Poem by Paul Valéry

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I've been enjoying re-reading the anthology, French Symbolist Poetry, translated by C.F. MacIntyre and published by U.C. (Berkeley) Press. It features poems by Nerval, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Corbiere, Mallarme, Rimbaud, LaForgue, and Valéry. These poets were original in their own right but also influenced poetry in English, including that of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound.

One by Paul Valéry caught my eye--titled simply "Caesar." It starts this way:

Caesar, serene Caesar, your foot on all,
hard fists in your beard, and your gloomy eyes
pregnant with eagles and battles of foreseen fall,
your heart swells, feeling itself the omnipotent cause.

It ends this way:

The spacious world, beyond the immense horizon,
the Empire awaits the torch, the order, the lightning
that will turn the evening to a furious dawn.

Happily out on the water, and cradled in hazard,
a lazy fisherman is drifting and singing,
not knowing what thunder collects in the center of Caesar.


What makes this a "symbolist" poem as opposed to just a regular old poem? The striking juxtaposition of images, I think--so striking that they begin to generate surrealism without generating confusion: "hard fists in your beard," for example--this isn't a logical, "realistic" image, but it makes emotional sense. The same goes for "thunder collects at the center of Caesar." Here Caesar becomes an institution or a phenomenon, or both--but not just a leader, dictator, or man.

Symbol-Rescue

Symbol-Rescue

She runs a small symbol-rescue operation

funded by donations. She takes in such words as

Africa, eagle, blood, sunset, heart, peak, sword,

and desert. Sometimes readers and writers

drop off wounded symbols secretly at night.

Her voluntary staff scrapes off encrusted layers

of meaning. The words are then allowed to rest.

In group-sessions, they talk about the abuse

they've suffered over centuries of literature,

politics, journalism, law, religion, and parenting.

They converse about simpler, denotative times.

Eventually, carefully screened users of language

are allowed to adopt the words, to speak and write

them only as needed, to avoid the old corrupt

symbolic forced-labor. The words seem glad

to have a second chance at meaning. They know

they'll get covered with connotative barnacles,

muck, and fungi again. They know they'll get

asked to signify awfully once more. In the

meantime, the symbols have been recovered.

Africa, for example, may mean in ways both

multititudinous and rare, like air.

Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom