[In the following essay, Caws maintains that Bonnefoy's moral concerns help to sustain his long poems.]

Often, a general question apparently about form is not that only: it aims at something specific, and goes beyond form. The one I want to ask now, both generally and in a specific meditation on the work of Yves Bonnefoy—concerns the long poem, and so implies connectedness and interruption. In so doing, it concerns more than that: I take it as a question not only aesthetic, but moral.

What is it, then, that sustains the long poem? What kinds of joinings enable its articulation? What gives it breath? Whatever response we could give, which of course, as in all such cases, is individual and comes from our own perception, background, and judgement, may, because of that, matter more to our own sustenance than we might have thought. That figures among the many reasons why one should only write on writers and thinkers one cares deeply about: your response will affect you profoundly, perhaps irrevocably. From my point of view, the question is at its high point of interest for American poetry in the case of Wallace Stevens (for example, “The Rock”) and, for French poetry, in the case of Yves Bonnefoy's Douve and especially his majestic Dans le leurre du seuil.

I will contend that for Bonnefoy a moral sustenance underpins the other more formal one. The same intensely moral concerns make themselves felt everywhere in his work, from his critical essays on literature and art to his translations of Shakespeare and Yeats, and, especially, his poems themselves. As in his great essays, such as “The Act and Place of Poetry,” or in his briefer and apparently more informal ones, say, those included in his Remarques sur le dessin, the readers we are can sense an implicit ethical stance whose consistency sustains not just the work and the person but those acquainted with them, that is, ourselves.

We are all familiar, from our first readings in the field of French poetry, with the concept of the poem-as-passage and its close relative, the poem-voyage: Baudelaire's “Voyage,” Rimbaud's “Bateau Ivre,” Apollinaire's “Zone,” Cendrars' “Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France.”¹ These major poems have prepared us for the experience of the metaphysical and mental passage of the long poem from 1975 that I remain haunted by, Bonnefoy's “Dans le leurre du seuil.” That an experience of passage should be architecturally marked as a poem of threshold by its title already suggests the necessarily interdependent complexities of the reading, for this voyage is—paradoxically and poetically—also a stance, as the threshold is already an invitation to passage. Clearly, any sort of moral stance that eschews complexity and to which paradox is foreign is unlikely to touch more than the skin of things. And here, as in one of André Breton's poems that Bonnefoy knows so well, “Je ne touche plus que le cœur des choses je tiens le fil” (“Vigilance”).

In the poetics of voyage literature as I read it, there is above all a consciousness not only of motion, but more particularly of invitation and invocation, of description as of interrogation, in the realization of the lyric subject through space and time. Lyricism, narration, and cognition converge, marking the verbs of articulation upon which such poetry depends, imposing a particular tone. In a sense, all these voyages of self-realization and metaphoric development are composed of successive momentary views of the same lyric subject or object at once super-imposed in the reading memory and nevertheless ongoing simultaneously. These spatial and psychological movements find their articulation and nourishment in the silences between the verbal motions like so many sources of energy, forming the pulse of the passage, its characteristic rhythm. At the end, as the reader looks back, a retrospective patterning may be detected, or then reconstructed.²

Such a rhythm of movement and stasis, of stress and silence, of gesture and stillness, can be experienced as analogous to the breath, inhaling and exhaling, unconsciously. In the vivid terminology of the expiration of the breath, as in the execution of the musical effect of poetry performed, an inescapable sense of mortality penetrates this silence heard from moment to moment. These pauses in the long poem must be sensed, together with their moments of renascence. From these deaths and the positive physicality of “la petite mort érotique” the text takes its life. The convergence of expiration and execution, of desire and extinction within the lyric subject in its development only deepens our own identification with that subject: it becomes our own.

GESTURES OF PASSAGE

The voyaging verbs of Rimbaud's magnificently inebriated vessel, which is also and marvelously the poet, are framed between knowing and seeing: “Je sais … j'ai vu … j'ai rêvé … j'ai suivi … j'ai heurté, savez-vous … j'ai vu.” Realization, disappointment, exhaustion, excess: “Mais vrai, j'ai trop pleuré,” before the return to the point of origin, now transfigured by perception, from which language is born. In Dans le leurre du seuil, a radically interiorized transposition of the voyage poem, everything happens with little material action: it is internalized, with very few gestures made, all the more significant for that. Among the more important, I would single out the invocation of sight, and its subsequent interrogation:

Regarde! De tous tes yeux regarde! Rien d'ici,
(…)
                    N'a plus cet à jamais de silencieuse
Respiration nocturne qui mariait
Dans l'antique sommeil
Les bêtes et les choses anuitées
A l'infini sous le manteau d'étoiles.

