Blood and Rhythmic Analogies in Valéry's Charmes

Or un architecte n'est pas nécessairement lui-même construit en matériaux précieux.

Valéry

      Les GrenadesDures grenades entr'ouvertesCédant à l'excès de vos grainsJe crois voir des fronts souverainsEclatés de leurs découvertes!

Si les soleils par vous subis,O grenades entre-bâillées,Vous ont fait d'orgueil travailléesCraquer les cloisons de rubis,

Et que si l'or sec de l'écorceA la demande d'une forceCrève en gemmes rouges de jus,

Cette lumineuse ruptureFait rêver une âme que j'eusDe sa secrète architecture.

      Le Vin perduJ'ai quelque jour, dans l'Océan,(Mais je ne sais plus sous quels cieux)Jeté, comme offrande au néant,Tout un peu de vin précieux . . .

Qui voulut ta perte, ô liqueur?J'obéis peut-être au devin?Peut-être au souci de mon coeur,Songeant au sang, versant le vin?

Sa transparence accoutuméeAprès une rose fuméeReprit aussi pure la mer . . .

Perdu ce vin, ivres les ondes! . . .J'ai vu bondir dans l'air amerLes figures les plus profondes . . .

Introduction

Because of their discussion of his own mode of composition, Paul Valéry's essays create a sense of continuity between his critical ideas and his poetic creations. These essays have served to form an idea of him as an almost excessively intellectual poet, one who wrote dozens of drafts for each of his poems, a math enthusiast who said of beginning a poem that "un problème de ce genre admet une infinité de solutions" (Valéry 1957, 1338–39). It may seem puzzling then, that Rainer Maria Rilke should have been so drawn to Valéry on both a literary and personal level, given that the usual thumbnail sketch provided of Rilke is that of an enraptured poet caught up in fleeting moments of inspiration. One explanation suggested for Rilke's admiration of poems such as "Palmes" would be "le génie de la France, ce sens du dessin, cette lucide contrainte [que Rilke] convoitait comme antidote à la facilité de son élan et de son émotivité" (Lang 1953, 17). From this point of view, the poetry of "le métallique Valéry" (Lang 1953, 39), being deliberately and carefully calculated, could share little of the sense of ephemerality and personal investment of Rilke's. I intend to propose a different view of Valéry by studying two consecutive poems from Charmes which, rather than azur, are characterized by a somewhat atypically rosy palette: "Les Grenades" and "Le Vin perdu." Through the image of ripening fruit, the first of these in particular recalls Blanchot's discussion of Rilkean patience in accomplishing death.

Telle est la tâche, et qui nous invite une fois de plus à rapprocher le travail poétique et le travail par lequel nous devons mourir (. . .) L'image de la lente maturité du fruit, de l'invisible croissance de ce fruit qu'est l'enfant, nous suggère l'idée d'un travail sans hâte

(Blanchot 1955, 160–161).

My reading will attempt to establish how, in Valéry's two poems, the end of the long poetic process equally implies death for the poet himself.

In the course of this argument, the two sonnets will be put into relation with analogies of harmony between music, architecture and the body suggested in Valéry's essay "Poésie et pensée abstraite." Valéry's essay deals with the tension between visceral inspiration and the structured, intellectual refinement of that inspiration. Ince observes that "many critics" wish "to see Charmes as a series of poems giving a chronological exposition to the various phases of poetic creation" (Ince 1956, 40). I do see these two sonnets as containing figures which relate to the genesis of the poem, but more specifically they represent the poet's release of the poem from the interior, closed space of his mind to the outside world. As much may be read into the opening quatrain...