The Wanderer

One of two Anglo-Saxon poems that we had to know for our rather absurdly easy comps, "The Wanderer" has been one of my all-time favorite poems since I studied it in Medieval Lit a few years ago. An obvious reason for this affinity is its Tolkein-esque-ness (how's that for an agglutinative?). Thinking of this, and being lazy as usual (when it comes to this blog, at least), I thought I would post a brief quote and see if it sounds familiar at all:

Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago?
Hwær cwom maþþumgyfa?
Hwær cwom symbla gesetu?
Hwær sindon seledreamas?
Eala beorht bune!
Eala byrnwiga!
Eala þeodnes þrym!
Hu seo þrag gewat,
genap under nihthelm,
swa heo no wære.

Where is the horse gone? Where the rider?
Where the giver of treasure?
Where are the seats at the feast?
Where are the revels in the hall?
Alas for the bright cup!
Alas for the mailed warrior!
Alas for the splendour of the prince!
How that time has passed away,
dark under the cover of night,
as if it had never been!

This anaphora is a staple of the poem, and a large part of why I find it so powerful (the tragic background to this almost-narrative verse is another reason). Plus anything in Anglo-Saxon is irresistible to me. But aside from those remarks, what does this remind you of? Honestly, the resemblance to one of the hymns of Tolkein's Rohirrim is uncanny:

Where now the horse and the rider? where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk and the bright hair flowing?
Where is the hand on the harp-string, and the red fire glowing?
Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.
Who shall gather the smoke of the dead wood burning?
Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?

Or perhaps not so uncanny when you recall that Tolkein, besides being fluent in Old Norse and conversant in about 16 other dead languages was an aficionado of Old English. Rather nifty all the same.

Bernanos on Jeanne d'Arc

St. Joan of Arc is probably one of my all-time favorite people, as may have come out at various points in the past on this blog. So when I discovered that the French author on whom I'll almost certainly be writing my thesis was not only married to one of the only living descendants of that saint's brother, but also was likewise fascinated by her character and by her sudden and still (to my mind) almost inexplicably mysterious appearance in history (I can't stop to explain now: just think for a minute, if you consider Catholic saints anything real--God getting involved in politics? But that can't be the explanation...why was she there, and what precisely was she doing?), well, given this, I was happy indeed. In fact, one of the first quotes of his I've come across in my preliminary scouring of the internet for all thing related to Georges Bernanos is from an essay of his about her. (An essay, which, I'm sorry to say, is almost impossible to find: the best I could scout out was a version which I could order from France for 20 euros and a ludicrous shipping charge.) Here's said quote:

"Just when the old man raises a finger to set a thousand typist in action, just when the peace of the world is about to emerge from all this machinery, in comes a young girl, mocking and tender, who belongs to no one, and whose soft voice answers the political theologians with old sayings and proverbs, after the manner of shepherds. The democratic abbes of the illustrious University of Paris, with their dream of some sort of universal republic; the distinguished pacifist prelates, dazzled by the dollar rate and impressed by the solidity of the good Burgundian coins; the Carmelite Eustache, making up to the Communist flayers of the Butchers' Corporation; the graduates of the Rue Clos-Bruneau; the clerics of the Rouen Chapter and those of the Chapter of M. Julie Benda - all these old men, many of them under thirty, look enviously at this little France who is so fresh, so mischievous, who is awfully afraid of being burnt, but still more afraid of telling a lie."

Le goût du néant

Morne esprit, autrefois amoureux de la lutte,
L'Espoir, dont l'éperon attisait ton ardeur,
Ne veut plus t'enfourcher! Couche-toi sans pudeur,
Vieux cheval dont le pied à chaque obstacle bute.

Résigne-toi, mon coeur; dors ton sommeil de brute.


Esprit vaincu, fourbu! Pour toi, vieux maraudeur,
L'amour n'a plus de goût, non plus que la dispute;
Adieu donc, chants du cuivre et soupirs de la flûte!
Plaisirs, ne tentez plus un coeur sombre et boudeur!

Le Printemps adorable a perdu son odeur!


