The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Paul Valéry · a book of twenty-one poems, from “Aurore” to “Palme” · published as “Charmes ou Poèmes” by the Nouvelle Revue Française, Paris, 1922, with a revised edition in 1926 · scored as the collection entire, on Valéry’s French, read from knowledge, with the desk’s own English renderings; no text in hand, and French quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
The lyric of the intellect: meditation, dramatic monologue and song in fixed metre and rhyme, the mind shown in the act of thinking
Mythos
Narcissus and his reflection, the Pythia possessed, the tempter in Eden, Zeno’s arrow and Achilles, the sea and the graveyard as being and the dead
Phase
From stillness to motion: the noon of pure being, the temptation of the absolute, the refusal, and the rising wind
Presentation
Twenty-one poems, all in fixed French metre and rhyme, none in free verse: six-line stanzas of decasyllables, alexandrines, short-lined stanzas in the manner of the eighteenth-century ode, sonnets and short quatrains
Register
Cold sublimity and lucid argument, by turns grave, ironic, erotic and serene
Scale
One consciousness and what it attends to: the sea, a tree, a fruit, a body, an oracle, a garden, the dead
Governing Proposition
A book of twenty-one poems in strict French metre and rhyme, published after twenty years of near silence in verse, at the moment when free verse and Dada were the live direction. Its wager is that the closed form can still carry a modern poetry of the intellect: that a consciousness which can conceive itself as pure, timeless and whole, and must live in a body, in time and toward death, can be shown in the act of thinking, and that the measure which binds the poem is the condition of the mind’s freedom, not its cage.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Paul Valéry published almost no verse for twenty years, from about 1898 to 1912. He came back to it with La Jeune Parque (1917), a long poem that is not part of this book, and then with the shorter poems gathered in 1922 by the Nouvelle Revue Française under the title Charmes ou Poèmes. A revised edition followed in 1926, and the book is read in its author’s settled text. It holds twenty-one poems, from “Aurore” to “Palme”. The most famous of them, “Le Cimetière marin”, had first been printed in the review in 1920.
The unit is the book as published, the twenty-one poems scored as one collection. They are not of one weight, and the desk does not pretend they are. Weighed most are “Le Cimetière marin”, “Ébauche d’un serpent”, “Fragments du Narcisse”, “La Pythie”, “Palme”, “Les Grenades”, “Les Pas”, “Aurore”, “Au platane” and “Cantique des colonnes”. Weighed least are “L’Insinuant”, “La Ceinture”, “Le Sylphe”, “Poésie”, “Le Vin perdu” and “Intérieur”, short poems finely made but slighter. The book is an arrangement rather than a sequence: its centre is necessary and its edges are permitted.
Every poem in it is in fixed French metre and rhyme. There is no free verse in the book. That was a choice made against the current: in 1920 the live direction was free verse, Apollinaire and Dada, and Valéry answered with the decasyllable, the alexandrine and short-lined stanzas in the manner of the eighteenth-century ode. He came from Mallarmé, whose poetics of the poem as a made object of language he carried forward entire. What he added was lucidity: the hard thought in clear syntax, the drama of a consciousness spoken as argument. The bet was that constraint could still make a modern poetry of the intellect. The bet was against the current; the path was a proven one.
Movement II
“Le Cimetière marin” is twenty-four stanzas of six decasyllables, 144 lines, rhymed aabccb, with an epigraph from Pindar’s third Pythian. It opens on the sea at noon, seen from a graveyard at Sète, and sees the sea as a roof: “Ce toit tranquille, où marchent des colombes”
“This quiet roof, where doves are walking”. The sea is stillness, pure being under the noon. The second line keeps the first’s music and adds the place: “Entre les pins palpite, entre les tombes”, between the pines it quivers, between the tombs. The alliteration and the echoing “entre” are held without strain.
Noon is the poem’s first temptation. “Midi le juste”, “Noon the just”: the hour without shadow, when the mind, looking at the motionless sea, can conceive itself as pure, timeless and whole. The self is reflected in that stillness and almost consents to it. The rest of the poem is the argument against that consent, and each stanza is a step of it. Little can be taken out. The motion runs from the noon sea through the self’s reflection to the dead, to Zeno, to the wind.
The form carries that motion. The six-line stanza with its returning rhyme is the sea itself, “La mer, la mer, toujours recommencée!”
“The sea, the sea, forever beginning again!”. A mind’s passage from stillness to action is made under a law of measure, and the measure is the knowledge. Set in prose, the poem would lose not its ornament but its claim: that the mind is free only within constraint. The command of caesura, vowel and consonant in these decasyllables is matched by very few poems in the language.
