Argument by Images in Keats’s “Sleep and Poetry”

 

Numbers in parentheses refer to lines of “Sleep and Poetry”; those in brackets to endnotes. 

 

     John Keats is not known as a theoretician, but his early “Sleep and Poetry” provides a programmatic manifesto in defense of his Romantic practice.  Characteristically, he makes a case through images rather than syllogisms.  This is wholly in keeping with Keats’ principle of Negative Capability, perhaps his most significant contribution to literary theory.  The reader who pays regard to the poem’s images from the start will develop the system of correspondences critical to the climactic passage.

     Though the title seems to balance sleep and poetry, the poem in fact is about the latter.  The opening paean to sleep is a feint, introducing the notion of a free imagination and setting up even greater praise for poetry.  After an epigraph from the pseudo-Chaucerian The Floure and the Leafe which in fact describes sleeplessness as distressing and inexplicable, Keats proceeds to identify sleep with a series of images that establish a foundation for his theme.

     First he celebrates the beauties of nature in a conventional catalogue which, for all its predictability (birds, bees, blooms, bowers) includes palpable and specific detail: a “pretty hummer” that “buzzes cheerily,” “a musk-rose, blowing/ In a green island, far from all men’s knowing.”  The primary meaning is at first a simple affirmation of sensuality, but even this significance is complicated by the rose being unknown, presumably because a mentally conceived flower is superior even to the beautiful ones in a real garden.  Similarly, the value of the “nest of nightingales” is heightened by its extreme secrecy analogous to an individual subjectivity. 

     Birdsong also suggests poetry, which leads to the culminating terms of the first rhetorical period’s cluster of images, “Cordelia’s countenance,” and “a high romance,” anticipating the poem’s conclusion by recalling poetic texts rather than natural objects and both implying love, the one paternal and the second romantic.  The poet’s goal, though, lies beyond.  All of pretty these images fall short of sleep’s power to please and shorter yet of the sublimity of the highest poetry.

     Having moved from attractive aspects of nature to images evoking art and human affection, in the second half of the verse paragraph Keats lists images meant to convey the nature of sleep itself.  Having just mentioned literary accounts of passion, Keats now associates sleep with the charms of actual lovers maternal and romantic.  Sleep closes our eyes and sings lullabies as though a loving mother.  Sleep is the “silent entangler of a beauty’s tresses,” a phrase suggesting the lady in bed.  It is a “happy listener” to the upwelling sense of felicity that greets each “new sunrise,” for, at any rate, “all the cheerful eyes.”  This praise is, again, designed to more greatly magnify the glory of poetry once Keats’ entire progression of thought emerges.

     In the next verse paragraph (ll. 19-40) the series of associations from prettiness to love to bliss forms a crescendo that exalts poetry to the level of a numinous experience.  It surpasses the experience of beauty in nature and, indeed, is ineffable, “beyond thought.” (19)  Keats mentions birds, considered intermediaries between the human and the divine, before admitting the inadequacy of language.  “What is it?  And to what shall I compare it?”  For Keats poetry provides access to a “glory” which is a direct experience of reality and thus contains hints at least of Ultimate Reality.  It is “awful, sweet, and holy,” appearing in many guises, sometimes, “fearful,” sometimes “gentle,” yet always “wondrous” and most accurately traceable only in images.  As art is generally oblique in its implications, the truth seems coy, often revealing only “shapes,” “aerial limning,” “faint-heard hymning,” yet such evidence is sufficient “sometimes” to elicit a jubilant reaction from the soul: “rejoice! rejoice!”  This experience of an illuminated sublime is familiar to many besides himself. (41-46)  He cunningly creates a community of the initiated, of all those who “can feel his being glow,” by saying that he will not “insult” his readers by attempting to sketch what they already know from their own lived experience. 

     The sensual delights of the imagination are detailed in the next section (47-84) as the poet contemplates the ascent of his own Parnassus.  “Not yet a glorious denizen” of that realm, he offers the sacrifice of praise as well as, in fantasy, his own death “like a fresh sacrifice” ‘to the great Apollo.”  His approach is marked by the heady intoxication of “o’erwhelming sweets.”  This is for Keats the locus amoenus, the “bowery nook,” the “elysium,” identified with the entire body of poetry, what I like to call “the ocean of words,” for Keats “an eternal book” where everything is “lovely” and nymphs play in the woods.  There he might entertain “imaginings” of all sorts, “vistas of solemn beauty” inspiring him to “write on my tablets all that was permitted,/ All that was for our human senses fitted.”  Mysteriously, only through such fabulating flights of the mind can the individual ”seize” (or understand) “all the events of this wide world.”  Keats then overturns his earlier modesty topoi and anticipates gaining “wings” and a concomitant immortality through his own verse.

