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The Imagery of Saint-John Perse's Neiges
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
The most significant studies to date of Saint-John Perse approach his work “extensively,” keeping the poet's total output in the foreground. Commentary on individual poems is not entirely lacking, especially on Anabase and Vents, but nothing approaching exhaustive textual analysis of any one poem has yet been attempted. The present study has been undertaken in the belief that an intensive approach to a small segment of Perse's work may supplement and give sharper relief to the insights of more general studies and perhaps lead some readers more directly to the actual text of one of the unquestioned major poets of our time.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1955
References
1 The otherwise excellent presentation of Perse by Alain Bosquet in the “Poètes d'aujourd'hui” series omits any extract whatsoever from Neiges. Saint-John Pérse: Presentation par Alain Bosquet. Choix de textes, bibliographie, dessins, portraits, fac-similes (Paris, 1953). All eds. of Neiges to date are listed in the excellent bibl. of this Bosquet vol., pp. 188–190. The two printings most readily available in the U. S. are probably: a) Exile and Other Poems, Bilingual ed., trans. Denis Devlin, Bollingen Ser., xv (New York, 1949): Neiges: pp. 63–74 (Fr. text), pp. 129–140 (Engl, text); b) Œuvre poétique, i (Paris, 1953); Neiges: pp. 263–278. Quotations from Neiges in the present article utilize the Bollingen text, presumably the most reliable, since it is a carefully prepared de luxe ed., and since the author was in this country at the time of its appearance and able to keep immediate watch on the printing of the text. Quotations from earlier poems are based on the text of Œuvre poétique, i.
2 The principal poems of the “American Series” with their respective dates of composition are: Exit (1941), Poème À l'étrangère (1942), Pluies (1943), Neiges (1944), Vents (1945), Amers (1950–51).
3 Is it possible that Marcel Proust had in mind this characteristic of Perse's earlier poems when he referred to them in A la Recherche du Temps perdu, where the narrator is talking about two girls he has met in Balbec? “Un jour, pourtant, elles trouvèrent sur mon lit un volume. C'étaient des poèmes admirables mais obscurs de Saint-Léger Léger [i.e., Perse]. Céleste lut quelques pages et me dit: ‘Mais êtes-vous sûr que ce sont des vers, est-ce que ce ne serait pas plutôt des devinettes?’ Evidemment pour une personne qui avait appris dans son enfance une seule poésie: Ici-bas tous les lilas meurent, il y avait manque de transition” (Sodome et Gomorrhe, ii, 316). The passage is rather ambiguous, and it may well be that the “manque de transition,” rather than referring to Perse's technique, simply indicates the gap between the naive “Ici-bas tous les lilas meurent,” and Perse's highly sophisticated poems.
4 It is interesting to note that in English the noctuids are also known as owlet-moths.
5 There are several other examples of metaphoric exploitation of scientific terms in Neiges, the most striking of which is the botanical series in the fourth section: “Fraîcheur d'ombelles, de corymbes, fraîcheur d'arille sous la fève.” An umbel is an arrangement of flowers around an axis, in which the little stems of each blossom are of equal length and start from a common source, producing a parasol-shaped cluster. The corymb is similar, except that the stems are of unequal length and rise from various points on the axis. Coolness of flowers is in this figure, of course; but there is more. “Ombelle” has affinities with Latin umbrella ‘parasol’ and umbra ‘shade,‘ the latter, of course, being the fundamental root. So the idea of shade and even rain plays about the word. “Corymb” etymologically simply reinforces the idea of inflorescence, since its Greek root means “a cluster of flowers.” “Arille,” however, is a rarer word and is used for purposes of accuracy. The aril is an appendage of certain seeds that develops after fertilization and may envelop the whole seed. Perhaps this involves keeping a certain amount of moisture in the seed, and the attempt here is probably to enrich still further the sensation of coolness. Saturation of imagery is carried almost to excess in this series.