Et le Temps m'engloutit minute par minute,
Comme la neige immense un corps pris de roideur;
Je contemple d'en haut le globe en sa rondeur,
Et je n'y cherche plus l'abri d'une cahute.

Avalanche, veux-tu m'emporter dans ta chute?

This poem appears about 2/3 of the way through Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal and I'm going to do an analysis of it for my French Symbolists class, so I'll post a few preliminary thoughts about it here, going stanza by stanza. First I'll do another one of those literal translations so that it's a little clearer what I'm talking about to anyone who's not familiar with French. (The usual disclaimer about my translation being in no way an attempt at a poetic rendition stands firm.)

Morose soul, once amorous of the struggle,
Hope, whose spur once kindled your ardour,
No longer deigns to mount you! Lie there without modesty,
Old war horse whose foot stumbles at each obstacle.

Resign yourself my heart; sleep your brutish sleep.

Vanquished, exhausted soul! For you, old thief,
Love has no more savour, no more than war;
Farewell then, songs of brass and sighs of the flute!
Pleasure, tempt no more a heart sombre and sullen.

The adorable springtime has lost its fragrance!

And time swallows me up minute by minute,
As an immense snow a stiffening corpse;
- I contemplate from above the globe in its roundness
And I no longer seek there the shelter of a hovel.

Avalanche, why don't you carry me away in your fall?


I. The first stanza takes the form of a direct address of the poet to his soul, which the poet describes as an old war horse, once "amoreux de la lutte" but now worn out and lacking its rider, "l'espoir," which at one time had spurred it into action. The rather gnomic opening two lines only hints at the war horse imagery through the use of the words "éperon" and "enfourcher," but their regretful tone, together with the idea that the soul at one time could be spurred into action, and in fact loved the struggle does bestow upon it the sort of noble identity that the image of the battle charger would suggest.

Yet this sense of the soul's nobility drops away quickly in the close of the sentence. The second line, which preserves a formally conventional line break, is in fact heavily enjambed syntactically, the contre rejet at the beginning of the third line completing the idea that had begun with "L'Espoir," but had been suspended for a moment by the intervening semi-parenthetical clause which ends the second line with a description of hope. The delayed realization of what this hope is actually doing --that is, that it disdains the weariness of the soul and will not even stoop to be its guide any longer--delays our recognition of the mild contempt in which the poet in fact seems to hold his soul's weakness. Hope is not merely absent; it does not want to mount the worn-out soul. And thus the poet berates the "vieux cheval" which stumbles at every obstacle, sarcastically commanding it to lie down without shame ("sans pudeur"). The single-line exclamation that succeeds the opening quatrain echoes that stanza in its imperitive quality and directness of address, but nuances the image of surrender into that of resignment. This could be taken as a more positive view of the soul's submission, yet to give up the fight may well be to lose a major aspect of one's humanity--the sleep into which the soul sinks is not that of a poet's powerful genius; it is not even that of a noble war horse, but is merely a "sommeil de brute"-a brutish sleep.

II. In the second quatrain, Baudelaire sustains the tone of slight contempt, calling his soul not merely "morne," but vanquished and exhausted ("vaincu, fourbu"). It no longer bears even an ironic resemblence to a war horse, but rather seems more akin to an old petty thief ("vieux maraudeur"). This image affects the image of the struggle of the previous quatrain by even further diminishing its heroism: the fight has not been a war to gain what is the poet's by right, but the toil of the thief to rob others of items of small worth. Certainly the images--of love and the music of brass and flutes--in the stanza suggest that part of what the soul has been pursuing is Beauty, and this is hardly an item of small worth in Fleurs du Mal. Yet his reaction to Beauty is always ambiguous, if not directly hostile, and the images of love and music in this stanza cannot but conjure up the many poems in which he attacks these instances of Beauty as being cheapened conceptions of the real thing, or attacks Beauty "herself" as deceiving him by making herself inaccessible except through such tawdry--and mortal--intimations. These pleasures have been nonetheless tempting, and his appeal to them to "tempt no longer a dark and sullen heart" reveals that he sees them as something dangerous, liable to lure him into a struggle which he no longer has strength to conduct. Whatever love and the songs of brass or sighs of the flute have been in the past, however, it is not even merely his weariness that stops his pursuit, but the utter lack of taste in his "somber heart" for their pleasures.