     The rush of this grand ambition is then brought up short with the admonition “Stop and consider!  Life is but a day,” followed by a series of images of life’s evanescence: “a fragile dew-drop,” “a poor Indian’s sleep,” turning to the more hopeful “the rose’s hope while yet unblown,” concluding with the quite wonderful “a laughing school-boy. Without grief or care,/ Riding the springy branches of an elm.”    With this more sanguine view, Keats returns in lines 96-121 to his poetic ambitions, asking, with a poignance inevitable for those who know the poet’s biography, for ten years to produce his oeuvre.  The thought I enough to return him to the idyllic quasi-Classical scenes that for him suggest the beauties of art in general, often with erotic even orgiastic imagery.  The poet says he will “choose each pleasure that my fancy sees,” “catch the white-handed nymphs,” “woo sweet kisses,” “play with their fingers, “touch their shoulders.”  He imagines in fact a troupe of nymphs all ministering to his comfort, teaching the doves to fan him with its wings, dancing, enticing,

 

till in the bosom of a leafy world

We rest in silence, like the two gems upcurl’d

In the recesses of a pearly shell.

                                               (119-121)

 

This final image with its snug lapidary beauty is a neat formulation of purely aesthetic satisfaction. 

     Yet the poet feels he must, with an act of will, summon up his gravitas and “bid these joys farewell” in pursuit of “a nobler life” that embraces not beauty alone but also the “agonies” and “strife of human hearts.”  This resolution is followed immediately by a vision of an Apollonian heroic charioteer, the embodiment of the poet as redeemer, bringing in his train “shapes of delight, of mystery, and fear,” an entire spectrum of emotion, laughing, weeping, but always beautiful like “a lovely wreath of girls.”  The onward impetus on this lord of poetry is “awfully intent,” implying the dread and delight of his comprehensive view.

      The vision then vanishes, as visions do, the chariot “fled into the light of heaven,” bringing Keats crashing down into “a sense of real things” that “like a muddy stream” he feels may “bring my soul to nothingness.”  He is sustained by the sublime memory of poetry’s potential and muses over the decline of the art in his own age, recalling a Golden Age in which the British muses had no care “than to sing out and comb their wavy hair.”  In another of Keats’ breath-taking images he describes how earlier poets, a “fervid choir that lifted up a noise of harmony” until their song, a “mighty self of convoluting sound” which gains such immensity that it becomes “huge as a planet” and rotates “eternally around a dizzy void.” (173-177) 

     This grand afflatus comes and goes, however, in the life of the world as well as of the individual.  A summary of the images in the latter portion of the poem will indicate this oscillation between the previously defined poles.  The ordinary aesthetic pleasures are evoked still by the images of pastoralism, most succinctly by the “sweet music” of the “swan’s ebon bill.” (223, 226)  Yet the joy of these immediate delights is curtailed by suffering, mortality, and the great unknown.  For Keats art provides the most effective strategy for coping with an unknowable and often inimical world.    Faced with “the shiftings of the mighty winds that blow/ Hither and thither” (286-7) “the mighty winds,” he finds a route “out the dark mysteries of human souls.” (289)  Through the sort of via negativa not unlike the ancient Skeptics’ and Stoics’ concept of ἐποχή and which Keats called Negative Capability, the poet is capable of not only accepting inability to understand the cosmos, but building insight from that lack.

 

yet there ever rolls                

A vast idea before me, and I glean           

Therefrom my liberty; thence too I’ve seen         

The end and aim of Poesy.

                                                                                          (290-3)

 

Here poetry is named as the only route to a clear enlightened vision.  Yet that “liberty” brings no end to suffering and striving, though the truth be

 

                                             manifest                     

As a large cross, some old cathedral’s crest,        

Lifted to the white clouds.

                                                            (295-297)

 

There remains a kind of existential “ocean dim” “spreads awfully before me” (306-307), presumably made up of ignorance and suffering, irreducible but tolerable through art.   A proper Pegasus, not the neo-Classical “rocking horse” (186) with “might half slumb’ring on its own right arm” (237) has the power “to sooth the cares, and lift the thoughts of man” (247) in spite of “trees uptorn,” (242) etc., bringing “delightful hopes” and “heart-easing” words. (268)

     Keats recognizes the hazards of the visionary’s role, indeed he embraces the Romantic myth of the artist’s likely early death, which proved so poignantly true in his case. 

Ah! rather let me like a madman run       

Over some precipice; let the hot sun       

Melt my Dedalian wings . . .

(301-303)

     This self-dramatizing image embodies an existential crisis with the poet as hero facing a cosmos sufficiently disturbing to drive the persona back to refuge in the sensual beauty which defines the pleasures of the mind, while the poet knows he must accept also the harshness of the world and the limits of his own knowledge.  The mention of myrtle, Aphrodite’s flower (248), represents a resolution in art between the joys and distresses of the world.  The plant, primarily associated with love (and under Christianity with the Virgin), also signified the victor in athletic and poetic competitions (a usage also echoed in the New Testament) [2]

     Keats’ vision of life, abundant and delightful yet inevitably tragic, is rendered livable by imagination, by art.  In the concluding passage, Keats takes his inspiration and comfort from the symbolic elaborations of the art objects he sees about him in Hunt’s cottage.  He restates his earlier description of poetry functioning with insouciant mastery, “’tis might half slumb’ring on its own right arm” (237),     

   

            And with these airs come forms of elegance
            Stooping their shoulders o'er a horse's prance,
            Careless, and grand — fingers soft and round
            Parting luxuriant curls; — and the swift bound
            Of Bacchus from his chariot, when his eye
            Made Ariadne's cheek look blushingly.

(331-336)

 

     The reader is left, then, in the end with what to Keats was most significant: a handful of images: the immediately appealing musk-rose and the nymphs, but also the alarming images of the uprooted trees, the Indian about to go over the waterfall, and the precipice.  The contradiction is then resolved by art, signified in the pearly shell, the cross “huge as a planet,” and the charioteer.

     Keats’ conclusion is a charming and intimate recapitulation with details of the poet’s visit to Leigh Hunt’s cottage on the Vale of Health (in which Shelley and Byron were also guests).  His demonstration of the power of images is here raised to another order by his use of the objets d’art he saw about him [3], selected by Hunt and viewed by Keats as symbolic representation of their values.  Since Keats here plays the role of consumer of art as well as creator, this passage serves as an example of art’s uplifting influence.  

     The images of antiquity represent beauty embodied in art includes nymphs as well as “fauns and satyrs taking aim at swelling apples with a frisky leap.”  Here the poet includes a vision of nature itself, seen as though freshly through the eyes of the artists of the past.  The sexual association of this reverence for nature is clear in language like “the wild thrilling liquidity of dewy piping.”  While the mythological prints on the wall celebrate nature, love, art, and, in particular the art of antiquity, and, by implication, offer a sort of pagan divine service as well, the gap of centuries separating the poet from the Classical era suggests his lack, his longing, his hunger.  The picture of Petrarch and Laura reinforces the same scheme as does the bust of Sappho, each with associations both erotic and artistic.

 

                                             half smiling down

At nothing; just as though the earnest frown

Of over thinking had that moment gone

From off her brow, and left her all alone.

 

Sappho’s peace of mind is imagined to have arrived at the moment that ratiocination, “over thinking” ceased.  Surely Keats sought a similar resolution for himself and his readers.

     While the construction of the value of beauty is the primary theme, Keats’ political ideals support his aesthetic ones.   More than a nationalist icon, the bust of Alfred the Great probably suggested to Keats the king’s support for learning and culture as well as the notion that he advanced constitutional rule.  Kościuszko, to whom Coleridge and Hunt himself had also written sonnets, was a hero in freedom’s cause for the Romantics [4]. 

     With the sight of these meaningful images, Keats is uplifted and declares, “And up I rose refresh'd, and glad, and gay.” (401)  The positive operation of these works of art on the consciousness of the poet anticipates a similar effect of the poem on the reader.  In effect, the author represents himself as having “reprogrammed” his mind through contemplation of both art and nature, and the alteration of consciousness occurs through the developing montage of images alone. 