Movement III
Below the noon lie the dead. “Ils ont fondu dans une absence épaisse”
“They have melted into a thick absence”. The poem recognises that the dead have become nothing but the material of the living, and it rejects the metaphysical consolation of immortality. The stanza of the dead is one of the poem’s heights, and its meaning is stated, not felt only: the mind that would be timeless stands among those whom time has dissolved, and does not lie to itself about them.
Then Zeno: “Zénon! Cruel Zénon! Zénon d’Élée!”, with his arrow and his “Achille immobile à grands pas!”
“Achilles motionless at full stride!”. The paradox of the philosopher who proved that motion is impossible becomes the paradox of a mind that would stop time, and the poem refutes it. Zeno and Achilles are not ornament here; they are the shape of the temptation the poem refuses. The stanza has drawn philosophical reading of its own for a century.
The wind comes. “Le vent se lève!... il faut tenter de vivre!”
“The wind is rising! We must try to live!”. The waves break, the stillness is broken with joy, and the poem turns in its last stanzas to action and air. The turn is argued over still: an affirmation of life, a refusal of thought, or both. A century of commentary, Alain’s among it, and the long explication tradition of the French school have not exhausted it. The last line has become a common quotation in French.
Movement IV
In the book’s longer poems myth is the structure, not the decoration. “Fragments du Narcisse” makes Narcissus consciousness in love with its reflection, unable to possess it without destroying it. “La Pythie” makes the oracle’s priestess the archetype of inspiration as violation: the body seized by the god’s speech, made the instrument of a language not its own. The poem reaches a frightened grandeur in the possession and closes on the elevation of sacred language. “Ébauche d’un serpent” gives the tempter of Genesis his own speech, and the speech is the poem: the mind’s self-regard, its delight in itself and its contempt for a creation it envies and is bored by. Both long poems yield more on return than on first reading; both could lose stanzas without the argument breaking.
The smaller poems carry the same law in other keys. “Les Pas” is erotic and almost weightless, a poem of waiting for steps: “Tes pas, enfants de mon silence”
“Your steps, children of my silence”. It reaches a small, intense height of expectation. “Les Grenades” is a sonnet of exact building in which the split pomegranate becomes the brow of the mind. “Au platane” takes up the plane tree, “Cantique des colonnes” the architecture of columns, “La Dormeuse” the body asleep. The slightest pieces, “L’Insinuant” and “La Ceinture” among them, are graceful rather than high, and a preciosity of vocabulary shows in a few.
The Pythia in convulsion and the palm in its patience, the light steps and the graveyard’s argument, obey one law: the mind attending to itself in the act of making, its stillness and its motion, its waiting and its seizure, under strict measure. The serpent is that law turned to irony, Narcissus the law turned to longing. The range is real, from myth and landscape to love, death and the body. Its bound is that every poem turns on the one consciousness. The family, labour, the state, history and the social world are not in the book; written in Europe in the years just after the war, it holds no trace of the war, except perhaps as absence.
Movement V
The book ends on “Palme”, a poem of a palm tree, in short, insistent lines that are the patience they recommend: “Patience, patience, / Patience dans l’azur! / Chaque atome de silence / Est la chance d’un fruit mûr!”
“Patience, patience, patience in the blue! Each atom of silence is the chance of a ripe fruit!”. The truth it puts is the work of time hidden in apparent idleness, and it is elevation in quiet. A poet who had kept twenty years of near silence ends his book on silence as ripening.
The reach was real and international, and it went mostly outside France. Rilke translated the book into German. Jorge Guillén translated “Le Cimetière marin” into Spanish, and his Cántico carried Valéry’s poetics into the Generation of 27. T. S. Eliot wrote on Valéry and admired him, and the idea of the poem as a made object passed into the New Criticism. Within French poetry the main line after 1922 went the other way, through surrealism to Ponge, Char and Bonnefoy, who wrote partly against him, and the generation after him found him official. The book consolidated more than it redirected. It stands, a hundred and four years on, whole and in print, its great poem among the most read and taught in French and the rest read more in the academy than outside it.