Thus in this second stanza we see a development of the poet's attitude towards his spirit and of his understanding of its inaction, which is not simply a result of brutish indolence, but which has at its root a loss of delight in those pleasures which once tempted him. Yet he still, as it were "wishes to wish these things" (cf. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday" IV). He still has not purged himself of regret for a time when such pleasures could mean something to him, and thus the brief exclamation that follows the quatrain laments that "Le Printemps adorable"--the season of new life and renewed beauty--"a perdu son odeur."

III. No longer addressing his spirit, the poet spends the final quatrain in a melancholy meditation on his own place in time and in the universe. The loss of savor in life becomes here a descent into the abyss of time, which--and the word conjures up an image of time as some ravenous monster--swallows up (engloutit) the poet. This image is immediately linked to another, even more sinister metaphor, whereby the action of this monstrously personified time is described as an enormous fall of snow that buries and freezes a stiffening corpse. Time's action becomes nothing more than a process of deadening the person to any outside influences, just as the above two previous two quatrains suggest an emotional dulling of the person's spirit. The immobility of the soul in the face of the struggle we now understand in terms of the immobility of this corpse, unresponsive, buried, and (both emotionally and physically) frozen.

Contemplating in the next two lines the world and the ravages of time, the poet knows himself to be helpless to find shelter from the storm; even the slight defense of a shack is unavailable to him. To use the word "cahute," with its connotations of dinginess and dilapidation, is to recall the description of the soul as a "maraudeur" in the second quatrain and the correspondingly low estimate of pleasure as a valid object of struggle. Pleasure would be one of these near-worthless shelters from the onslaught of the abyss, his taste for them a distraction from the "goût du néant" (taste for nothingness) of the title. He had once hoped for at least its shelter, which explains why at the end of the second quatrain he still lamented the loss of springtime's odor: he had not yet reached the point where he can eschew such shelter entirely.

Now, by contrast, he no longer seeks it. In contemplating "la globe en sa rondeur" he recognizes the inevitability of stiffening like a corpse as his soul becomes too worn in the fruitless struggle for beauty and he understands the ultimate uselessness of makeshift shelters from the storm. Thus his last line takes the form of a direct address, not this time to his soul, but to the avalanche, an image that directly recalls the "neige immense" that is his metaphor for all-devouring time. He now fully assents to the once contemptible weakness of his soul, relinquishing action to beseech the "avalanche" to carry him away into the abyss.

You know you're from Maine if...

(These are, for the most part, excellent.)