     Regularly through the poem, the lower levels of inspiration are marked by the Classical images of pastoralism and the higher by divine figures, only to vanish at the summit of aesthetic experience as language becomes unable to bear the theme.  Keats maintains the vigor of his skepticism, proceeding without illusion, with the conviction that the symbolic manipulations of art provide the most potent solace in a fallen world both beautiful and terrifying.  For him the most profound truth is accessible by looking closely, meditating, one might say, on certain images which have their own order and the capacity to program the consciousness, his own and his readers’.  Whereas sleep is a mere temporary escape, like the unmixed sylvan fantasies of pastoralism, Keats seeks to provide an authentic and lasting heart’s-ease in poetry “to sooth the cares, and lift the thoughts of man” (247).

 

  

1.   I am reminded of the elusiveness of enlightenment suggested by the Zen Ox-herding pictures. 

 2. See, for instance, Philippians 3 and I Corinthians 9:24.

3.  These works are listed by Sir Sidney Colvin in his John Keats (ch. 3) as Poussin’s “Empire of Flora,” his “Venus and Adonis,” and several, perhaps, of his “Bacchanals;” Stothard’s “Bathers,” “‘Vintage,'” and Petrarch as a youth first meeting Laura; and Raphael’s “Poetry,” from the Stanza della Segnatura.

4.  Among the many other poets of the age who wrote in praise of Kościuszko were Henry Francis Cary (“Ode to General Kosciuszko”), Byron (“The Age of Bronze”), Southey (“To A. S. Cottle from Robert Southey”), and Thomas Campbell (“Pleasures Of Hope”).

Rimbaud’s Use of Montage

The essay is followed by my translation and by the French text of “Villes.”


     Fragmentation and elliptical expression are implicated in all literary usage. Figures of speech, for instance, always require the reader’s imaginative leap though this action is so natural to the human mind, always so sensitive to structure and pattern and abstract form, that we are not ordinarily conscious of it. These characteristics are particularly evident in modern literature and, like other characteristics of the modern, in the poems of Arthur Rimbaud.
     Texts like the prose poems of his Illuminations may be considered as literary examples of what in cinema would be called montage. This most revolutionary technique of cinema is identified with Sergei Eisenstein, though he credits Griffith as his own source. [1] Those who feel at sea in the middle of one of these poems might do well to simply watch the mental movie scripted by the poet’s images without concern for unity or consistency until the end. As when watching one of the breathtaking sequences in Ivan the Terrible, one might relish the formal structure and melodic appeal of Rimbaud’s words which, like Eisenstein’s masterful images, carry the reader or viewer effortlessly aloft.
     To filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein the visual sequence of montages of image is the most potent and distinctively cinematic of the techniques he developed in his own films and in his teaching and critical writing. He calls montage “the most powerful compositional means of telling a story” and “a syntax for the correct construction of each particle of a film fragment.” [2] Through montage he pursued a “unity of a higher order.” [3] An admirer of James Joyce during Stalinism when such enthusiasm could have the most serious consequences, he praised Joyce’s skill at presenting apparent “disintegration in stylistic unity” and declared himself very nearly a disciple, saying, “from Joyce the next leap is to film.” [4]
     Eisenstein differed with his colleague Pudovkin’s view of montage as “linkage,” building an accumulated case as though with mounting evidence, and championed instead the idea of montage as “collision,” forcefully juxtaposing elements with no immediate connection, thus obliging the viewer to make one, consciously or, perhaps better yet, unconsciously. [5] His own montages seek to be at once “monistic” in the final effect and “dialectic” in working toward that end. [6]
     The filmmaker was quite clear about the literary parallels to his visual techniques, citing Flaubert and others as influences. Such gaps have long been exploited as a source of literary beauty. Long after Lautréamont described a boy’s fairness as "beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella" [7] his simile became a Surrealist slogan. More modern manifestations of related theories include Rothenburg and Robert Kelly ‘s concept of “deep images [8] or Bly’s of “leaping” poetry. [9]
     Some have found Rimbaud’s prose poems to include an almost indigestible density of signification. (The same complaint is sometimes made of John Ashbery, perhaps Rimbaud’s finest translator. [10]) If the consumer experiences the images as a series, allowing them to register “without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” [11] they will not only register as powerful impressions, but they will shortly form highly ordered groupings that might, in the end, be called unified or even “monistic.” By listing the images over each section of the poem, I mean to suggest how they might appear as raw experience. I follow with a rapid, stream-of-consciousness interpretation, always provisional. I present this explication as a document of one reader’s response. In the end I believe the poem seems almost classical in its regard for form.