6 One descriptive passage in the third section which had puzzled me was cleared up by a suggestion from Henry A. Grubbs. The poet is telling how the purity and quiet of the scene is interrupted by the noise of skid-chains and shovels. He adds: “Les nègres de voirie vont sur les aphtes de la terre comme gens de gabelle.” Perse, who once studied medicine, frequently uses medical terms, and the use of “aphtes” here is most felicitous, since aphtae are a minute parasitic fungus that grow, for example, around the mouth and flake off. The figure is striking for snow-covered rubble. But it was not until Grubbs suggested a possible connection between piles of salt and piles of snow that the reference to “gens de gabelle” became intelligible to me. I had thought of the “gabelous”—those hateful salt-tax gatherers of pre-revolutionary France—only in their role as oppressors. But “gens de gabelle” could well refer to those persons working around the salt marshes and salt storehouses, where unrefined piles of salt would be reminiscent of slightly sullied snow.
7 Especially in “Pour fêter une enfance” there is constant concern for “la douceur d'une vieillesse de racines,” and the poem ends with a kind of dynastic invocation: “Or les Oncles parlaient bas à ma mfère. Ils avaient attaché leur cheval à la porte. Et la Maison durait, sous les arbres à plumes.” And this mother to whom the uncles spoke is the same one of whom it is said in Neiges: “Et c'est un pur lignage que tient sa gràce en moi.” In other poems this concern for purity of lineage often merges with more generalized concerns for caste and social hierarchy.
8 Like Roger Caillois, I am convinced that every mention in Perse designates an object or action that has or had concrete reality. Maurice Saillet is flagrantly wrong when he criticizes Caillois on this point and even insinuates that many of Perse's terms are arbitrary Alice in Wonderland creations. A few of Saillet's gratuitously erroneous proofs should immediately make one suspicious of his assertions. See his Saint-John Perse: Poète de Gloire suivi d'un Essai de biographic d'Alexis Léger (Paris, 1952), p. 121 et passim.
[My contention here has been borne out by Caillois' masterly rebuttal to Saillet, which appeared subsequent to the writing of the present article. See Roger Caillois, “Contestation d'une Contestation,” in La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Française, 2e année, No. 14 (1954), 289–293; also his Poétique de St.-John Perse (Paris, 1954), pp. 185–198 et passim.]
9 Word has been relayed to me from an eminent specialist in Dravidian dialects to the effect that, to his knowledge, no known Dravidian dialect lacked means of distinguishing yesterday and tomorrow. One would like to know the exact source of Perse's affirmation.
10 In the Bollingen ed., Mr. Devlin's transl. of “pur délice sans graphie” as “pure unwritten delight” is not a happy one; for “sans graphie” (“without script”) is much stronger than “unwritten”—for it emphasizes not merely the fact that a statement does not exist in writing, but that there existed no set of symbols in which the spoken word might have been written down. It is a clear instance where the poetic force of the precise scientific term reveals itself.
11 The reader may already have reflected that the device as such is far from new. Though that is perfectly true, it is difficult to think of examples where a long poem is so concertedly and tightly arranged around a single focal image as are Perse's American poems. The use of the Brooklyn Bridge in Hart Crane's The Bridge comes to mind; but the abundance of other key-images that do not tie in immediately with the bridge distinguish it markedly from the much tighter-knit and uniform imagery of Perse's American poems.
12 Of the many outstanding commentators on Perse's work, I should like to make special mention of René Girard, whose recent article, “L'Histoire dans l‘œuvre de Saint-John Perse” (RR, xliv [1953], 47–55), is a brilliant statement concerning what I have designated as the true subject-matter of most of the poems of the American series. Girard quotes from almost all these poems, including Neiges, in illustrating his contentions about the role of history in Perse's work. The inclusion of Neiges does not, I think, contradict what I have said about the exceptional position it holds (along with Poème à l‘étrangere) among the later poems; for, even though Neiges is an essentially subjective lyric poem, Perse's dominant concern with certain historical and anthropological problems during this whole later period was bound to make itself felt even in that poem.
13 The whole evocation of the snowy heights of the fourth section reminds one of the snowscape of “Le vierge, le vivace, et le bel aujourd'hui,” although the respective contexts are very different. More specific echoes of Mallarmé, conscious or unconscious, occur in the “pur délice sans graphie” (Mallarmé: “Au pur délice sans chemin” in “Autre Eventail”), and the last words of Neiges, “Désormais cette page où plus rien ne s'inscrit,” which is reminiscent of “le vide papier que la blancheur défend,” of Mallarmé's “Brise marine.”