1.. you've had arguments over the comparative quality of Fried Dough.
2.. you get four inches of snow and you call it "a dusting."
3.. you don't understand why there aren't fried clamshacks elsewhere in the country.
4.. you know what an Irving is and the location of 15 of them.
5.. you knew all the flavors at Perry's Nut House.
6.. your car is covered in yellow-green dust in May.
7.. you can drive the Augusta rotaries without slowing down.
8.. you've hung out at a gravel pit.
9.. you think a mosquito could be a species of bird.
10.. you once skipped school and went to Bar Harbor, Old Orchard Beach or Reid State Park.
11.. you've almost fallen asleep driving between Houlton and Presque Isle.
12.. you know how to pronounce Calais and Machias.
13.. you've gone to a Grange bean supper.
14.. at least once in your life, a seagull pooped on your head.
15.. at least once in your life you've said, "It smells like the mill in here." Yep
16.. there's a fruit and vegetable stand within 10 minutes of your house.
17.. your idea of a traffic jam is being the second car at the stoplight.
18.. you wonder out loud if the state can just close its borders to people from away.
19.. your house converts to a B&B every July & August for people from away that you happen to know.
20.. all year long you're tracking sand in the house; from the beach in the summer and the roads and sidewalks in the winter.
21.. you have a front door but no steps to get to it.
22.. you use "wicked" as a multi-purpose part of speech.
23.. you have to have the sand cleaned out of your brake system every spring.
24.. you do the majority of your shopping out of Uncle Henry's.
25.. you've ditched the car on the side of the road somewhere because you thought you saw some good fiddleheads!
26.. you've had a vacation from school just to help the family pick potatoes.
27.. you know a lobster pot is a trap, not a kettle. Of course!
28.. you know not to plant tender crops until the last full moon in May.
29.. when you go to the dump and bring back more than you brought.
30.. when people from "away" ask for directions and you intentionally led them in the opposite direction they wanted to go.
31.. you watch "Murder She Wrote" and snicker at the stupid fake accents.
32.. you know how to find the rope swing at the quarry.
33.. you take the New Hampshire toll personally.
34.. you feel really really good when you cross the Piscatiqua River bridge into Kittery.
35.. you always wave when you see a Maine license plate in another state.
36.. a roll of duct tape and a can of flat black spray paint will get your car to pass inspection.
37.. you have to replace your mailbox yearly because ofthe town plow.
38.. you know how to get from Cumberland to Fryeburg via the "Egypt Road".
39.. you can remember when the "Egypt Road" was a dirt track through the woods.
40.. when you're supposed to dress up, you wear plaid flannel with a tie.
41.. you know that Moody's Diner does NOT take credit cards!
42.. you actually miss the fifteen below zero mornings in winter (that have been eliminated by the greenhouse effect) because you enjoyed running or walking to workin the silent crystal stillness, punctuated by an idling car engine as the owner waited indoors for the car to warm up before his mad dash from warmth to warmth, and your lungs did not freeze; thank you verymuch for your concern.
43.. the word "stove" refers to what you did to the right front fender of your truck after you've had a wicked bring-up on a rock.
44.. there's too much "stuff" in your 2 "cah" garage to get either of your cars into it.
45.. you know the smell of Woodsmens fly dope.
46.. you eat supper at night and dinner at noon.
47.. your idea of a traffic jam is ten cars waiting to pass a tractor on the highway.
48.. "vacation" means going to the Allagash for the weekend.
49.. you measure distance in hours. Still do!
50.. you know several people who have hit moose more than once.
51.. you often switch from "heat" to "A/C" in the same day.
52.. you use a down comforter in the summer.
53.. your grandparents drive at 65 mph through 13 feet of snow during a raging blizzard, without flinching.
54.. you see people wearing hunting clothes at social events.
55.. you install security lights on your house and garage and leave them both unlocked.
56.. you carry jumper cables in your car and know how to use them.
57.. there are 4 empty cars running in the parking lot at the convenience store at any given time.
58.. you design your kid's Halloween costume to fit over a snowsuit.
59.. driving is better in the winter because the potholes are filled with snow.
60.. you know all 4 seasons: almost wintah, wintah, still wintah and construction.
61.. you know what it means when someone says they are going upstreet.
62.. you can actually see the milky way. Yes
63.. you can use your brights on the highway. Yes
64.. L.L. Bean's not just a store, it's a way of life. Absolutely
65.. you encounter any sign reading: "Next Exit: 246 miles".
66.. the nearest mall is 2 hours away.
67.. you have to yield for snowmobiles.
68.. the state closes down at five o'clock.
69.. "The City" means exclusively Portland. Yes
70.. "salt damage" is a viable insurance claim.
71.. all of the traffic lights blink yellow at 10 o'clock at night.
72.. it's not a storm, it's a nor'eastah.
73.. you say room and people think you are saying rum.
74.. you can buy a minivan with four wheel drive and chained tires.
75.. all addresses start with RR#
76.. a rest stop means a pit toilet and a picnic table.
77.. you know Moxie isn't a woman's magazine.
78.. you go "off-roading" before and after school.
79.. you eat ice cream with flavors like 'MooseTracks" and "Maine Black Bear".
80.. you know that a chocolate doughnut is not a white doughnut with chocolate frosting.
81.. you call any long sandwich an "Italian".
82.. you eat potato chips with flavors such as "clamdip", "ketchup" and "dill pickle".
83.. the smell of clam flats at low tide, while disgusting, brings back fond memories of childhood trips to the beach.
84.. you call the basement "downcellah."
85.. your grandmother called shorts "shots".
86.. you live in a mobile home and have a brand new car and a satellite dish.
87.. you see a beat up Ford Pickup with a bumper sticker that reads: "I'd rather be bowhunting."
88.. you can hum the tune of "You should have bought it when you saw it at Mardens?"
89..You know what the Old Port is.