Cities

     The very title launches a sort of bipolar dialectic that functions throughout the poem. A short time before Rimbaud, Baudelaire’s Parisian flâneur was at once engaged and alienated, while looking forward a bit, Eliot is astonished at the sight of the “unreal city.” [12] In spite of the title much of the piece employs natural images: palms, gorges, and high peaks. The writer occupies cities, and that fact suggests his alienation from his own original nature, a tense estrangement which is in fact the central theme. The idea is unannounced. The reader must await its unfolding in time, like a film.


Alleghenys and Lebanon -- chalets on tracks -- craters and colossi -- bells in gorges

     “Oh, cities! Here is a people for whom fantasies of the Alleghenys and the Lebanon were composed! Chalets of crystal and of wood which move on invisible tracks by means of unseen pulleys. Old craters surrounded by colossi where copper palms roar music through the flames. One overhears the love-feasts on the canals behind the chalets. The bells’ hunt cries through the gorges.”
     After announcing the title with an emotive exclamation point, he proceeds to characterize urbanites as people to suit whose taste such exotic realms as “the Alleghenys and the Lebanon” were specifically designed. He suggests their elaborate (virtually “steampunk” despite its date) artificiality by speaking of invisible tracks and pulleys.
     Then the images begin to flash by with dizzying speed. Rimbaud sketches a weird end-of-the-world scene like Coleridge’s Xanadu: a crater, a void, the emptiness of the modern soul seems in the center, surrounded by colossi more mysterious than those of Easter Island. Surely they are a response to the crater, an attempt through myth to restore balance. But this dialectic no sooner emerges than it is replaced by another natural/unnatural monster: copper palm trees which, in spite of their surprising material, are aflame, turning to a nightmare the tropical dream they first elicited. Further, in the midst of conflagration they, like the poet and, by implication, all the rest of us, are singing.
     Whatever can be the source of song? Perhaps the “love-feasts,” audible from a distance, the first introduction of the dynamo of eros that powers the creation and offers the potential for the persona’s escaping his distress and gaining a sense of belonging and fulfilment and joy. One next sees bells ringing wildly, their peal echoing through the gorges, those liminal areas where low turns to high, the tocsin ringing like the Buddha’s advice in the Lotus Sutra: “Your house is on fire! Act!” [13]


titanic choruses -- trumpeting Rolands -- masts on gangways -- seraphic centauresses

     “Choral societies with gigantic singers and striking robes and banners striking as a high peak dash on the scene. On platforms in the middle of the abyss, Rolands trumpet their courage. On gangways over the void and on the roofs of hostels heaven’s heat decks out the masts. The collapse of apotheoses has caught the higher fields where seraphic centauresses play among the avalanches.”
     Suddenly the colossi seem to have come alive and formed themselves into choruses. In the face of the dizzying onslaught we humans, poor doomed Rolands, crow and strut bravely as doom approaches. On the jerry-built justifications that get us through life and over our very accommodations the unforgiving absolute sun displays its mad love of pattern on the cosmic masts. The death of god has proceeded to the point where semi-divine women play heedless amid collapse and disaster.


a stormy sea -- sorrowful flowers -- gowned floating faeries -- theophany of Diana

     “Above the elevation of the highest peaks, a sea perturbed by the constant birth of Venus and filled with fleets of men’s choruses and with the thrum of valued conches and pearls. The sea grows dim with lethal blasts. On the slopes harvests of flowers, huge like our weapons and our winecups, bawl. Parades of Mabs in red and opalescent gowns climb the gullies. Way up there, feet in the blackberries and rushing water, Diana suckles the deer.”
     At the highest pinnacle of knowledge one finds only the great primal sea waving to reflect the sempiternal birth of Venus. The great sea of chaos is shaken by mortality to thicken the plot. The very flowers, inscribed with weapons and wine-cups, weep. Ascending faeries (the third mention of divinized female figures) rise from the gorges, seeking always the upward path and, as their goal, Diana sits at high altitude rooted in the water and the animals and the plants of perfected nature. She resembles those archaic goddesses of whom Gimbutas wrote. [14]


bacchantes under burning moon -- Venus going visiting -- bone-built houses -- elk on Main Street

