“La neige piétinée est la seule rose”: Poetry and Truth in Yves Bonnefoy

“La neige piétinée est la seule rose” : Poetry and Truth in Yves Bonnefoy James Lawler C AN 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 etfin 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 cen­ tury. 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 lapoésie (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 etfin 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 VOL. XXXII, No. 2 43 L ’E spr it C r éa te u r 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 fu t 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 child­ hood 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 etfin 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...