On this desk it stands three tenths below Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (8.7), level with it on The Made and The Inner Law and behind it on the rest, The Swerve most of all; two tenths above Goethe’s Roman Elegies (8.2), which leads it on The Swerve, The Imperishable and The Encompassed; and level with Cézanne’s The Card Players (8.4), another art of constraint made of the mind’s attention, which leads it most on The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition while Charmes leads on The Sublime, The Archetypal Deep and The Made. Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (9.1), the swerve Valéry inherits, stands above it on every deep axis. The Epochal Gate is not met, at The Unconcealment, The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition, and the book is placed among the Canonical on its standing.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and the book answers it unevenly. In “Le Cimetière marin” almost nothing can go: the poem moves from the noon sea as pure being, through the self reflected in that stillness, to the dead, to the refutation of Zeno, to the wind and the turn to life, and each stanza is a step of that argument. “Ébauche d’un serpent” and “La Pythie” are long and could lose stanzas without the argument breaking; the serpent’s rhetoric turns back on itself more than once. The book is an arrangement rather than a sequence, and its slight pieces, “L’Insinuant” and “La Ceinture”, could go without loss to what it knows. A necessary centre and permitted edges.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The book discloses the condition of a consciousness that can conceive itself as pure, timeless and whole, and must live in a body, in time, toward death. “Le Cimetière marin” states it as a meaning, not a mood: the mind at noon is tempted by the absolute, “Midi le juste”, “Noon the just”; it sees that the dead have become the material of the living, rejects the consolation of immortality, and turns to action and air. “Palme” makes it a truth of patience, the work of time hidden in apparent idleness; “Ébauche d’un serpent”, the mind’s delight in itself and its boredom with what it made. These hold. What keeps the axis a tenth below the bar is that one condition is turned and returned, and little of the shared, social human condition enters.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Height is reached often in the major pieces. “Le Cimetière marin” rises again and again: the opening stanza of the sea at noon; the stanza of the dead, “Ils ont fondu dans une absence épaisse”, “They have melted into a thick absence”; the last turn to the wind and the breaking waves. “La Pythie” reaches a frightened grandeur in the priestess’s possession, the body seized by the god’s speech, and closes on the elevation of sacred language. “Palme” is elevation in quiet, and “Les Pas” a smaller, intense height of expectation. The cold sublimity of the intellect is Valéry’s own register, and the book sustains it across its major poems. The charge: the slighter pieces are graceful rather than high.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Myth here is built, not evoked. Narcissus in “Fragments du Narcisse” is not an allusion but the structure: consciousness in love with its reflection, unable to possess it without destroying it. The Pythia is the archetype of inspiration as violation, the body made the instrument of a language not its own, and the poem works that archetype through. The serpent of “Ébauche d’un serpent” is the tempter of Genesis made a figure of the mind’s self-regard and its contempt for the creation it envies; his speech is the poem. In “Le Cimetière marin” Zeno and Achilles become the paradox of a mind that would stop time. The particular stays particular: a cemetery at Sète, a noon, a palm. Held on the bar because the minor pieces evoke rather than build.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Valéry inherits Mallarmé directly and wholly: the poem as a made object of language, the hermetic density, the cult of form. Charmes does not depart from that inheritance; it carries it into strict classical prosody, the decasyllable, the alexandrine, short-lined stanzas in the manner of the eighteenth-century ode, when free verse, Apollinaire and Dada were the live direction. That was a swerve against the current of 1920, and it carried a stake: the wager that rigorous constraint could still make a modern poetry of the intellect. But a return to proven forms is a turn along a proven path, and the departure from Mallarmé, in lucidity, argument and the drama of a consciousness spoken in clear syntax, is one of degree more than of kind.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Would changing the form change what the work knows? Here, nearly entirely. The knowledge of “Le Cimetière marin”, a mind’s motion from stillness to action under a law of measure, is carried by the measure: six decasyllables to the stanza, rhymed aabccb, the returning rhyme the sea itself, “La mer, la mer, toujours recommencée!”, “The sea, the sea, forever beginning again!”. The short, insistent lines of “Palme” are the patience they recommend. The serpent’s stanzas coil and turn back on themselves. Set in prose, the poems would lose not a decoration but their argument: that the mind is free only within constraint. Every poem in the book keeps fixed metre and rhyme, and the uniformity is part of the claim.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Evidence over promise. “Le Cimetière marin” has sustained a century of close reading: Alain’s commentary, the long explication tradition of the French school, translations into the major languages, philosophical readings of the Zeno stanza. It does not exhaust. Its last turn is argued over still, as an affirmation of life, as a refusal of thought, or as both. “Ébauche d’un serpent” and “La Pythie” yield more on return than on first reading. What holds the axis is concentration: much of the book’s returning readership goes to one poem, and the lesser pieces are polished surfaces that give their whole in a few readings. Formal depth is high throughout, and it is the formal depth that keeps the axis where it is.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The intrinsic force is real: Charmes turns the poetics of French symbolism into a poetry of the intellect, and shows that the closed form could carry modern thought. It is a consolidation more than a reorganisation of what poetry could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Rilke translated the book into German; Jorge Guillén translated “Le Cimetière marin” into Spanish, and his Cántico carries Valéry’s poetics into the Generation of 27; T. S. Eliot wrote on Valéry and admired him; the idea of the poem as a made object passed into the New Criticism. Within French poetry the main direction after 1922 went the other way, through surrealism to Ponge, Char and Bonnefoy, who wrote partly against him.