Vision and breath are linked here, as if unconsciously—and yet they are profoundly interwoven, as links between the body and the world, the physical and the mental. In its continued exclamations and interrogations—“O terre, terre / Pourquoi … / Et d'où / D'où / Et pourquoi … ?”—the poem exhales about itself the space necessary for definitive action.

In such a long poem, there is time, as here, to feel any distance as very near, as a familiar person who might arise in the summer night to throw open the blinds, and to whom one might say: “Look. …” Time to change your mind, the way you see things, or then, your life. You can hear the breath here inside, while out there, immobile, the night is unbreathing, windless. As if there were only this poem being born, in order to transfigure, to reassemble the things scattered about so silently:

Je crie, Regarde,
La lumière
Vivait là, près de nous! Ici, sa provision
D'eau, encore transfigurée. Ici le bois
Dans la remise. Ici, les quelques fruits
A sécher dans les vibrations du ciel de l'aube.
Rien n'a changé,
Ce sont les mêmes lieux et les mêmes choses,
Presque les mêmes mots,
Mais, vois, en toi, en moi
L'indivis, l'invisible se rassemblent.

(59)

DIFFERENCE AND DISTANCE

The poem Dans le leurre du seuil concerns, among other things, the temptation to perfection, that specific and most terrible lure. One of the most powerful temptations in reading anything is a tendency to believe that “reality” is objective, and so, that we must feel our own subjectivity as being less true.³ So we leave behind our own point of view, our own particularity, unable to resist the voracity of the objective appetite. Perhaps, says one American philosopher, we should no longer identify reality with objective reality. But then how do we know that the person desiring X now and the one desiring Y next is the same person we think we are? How recognize our own poetico-psychological impulses and their lyric continuity? Critics, says Harold Bloom, love continuities; poets detest them.

Among the meditations on interruptions and gaps, one of the most powerful is that of the surrealist André Breton, obsessed as he was with the lagging moments, the “moments nuls” he so roundly condemned in Dostoevski's descriptions. They were to be banished from his writing and thinking and seeing. Now of course, the vow to write or narrate or describe anything always in the same tone would be a self-condemnation to a closed system, where you could learn nothing. According to Bakhtin, it's only in the novel that you can have a heterology of different voices; so how shall the unique voice narrating or then simply speaking in a long poem find its sustenance in time? What kind of ongoing integrity can the subject find in all its irregularities?

The poem retrospectively constitutes the poet as lyric subject, communicating its enthusiasm and its intensity. We might want to think: Yves Bonnefoy is constituted a poet also by his figure and metaphor and creation Douve seen all at once in her motion and her immobility, as he is, for all time, in the photograph of him on the threshold stone in front of the closed wooden door of the great structure at Valsaintes, standing on tiptoe and holding the stone arch on either side.⁴That too is Yves Bonnefoy, see, there.

In any case, it is the effort that must precede the impression of unity: “… we project towards the center of the mind the very subject whose unity we are trying to explain: the individual person with all his complexities” (N, 164). We have to learn to experience the poem from the inside and outside at the same time, situated as it is nowhere and yet in our life, by means of this lyric behavior the surrealists liked to invoke: whereas the narrative disperses the subject's attention, the lyric's intensity tends to concentrate it. We must read them differently.

Now among the intensities opposed to those nul moments that Breton refused, which hold, I think, the key to the long poem's integrity, let me give place of privilege to the always nineteen points that punctuate now and again the density of the poem's verbal parts, like so many concentrations of silence. You might think them simple interruptions of the text; I think them the all-important ports of entry into the text itself. They open its density into space, I think, so that the distance beyond them can be seen, like another Arrière-Pays, situated further than the imagination of our own country. They are the ways that distance is brought into text.

John Rewald quotes a friend of Cézanne who recounts that painter of Aix telling how it was distance that counted in a picture: first, you had to paint the climactic point of the object as it appeared to you, the high point being always nearest your eyes, and then you had to “find the distance.” That was what you had to express, had you any talent as a painter.⁵ A long poem, then, must also hold distance, as well as a vivid consciousness of death. Distance, unlike absence, can be a profound part of presence. How present, for instance, just beyond those hills, is the country behind, distant yet so lit. I want to return later to that so-present distance, crucial to the long poem, and to us.

For the text to be full, for it to be entire, it must incorporate the consciousness of nothingness—for, otherwise, it results in a willed betrayal of truth. In the dialogue between plenitude and poverty, between speech and silence, control over a perfect universe will be abandoned. The text will not be closed to chaos—but what it opens upon is, also, presence.