     “Suburban bacchantes weep while the moon burns and cries. Venus visits the caves of ironworkers and ascetics. Groupings of belfries sing what’s on people’s minds. From manors built of bones comes an unknown tune. All myths alter and the elk rush through towns.”
     The bacchantes are the wise ones, but they weep under the burning moon of experience. Still some favored ones (here hermits and blacksmiths) can enjoy communion with Venus and in that way to become enlightened. Again song carries the human consciousness abroad as the bells sing out the truth. More music emerges from the grand structures people have built of their own knowledge of mortality, but it is not wholly intelligible. The myths must be updated as Diana’s animals troop trough Main Street in an undeniable rush of energy.


paroxysms of storm -- tribal dancing -- the dilemma of the Baghdad street -- conclusion

     “A paradise of thunderstorms collapses. Tribal people dance without pause to celebrate the night. And, one time, I went down in the crowds of a Baghdad street where troops were singing the joy of new work, with a brisk breeze blowing, circling, unable to escape the unreal phantoms of the hills where they must have gathered.
     What good arms, what fine hour will recover for me the place from which my sleep and my smallest movements come?”
     The sky, chaotic like the sea, is torn by huge storms, while below tribal people, the only possessors of the cosmic secrets, dance to embrace the night so alarming to the city-dweller. In the exotic yet urban medina of Baghdad he hears people singing their daily round, singing again to counteract the dark, but he feels always the cold reminding breeze of the metaphysical dilemmas of the mountains. Carrying this burden about with him, he cannot join the crowds. He wonders how he might regain that place of his own unconscious, his sleep, and also of his deepest nature, the origin of his “smallest movements.” In Zen terms he is looking for his original face, before his parents’ birth.
     We have then a poem on cities in which the few mentions of cities are emphatically exotic. Here an urban setting serves simply as an emblem of estrangement. Yet the poet realizes that he cannot return to a prelapsarian nature. The only routes toward mitigation of the unfitness we humans feel as a neurotic byproduct of self-consciousness are love and art, Venus and song. Wild as it is, the poem is optimistic in contrast to Rimbaud’s silence that was to come, his escape to Africa, when even these most powerful consolations came to be insufficient. Already in the nineteenth century, the pillars of certainty had fallen for the young poet, and he could find his way only by anticipating the techniques and themes of the age to come.



1. For homage to Griffith see p. 204-5 and 234-5 The Film Form and The Film Sense (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1957).

2. The Film Form, p. 111.

3. The Film Form, p. 254.

4. From Emily Tall, “Eisenstein on Joyce: Sergei Eisenstein's Lecture on James Joyce at the State Institute of Cinematography, November 1, 1934,” James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Winter, 1987), pp. 133-142.

5. Robert Bly, Leaping Poetry: An Idea with Poems and Translations.

6. The Film Form, Flaubert p. 12 For montage as collision, see p. 36.

7. Canto VI, Les Chants de Maldoror. Lautréamont became a hero of the Surrealists after Phillippe Soupault came upon a copy of Maldoror (while a mental patient) and showed to Breton.

8. Trobar 2.

9. The Film Form, p. 235.

10. Though I was immensely impressed with his 2011 translation of Illuminations, I avoided consulting it when doing my own version of “Villes.”

11. The phrase is from Keats’ letter, of course, on “negative capability.”

12. Line 60 of “The Wasteland.” In Baudelaire’s “Paysage” he sees a city in terms as artificial as Rimbaud’s, occupied with “crystal palaces.”