Score: 8.2 / 10
A book of 1922, a hundred and four years old, whole, in print without break, in its author’s settled text. Survival across that span is demonstrated. Presence is wide but uneven. “Le Cimetière marin” is among the most read and taught French poems of its century: recited, set in schools, widely translated, its last line a common quotation in French. The rest of the book is read more in the academy than outside it, and Valéry’s standing has had periods of eclipse since the 1950s, when the generation after him found him official. Nothing of the text is lost. Presence uneven across the book is not neglect, but it holds the figure at the foot of the range its age and survival earn.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged on Valéry’s French, command of the medium is at its height. The decasyllable of “Le Cimetière marin” is handled with a control of caesura, vowel and consonant that very few poems in the language match: “Ce toit tranquille, où marchent des colombes, / Entre les pins palpite, entre les tombes” holds its alliteration and its echoing “entre” without strain. The short lines of “Palme” carry argument in metre as nimbly as conversation. “Les Grenades” is a sonnet of exact building in which the split fruit becomes the brow of the mind. The syntax stays lucid where the thought is hard. A tenth or two is withheld for the slight pieces and a preciosity of vocabulary in a few, “L’Insinuant” among them.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Take the most distant elements: the Pythia in convulsion and the palm in its patience; the erotic, almost weightless “Les Pas” and the metaphysical argument of “Le Cimetière marin”. One law governs them: the mind attending to itself in the act of making, its stillness and its motion, its waiting and its seizure, under strict measure. The serpent is that law turned to irony, Narcissus the same law turned to longing. The range is real: myth, landscape, love, death, the body, the tree, the architecture of columns. Held below the highest because this is a collection, not a sequence, its minor pieces belonging to the law by tone more than by need, and because every poem turns on the one consciousness.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Judged on what a book of lyrics holds, and what it holds it holds deeply. Consciousness above all. The body, in “La Pythie”, “La Dormeuse” and “Les Pas”. The natural order: the sea, the plane tree, the palm, the pomegranate, the bee. The sacred in its classical and biblical figures, the oracle and Eden. Death and the dead, in the graveyard by the sea. Inside the major poems these are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis at 6.8, the lowest of the twelve, is what is absent: the family, labour, the state, history and the shared social world. A book written in Europe in the years just after the war holds no trace of it, except perhaps as absence.
Score: 6.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.3, then The Imperishable at 9.0, and The Sublime and The Living Form at 8.8. A command of French verse at the height of the language; a text whole and in print for a century, with one poem among the most read of its age; height reached again and again in the major pieces; and a form that is the argument, the mind free only within measure.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.8: consciousness, the body, the natural order, the sacred and the dead are held deeply, but the family, labour, the state, history and the social world are absent. Among the gated axes The Swerve is lowest, at 7.8: the book carries Mallarmé’s poetics into classical forms, a wager against the current of 1920 but a turn along a proven path.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.3, The Living Form at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.0 clears the bar of 8.5 and The Archetypal Deep meets it on the line at 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 falls a tenth short, one condition of consciousness disclosed from many angles with little of the shared human world; Pressure on Tradition at 8.2 falls three tenths short, its reach real and international but not redirecting the main current of its own field; and The Swerve at 7.8 falls seven tenths short, a return to proven forms that departs from its master in degree more than in kind. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below The Swerve at 7.8, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.8. The twelve sum to 101.0, and the aggregate, 8.4, stands in Tier IV in any case.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Paul Valéry’s Charmes, published as Charmes ou Poèmes by the Nouvelle Revue Française, Paris, 1922, and read in the text of the revised edition of 1926: twenty-one poems, from “Aurore” to “Palme”, scored as one collection. La Jeune Parque (1917) is not part of the unit and is named as context only. The poems weighed most are “Le Cimetière marin”, “Ébauche d’un serpent”, “Fragments du Narcisse”, “La Pythie”, “Palme”, “Les Grenades”, “Les Pas”, “Aurore”, “Au platane” and “Cantique des colonnes”; the slighter pieces, “L’Insinuant”, “La Ceinture”, “Le Sylphe”, “Poésie”, “Le Vin perdu” and “Intérieur”, are weighed least. “Le Cimetière marin” is read closely, line by line in many places; the other major poems in shape, argument and key lines. Every axis is judged on Valéry’s French. No text was in hand: nothing was measured on a text beyond the form of “Le Cimetière marin” (twenty-four stanzas of six decasyllables, 144 lines, rhymed aabccb), and no quotation was checked against a file. French is quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s own English beneath, and cited by poem; everything else is paraphrased. Translation · C. Day Lewis’s English version of “Le Cimetière marin”, The Graveyard by the Sea, was used for sense of that poem; it is not quoted, and no translation’s shortfall is charged to the work. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the differences between the editions of 1922 and 1926, the metres and stanza counts of the poems other than “Le Cimetière marin”, the date of Alain’s commentary and of other commentaries, the date and publisher of Rilke’s German version and the date of Guillén’s Spanish one, and Valéry’s own account of how “Le Cimetière marin” began.