El Desdichado translation

Here's the promised translation of El Desdichado, done verse by verse. I'm only giving it a literal translation for the purposes of analysis; I have neither the time nor the skill to translate it poetically.

Note that this poem is in the classic form of the French sonnet, which differs slightly in arrangement from both the Petrarchan and the English sonnets. Ideally, there are two initial verses of four lines each (octet) and then two verses of three lines each (sestet). And of course, there's a fairly regular rhyme scheme, just as in the classical English sonnet. Alternate ABAB rhymes in the two parts of the octet, and the sestet's pattern is: CDD CEE.

Je suis le Ténébreux, – le Veuf, – l’Inconsolé,
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la Tour abolie :
Ma seule Étoile est morte, – et mon luth constellé
Porte le Soleil noir de la Mélancolie.

"I am the man of shadows, - the widower, - the unconsoled,
The Prince of Aquitaine of the ruined Tower:
My only Star is dead, - and my starry lute
Carries the black Sun of Melancholy."

The "Prince of Aquitaine" is not a random image (no image is in this poem); it refers to Godfried d'Aquitaine, a medieval lord famous for his misfortunes, who came from the same provence Nerval came from. The connection is not crucial to understanding the poem, but it does at least give you an idea of why he uses that image in particular to emphasize his desolation. And why is he desolate, why a widower and unconsoled? His "only star is dead" - so there's been a death of some sort, figurative or literal, a loss of someone who would, perhaps, have consoled him. Now his "starry lute" - a musical instrument equipped to bring light to the darkness (and, as Nerval makes explicit by the end of the poem, a reference to Orpheus) brings only the "black sun of melancholy", "black sun" being a technical term from alchemy to describe a powerful "negative light" (though the idea is quite absurd) that is not merely the absence of light, but its inverse. The imagery as a whole in this stanza is quite easy to follow all in all, giving us a picture of a sort of "dark night of the soul" or of a descent into a realm of overwhelming darkness.

Dans la nuit du Tombeau, Toi qui m’as consolé,
Rends-moi le Pausilippe et la mer d’Italie,
La fleur qui plaisait tant à mon cœur désolé,
Et la treille où le Pampre à la Rose s’allie.

"In the night of the Tomb, You who consoled me,
Give me back Posilipo and the Italian sea,
The flower which pleased my desolate heart,
And the trellis where the Vine and the Rome are united."

Posilipo and the Italian sea are partly autobiographical references to a summer he spent with an Englishwoman in a town near Naples. Yet like the Prince of Aquitaine imagery, the self-referential aspect of this line is really not the main point. There is, of course, the larger image (almost cliched in Nerval's time as well as ours) of the warm, brilliant south as another world in which consolation was possible. The syntactical confusion in the first line of this stanza - "Dans la nuit du Tombeau, Toi qui m’as consolé" - forces us to wonder whether the speaker is referring to himself as metaphorically dead, or to the one who consoled him as literally dead. Or perhaps both, the former as a result of the latter? And we also get a confirmation here of what the phrase "the unconsoled" (as opposed to "the unconsolable" or something tantamount) made us suspect in the first stanza: there was once someone who had consoled him, and she is now gone, just as the comfort of the time in Italy, of the lost flower are gone. He longs for a return of the trellis which made possible the union of two different yet complementary beings - the vine and the rose.

Suis-je Amour ou Phébus ?... Lusignan ou Biron ?
Mon front est rouge encor du baiser de la Reine ;
J’ai rêvé dans la Grotte où nage la sirène...

"Am I Cupid or Phebus? ...Lusignan or Biron?
My forehead is still red from the kiss of the Queen;
I have dreamed in the Grotto where the mermaids sing..."