13. In Ch. 3.

14. See The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe and other books.

Cities
Oh, cities! Here is a people for whom fantasies of the Alleghenys and the Lebanon were composed! Chalets of crystal and of wood which move on invisible tracks by means of unseen pulleys. Old craters surrounded by colossi where copper palms roar music through the flames. One overhears the love-feasts on the canals behind the chalets. The bells’ hunt cries through the gorges. Choral societies with gigantic singers and striking robes and banners striking as a high peak dash on the scene. On platforms in the middle of the abyss, Rolands trumpet their courage. On gangways over the void and on the roofs of hostels heaven’s heat decks out the masts. The collapse of apotheoses has caught the higher fields where seraphic centauresses play among the avalanches. Above the elevation of the highest peaks, a sea perturbed by the constant birth of Venus and filled with fleets of men’s choruses and with the thrum of valued conches and pearls. The sea grows dim with lethal blasts. On the slopes harvests of flowers, huge like our weapons and our winecups, bawl. Parades of Mabs in red and opalescent gowns climb the gullies. Way up there, feet in the blackberries and rushing water, Diana suckles the deer. Suburban bacchantes weep while the moon burns and cries. Venus visits the caves of ironworkers and ascetics. Groupings of belfries sing what’s on people’s minds. From manors built of bones comes an unknown tune. All myths alter and the elk rush through towns. A paradise of thunderstorms collapses. Tribal people dance without pause to celebrate the night. And, one time, I went down in the crowds of a Baghdad street where troops were singing the joy of new work, with a brisk breeze blowing, circling, unable to escape the unreal phantoms of the hills where they must have gathered.
What good arms, what fine hour will recover for me the place from which my sleep and my smallest movements come?


Villes
Ce sont des villes ! C'est un peuple pour qui se sont montés ces Alleghanys et ces Libans de rêve ! Des chalets de cristal et de bois qui se meuvent sur des rails et des poulies invisibles. Les vieux cratères ceints de colosses et de palmiers de cuivre rugissent mélodieusement dans les feux. Des fêtes amoureuses sonnent sur les canaux pendus derrière les chalets. La chasse des carillons crie dans les gorges. Des corporations de chanteurs géants accourent dans des vêtements et des oriflammes éclatants comme la lumière des cimes. Sur les plates-formes au milieu des gouffres les Rolands sonnent leur bravoure. Sur les passerelles de l'abîme et les toits des auberges l'ardeur du ciel pavoise les mâts. L'écroulement des apothéoses rejoint les champs des hauteurs où les centauresses séraphiques évoluent parmi les avalanches. Au-dessus du niveau des plus hautes crêtes une mer troublée par la naissance éternelle de Vénus, chargée de flottes orphéoniques et de la rumeur des perles et des conques précieuses, - la mer s'assombrit parfois avec des éclats mortels. Sur les versants des moissons de fleurs grandes comme nos armes et nos coupes, mugissent. Des cortèges de Mabs en robes rousses, opalines, montent des ravines. Là-haut, les pieds dans la cascade et les ronces, les cerfs tettent Diane. Les Bacchantes des banlieues sanglotent et la lune brûle et hurle. Vénus entre dans les cavernes des forgerons et des ermites. Des groupes de beffrois chantent les idées des peuples. Des châteaux bâtis en os sort la musique inconnue. Toutes les légendes évoluent et les élans se ruent dans les bourgs. Le paradis des orages s'effondre. Les sauvages dansent sans cesse la fête de la nuit. Et une heure je suis descendu dans le mouvement d'un boulevard de Bagdad où des compagnies ont chanté la joie du travail nouveau, sous une brise épaisse, circulant sans pouvoir éluder les fabuleux fantômes des monts où l'on a dû se retrouver.
Quels bons bras, quelle belle heure me rendront cette région d'où viennent mes sommeils et mes moindres mouvements ?

The Soap Opera of the Pair Who Forgot Themselves, but only Temporarily

texts of arias from The Soap Opera of the Pair Who Forgot Themselves, but only Temporarily

(Images from an old French textbook accompanied these words, but as of yet I have not succeeded in including them in this format.)

1. [sigh]

2. I loved and didn’t think until I saw that I had spilled my joy and thus had marred my dress. The tea that should sustain me now cannot do enough.

3. On the first I had felt on the brink of what had seemed my pool of joy. On the second my knees began to ache. And today . . .!

4. Hello, my lover, my ladder into air, my jive cell-mate, my fruitbasket, my goose, my cave, my answer. My love, hello, are you there?

5. Oh, how milk and coffee flowed, like stone come live and lively! What fawn-tone! What hazel cream! What body can match this complexion?

6. [stricken pause]

7. I struggled hard to say the truth but couldn’t stretch my mouth so far; I tried to cry, but sudden music came.

8. Diverted and intent, the card-players never looked up. For them the game held fond hopes, petty aggressions aplenty, uncomplicated alliances of Realpolitik across a globe around which any of them could stretch and arm. Leave love and music to those whom they have not yet disappointed, each thought, and tonight, tonight, I shall score. And then, then I can bid my host good-night and go home knowing for once, when all is added up at day’s end, I have come out ahead.