Bonnefoy salutes Baudelaire who knew, precisely through his imperfections—that is, the padding of his verses (those “chevilles” for which critics so reproached him), and his excesses—how to crack apart the old closed prosody and that stability of control. He brought mortality in. Among Bonnefoy's other salutes, I find most moving the one to Cézanne in a chapter of his Remarques sur le dessin, called simply: “Devant la Sainte-Victoire.” The powerful equivalent of Rilke's celebrated letters to his wife on the subject of Cézanne's paintings of his mountain, Bonnefoy's remarks are eloquent on the relations between the white spaces and the forms sketched out, in the drawings and in the late paintings of the one we have learned to call simply “The Holy Man of Aix.”

Rilke quotes a friend of Count Kessler saying those empty spaces in Cézanne's canvasses were “things he didn't know yet.” For Bonnefoy, they are testimonies to the impossibility of representing any mountain (“S'il y a montagne pour nous … c'est parce que nous subissons une impression de présence”).⁶ The interruption of Cézanne's line in his representation of the summit, the break that indicates presence, is analogous to the poetic line that refuses to close upon itself (RD, 36). Nothing is closed here, or slickly finished, and the poem, like the drawings, will live through its irresolutions and instabilities, through its points de suspension, which open it out into the imperfect universe, with which it can maintain an impassioned relationship.

FIRE AND WATER

Bonnefoy's epic poem draws to its end with a long conjunction of fire and water, situating itself thus in the long tradition of epic closing lines of this kind of elemental convergence. Like the end of Eliot's great Waste Land, like the end of Tzara's Homme approximatif, like the end of Breton's long incantation of his love called “Union libre” (“Ma femme … / Aux yeux de niveau d'eau de niveau d'air de terre et de feu”) and the concluding line of his “Sur la route qui monte et qui descend” (“Flamme d'eau guide-moi jusqu'à la mer de feu”⁷), Bonnefoy's convergence begins:

Bois, je suis l'eau, brûlée

and continues then, at greater length:

Comme Dieu le soleil levant je suis voûté
Sur cette eau où fleurit notre ressemblance.
… Moi, le passeur,
Moi la barque de tout à travers tout,
Moi le soleil
Je m'arrête au faîte du monde dans les pierres.

Moi, la barque … the poet's identification with his sailing craft reminds us ineluctably again of Rimbaud's “Bateau ivre,” one craft echoing the other in salute. Later, the elements recognize each other as the water in its “coupe fugitive” reflects the still more fleeting fire, “which is nothingness,” and sends it into the light, so that earth and air and water and fire should finally meet:

Nuages,
Et un, le plus au loin, ou, à jamais
Rouge, l'eau et le feu
Dans le vase de terre …

Here, the enunciation is as modest as the container. This earthen vase holds everything, and in these few lines the oath is taken upon the same two elements of fire and water:

Oui, par ce feu,
Par son reflet de feu sur l'eau paisible,
Par notre lieu, qui va,
Par le chemin de feu sous le fruit mûr.

The fruit is ripe in its time, which is ours.

OPENING AND HOLDING

The invocation backwards, Bonnefoy's strong summoning of the Rimbaldian gesture and tone—from “J'ai heurté, savez-vous, d'incroyables Florides …,” when the poet speaks as his own inebriated vessel—works as a liminal action, the threshold to its own threshold. “Heurte,” he cries: “Heurte à jamais. / Dans le leurre du seuil.” This is the verbal equivalent of the material gesture of knocking against something: “Heurte, heurte à jamais …” It is a demand for contact, a dialogue with the other, preceding or following, writing or reading.

Paradoxically, in the space formed by this eternal gesture (“à jamais”), things are lit at once from close up and in the clarity of the infinite. In this space and in the smallest possible container you can gather the earth entire. And yet that statement with its immemorial tone is made without the slightest taint of narrational prosaics entering in. Each gesture, every moment is imbued with a simple luminosity:

Je t'écoute, je prends
Dans ton panier de corde
Toute la terre …

The universe can be held here in the humblest of things, in this slight rope basket. The image is strong as are all containing images.⁸ The force of a containing poem is double, for it is holding that which holds.

