De la métrique à l'interprétation. Essais sur Rimbaud (review)

"Rhythm contributes to meaning," writes Benoît de Cornulier in the introduction to this recent compilation of the author's work on Arthur Rimbaud, De la métrique à l'interprétation: Essais sur Rimbaud (Gallimard, 2009). These four words neatly summarize Cornulier's exploration of Rimbaud's poetry, mostly published in shorter pieces over the last thirty years, here gathered and re-edited in light of subsequent scholarship (including the author's own). Those familiar with Cornulier's work will appreciate the scholar's provocative thinking and engaging expression that bring together a long career of metricometric analysis. The fact that most of the chapters are updated versions of previously published papers or articles does nothing to take away from their scholarship or the utility of the collection as a source book for Rimbaud studies.

The study is divided into two main parts with a helpful index and glossary appended to the second section to help the reader clarify a very rich but very dense metrico-rhythmic lexicon. The first half of the study ("Analyses") consists of a series of analyses of poems in light of their meter. The second part of the study ("Métrique") is a detailed examination of Rimbaud's verse, all 1750 lines of it, resulting in a taxonomy of vowel stress patterns. Overall, the various essays bear witness to the gradual weakening of the cæsura in modern French poetry explored elsewhere by critics like Michel Murat and Jean-Michel Gouvard.

The first half of the book consists of seven chapters and is the more readable of the two thanks to lucid prose and an occasionally light and humorous tone. In the first chapter, for example, Cornulier provides a provocative reading of Rimbaud's sonnet, "Morts de Quatre-vingt douze et de Quatre vingt treize," that suggests a particularly subversive placement of the cæsura in the line "Morts de Valmy, Morts de / Fleurus, Morts d'Italie," By counting it as a 6-6 rather than the long-assumed 4-4-4, Cornulier ascribes to Rimbaud the rare Alexandrine in which the cæsura falls not only on a monosyllabic preposition (de) but on a particularly unstable one at that. In doing so Cornulier draws the reader's attention to the ubiquitous preposition "de" and, in particular, to its use as an ennobling agent (Messieurs de Cassagnac). By placing the "de" at the crux of the poem and in the weakest position possible vis-à-vis the rhythm, Rimbaud, Cornulier suggests, is playing with the titles of noblesse, in essence positioning the true noble defenders of la patrie (Morts de . . .) over and against the false nobles (Messieurs de . . .). The remaining essays in the first part consist of previously published chapters or articles on several of Rimbaud's poems. Chapter two, for example, identifies the oddly accentuated 'je' of the penultimate line in "Ma Bohème" ("Comme des lyres, je / tirais des élastiques"), odd and provocative since the stress not only breaks up a syntagmatic unit but this stress on the self ("je") would have been frowned upon in bourgeois society.

The final chapter in the first section is a hundred-page study on "Qu'est-ce que pour nous mon cœur . . . " and represents one of the few detailed analyses of the poem exploring the poet's further weakening of the cæsura through the use of metrical structures banned since the sixteenth century, the Italian cæsura ("De rage, sanglots de + tout enfer renversant") and the lyrical cæsura ("Et toute vengeance? + Rien! . . .—Mais si, toute encor,"). The poem, notes Cornulier, starts out with a classical Alexandrine in 6 + 6 ("Qu'est-ce que pour nous mon cœur / que les nappes de sang") and quickly dissolves into lines of twelve syllables that cannot easily be divided into 6 + 6, 8 + 4, or 4 + 8 without the cæsura landing on a conjunction ("et") or an unstable...