bird cruel and of a black voice, the narrator enters, speaks, ages, and is silent, before hearing another song; as if an entire story were to have been absorbed in this short stanza. On a page alone we read or hear a song made of brief lines, telling both of destruction and salvation: “Que l'oiseau se déchire en sables, disais-tu, / Qu'il soit, haut dans son ciel de l'aube, notre rive” (“Let the bird tear apart in sand, you were saying / Let him be, high in his dawning sky, our shore,” 129).

“Le Feuillage éclairé” (“The Foliage Lit”), which begins by an interrogation, is strengthened in this recent edition by the doubling of the question, “Dis-tu? Dis-tu?”, conveying perfectly the feeling of legend, of vague mystery and certain sadness. It opens thus, after the initial questions in their echoing repetition, leading into a simplicity of statement consonant with the birdsong:

Dis-tu qu'il se tenait sur l'autre rive,
Dis-tu qu'il te guettait à la fin du jour?
L'oiseau dans l'arbre de silence avait saisi
De son chant vaste et simple et avide nos coeurs,
Il conduisait
Toutes voix dans la nuit où les voix se perdent

(131)

(Are you saying he stayed on the other shore,
Are you saying he watched you closely at day's end?
The bird in the tree of silence had seized our hearts
With his vast, simple, and avid song
He was leading
All the voices in the night where voices are lost)

What we call after, as the bird well knows, is what is lost and is to be found no more. Such a song is never unmixed with pain; again we think of Rilke's bird song, joining inner and outer worlds, and again of Baudelaire's Passerby, loved and lost, loved because lost. The setting is full of memories, although bare of detail. With the bird as guide, the wanderer in the lofty and tragic “boat laden with grief” devotes himself to the task: “L'oiseau m'a appelé, je suis venu” (“The bird called me, and I came,” 130), and leaves what is most familiar and homelike, the earth of lamplight and hearth, for the night. The song was simple: presently it takes on a tone of irony and a threat of death, while the vocabulary increasingly stresses distance, refusal, blackness, poverty, and hardship; the bare moment in the harsh work of earth.

The very harshness of the setting, while it sets the task and the calling apart from the everyday, intensifies the solitude about the one who, like Siegfried, will have now to seize the sword, bright-colored with red and with blue, like a red sun against an azure sky, or within the flame of some brightly colored fruits. For even in the land of exile, the obscure land of shadow and yet of dawn, where “une ombre essentielle / voile toute lumière et toute vérité” (“an essential shadow / veils all light and all truth,” 134), the love of earth remains strong, and the love of love. The sun, rising only to age and to sink, shares man's pattern. Each text will elaborate—although keeping the same simplicity—upon the hero's call, task, and knowledge. You (for the second-person form is retained) will hear the bird call, “like a sword in the distance,” cutting through all the shadow and fear and despair, will see “shining the naked blade you must seize” (136), and this will be the end of waiting.

The task is legendary: the sword is cold, its handle rusty, and its flame now grown dark. It is inscribed in the stone, which bleeds from its wound, and on which the lessons of moving and dying are traced. The task is, as we might have expected, eternal, and endless. As other trees closed off the path after Douve's death and departure, these on the contrary open a path, which must be taken.

The concluding section, “À une Terre d'aube” (“To an Earth of Dawn”) is brief. Its form is that of dedication, of a devotion as in the prose poem called by that name, at the end of the volume and already referred to: in this edition it has become a separate item, standing, as indeed it should, apart. Dawn, daughter of tears and suffering, is to rearrange and reshape the room of rest, and the heart to begin again and take on color, after that colorless face, in another brightness. Life will return afresh. “Écoute-moi revivre, je te conduis Au jardin de présence …” (“Hear me reliving, I lead you / To the garden of presence …,” 144). Each of a number of privileged images—the dawn coming, like the red wound of a sun against a sky, or water making a hollow in the stone of day, or fire and spirit seen in the broken bread, or the conflagration of every dead branch—discovers or uncovers a country. Again we think of the Heideggerian call and disclosure, in this “pays découvert” (“land discovered”). A star marks the threshold, and the ardor within is perhaps only what we call time. This is at last, then, the place, sought, toward which all steps were leading. “Le pas dans son vrai lieu” (“The step in its true place,” 149). The voice after its unrest is happy in these rocks of silence, and will continue to sound within the stone of the tree, recalling another legendary task: Oedipus saved as well as sacrificed, about to do battle. For this voice: “The same voice, always,” traverses all pain and anguish and all time, emanating from the bird of ruins.

Here, at the end of this yesterday which was deserted and was a desert Hier régnant désert, is the true, clear place, no longer dawn but now day, no longer the mirage of a song, but the certainty of the task chosen alone, in this place built from memory and from stone. “Ici, dans le lieu clair. … Ici, et jusqu'au soir. … Ici, toujours ici” (“Here, in the clear place. … Here, and until evening. … Here, always here” 150).

The poetic path has not led far off, but only to a song of the here and now, of a presence recaptured in full clarity.

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The Search for Transcendence in Yves Bonnefoy's Un feu va devant nous.

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