At the conclusion of Rimbaud's voyage as and in poetic craft, closure in seeming reduction produces an effect as natural as convincing, as the drunken boat, then the boat adrift, becomes the frail toy of a saddened child, as the river and sea become a small puddle. Bonnefoy's great long poem will transform by memory Rimbaud's small puddle and toy boat, and with them, the entire experience. It will end—if such poems end—with the perception of an entire sky and all of poetry held, suddenly and forever, in a small pool like a painting. Like a haiku poem, its small size holds, along with the sky, its sustaining strength. Great poetry passes on its greatness.

The holding action of the final lines of the poem is prepared by another, earlier one, when the sky is caught in the disturbed water and in a personal context, framing the picture with its simple symbolic masses in intimacy:

Toi, tu es ce pays
Toi que j'éveille,
Comme dans l'eau qu'on trouble, même de nuit
Le ciel est autre.

At the conclusion of the threshold poem, the brief expanse of the pool will reflect the infinite, this “other” sky—the water can absorb the sky, just as the fruits of the earth can be held in the human hand:

Dans la main de dehors, fermée
a commencé à germer
Le blé des choses du monde.

All these things held and treasured: whether in a rope basket, or in a hand, or in some water, all these are vast things which continue giving life. The space is a generous one, in which nature and the lyric subject are met and awake each other, in a presence where container and contained converge.

THRESHOLD

The threshold must never be domesticated—it opens on more than a house. It is also the border between, say, the sea and the land. It is everything that joins and separates. And so this poem joins all the others of the same spirit, where nothingness can enter and ripen the fullness. As Harold Bloom puts it, “The meaning of a poem is another poem.” Like a musical tone, it can be heard only in relation to another.

Finally, I want to speak of the musical term ostinato, where the bass repeats obstinately, while the other voices are modified.⁹ Gérard Genette hears in the obligato the “tremblement, le bégaiement indéfini d'une création qui procède toujours, et partout …” I have used the term sostenuto instead because I have wanted to interpret not only the continuing basso obligato, but the moral respiration that sustains both tone and text in relation to the others, to the poet himself, and to us.

In those points de suspension that open the space of the text towards something else which might be the threshold of who knows what construction, whether of a house quite simply or a majestic abbey in ruins, it is a question of always renewing one's interior threshold, of keeping the most distant distances in what is nearby. For it is the mark of willed imperfection that brings us near the lyric dwelling. The lyric subject sustains itself both in the search for the developing self and in this creation proceeding always and everywhere. These holes tearing into the veil of the page are so many secret figures of this voyage, with their apparent negativity transformed into the positive, in this extraordinary and long yea-saying procession, this exploration of a promise and a path:

          Oui, par la main que je prends
Sur cette terre.
…
Oui, par la mort,
Oui, par la vie sans fin.
…
Oui, par même l'erreur,
Qui va,
Oui, par le bonheur simple, la voix brisée.

These simple words give way finally to a six-line ending, where three lines mirror the others, as the sky is mirrored in the small puddle. At last, the dispersal of sounds and signs and significance is reassembled, suddenly entire:

Les mots comme le ciel
Aujourd'hui,
Quelque chose qui s'assemble, qui se disperse.
Les mots comme le ciel,
Infini
Mais tout entier soudain dans la flaque brève.

(DL, 121)

It is in its own and our own depths that all this long creation sustains, and will continue to sustain us.

Notes

1. For a discussion of the poem-as-passage, see my Metapoetics of the Passage: Architextures in Surrealism and After (Hanover: New England University Press, 1981).

2. For a discussion of this kind of retrospective patterning in the reader's mind, see Barbara Herrnstein Smith, How Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 254.

3. Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 197.

4. In Yves Bonnefoy: Livres et documents (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale/Mercure de France, 1992), 130.

5. John Rewald, Paul Cézanne (New York: Shocken, 1968), 196.

6. “Devant la Sainte-Victoire,” 27-42, Remarques sur le dessin (Paris: Mercure de France, 1993), 29. (Referred to hereafter as RD.)

7. André Breton, Clair de terre (Poésie/Gallimard, 1966), 113.

8. To feel its strength, take a similar image, although at the other pole of size and feeling, from René Char's “Compagne du vannier,” where the container is no less humble: “Je t'aimais. J'aimais ton visage de source raviné par l'orage et le chiffre de ton domaine enserrant mon baiser. Certains se confient à une imagination toute ronde. Aller me suffit. J'ai rapporté du désespoir un panier si petit, mon amour, qu'on a pu le tresser en osier.” René Char: Selected Poems, ed. Mary Ann Caws and Tina Jolas (New York: New Directions, 1992), 18.

9. I am at present translating Louis-René des Forêt's ongoing autobiography Ostinato, of which translation parts have been published in Pequod and The Denver Quarterly.