Now comes the turn in the poem from the speaker's lamentation of his loss to his meditation on how to respond to it and on his role as a poet. Not how the opening of the sestet reverses the declarative "je suis" at the beginning of the octet to the questioning "suis-je?". The references to mythology and folktale only hinted at in the previous eight lines now become explicit, as he explores characters from both Greek mythology and French legend as possible analogues to himself. Is he Cupid, the god of passion and eros or Phoebus, god of the sun, of rationality, of light? Is he Lusignan, husband of the fairy Melusine, or Biron, a French hero whose name also recalls the English poet? The tension between the enchantment of eros and the appeal of rationality and love of higher order is reemphazied in the two following lines, where the "kiss of the queen" merges with his dream of a mysterious grotto filled with mermaids. It's also important to remember that both Cupid and Lusignan lost their loves because of a transgression - Cupid because his wife, Psyche, looked at his face against his command, and Lusignan because he saw his wife bathing and thus discovered that she was really a mermaid. Apollo and Biron, on the other hand, are the pursuers of light, yet have no record of seeing what must not be seen; and as poets, they have the ability to do exactly what Nerval is trying to do in this verse: recall a joyful time that has now disappeared from physical sight.

Et j’ai deux fois vainqueur traversé l’Achéron :
Modulant tour à tour sur la lyre d’Orphée
Les soupirs de la Sainte et les cris de la Fée.

"I have twice crossed the Acheron, victorious:
Modulating by turns on Orpheus' lyre
The sighs of the Saint and the calls of the Fairy."

Now we get the explicit connection to Orpheus, the lute/lyre player, who crossed the Acheron in an attempt to retrieve his wife from Hades but who on the victorious return lost her once more, and decisively this time. As he goes, the melody of the lyre, mirroring the flow of the poem, "modulates" between the "sighs of the Saint" and the "cries of the Fairy": contrasting the dark night of the soul described in the octet with the alluring calls of myth (sestet) which may or may not turn out to be consoling.

It's easy to see what aspects of the Orpheus story Nerval wants to emphasize after having seen the contrast between the mythological figures of the previous tercet. He's fascinated by the way the poet seemingly has the ability to evoke his lost love (or whatever he's describing) in a manner so real as to make it almost present once more. Yet there's always the danger that as a human, under the influence of eros and other no less strong desires (curiosity and lack of trust in particular), he will "look back" against the command of the form, and realize that in seeking to ensure the presence of his loved one, he will seal his loss. You cannot be conscious of the fiction of the poem if it is to really make present what you are hoping to regain.

René - Translation

I apologize in advance for any mistakes in translating - I'm still quite new to this. Never a bad idea to practice though! You can definitely get the idea here at least.

"The absolute solitude, the spectacles of nature soon plunged me into a state nearly impossible to describe. Without relations, without friends, alone, so to speak, on the earth, having no loved ones, I was overwhelmed by a superabundance of life. Sometimes I would suddenly blush, and I felt the colour of streams of boiling lava in my heart; sometimes I uttered involuntary cries, and the night was as troubled in my dreams as in my sleepless moments. I lacked something to fill the abyss of my existence; I descended into a valley, I climbed the mountain, calling with all the force of my desires the ideal object of a future brightness; I embraced it in the winds, I would believe I heard it in the laments of the river; all was this imaginary phantom, even the stars in the heavens and the principle of life in the universe.

"Nonetheless, this state of calm and trouble, of poverty and richness, was not without some charms: one day I amused myself by stripping the leaves off a branch of a stream-side willow, and attaching an idea to each leaf that the current carried off. A king who feared to lose his crown through a sudden revolution would not feel distress as vivid as mine at each accident that threatened the debris of my branch. O feebleness of mortals! o childhood of the human heart, which never grows up! See then to what degree of puerility our superb reason can descend! And is it not true that many men attach their destiny to things of as little value as my willow leaves?

"But how to express this multitude of fleeting sensations that I experienced on my walks? The sounds that the passions emit in a solitary heart resemble the murmure that the winds and waters make in the silence of a desert: one feels them, but one cannot describe them."

I'd welcome suggestions about the last lines in the 1st and 3rd paragraph.