The Poetry of Nerval by Gérard de Nerval
Gérard de Nerval's poetry is a significant aspect of French Romantic literature, celebrated for its haunting visions and lyrical depth. Nerval, whose work has influenced figures such as Baudelaire and the Surrealists, produced a body of around fifty poems that reflect his struggles with mental health, love, and existential despair. His poetry is categorized into three main groups: the Odelettes, which are short lyric pieces; the Lyricism and Operatic Lyrics meant for musical settings; and the complex sonnets of Les Chimeres, which delve into themes of memory, myth, and the human condition. Nerval's writing style is characterized by technical precision, avoiding the bombast often found in his contemporaries' works. He draws inspiration from the German mystical tradition and folk poetry, exploring the thin line between dreams and reality. His poetry articulates profound feelings of loss and a longing for the idealized feminine figure, often expressed through richly evocative imagery. Nerval's life experiences and mystical explorations culminated in a unique poetic voice that confronts mortality and the possibility of spiritual rebirth, ultimately leading to his tragic end.
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The Poetry of Nerval by Gérard de Nerval
First published:Odelettes, 1852; Les Chimeres (1854; English translation, 1957), 1854; Poesies, 1924
Critical Evaluation:
No poet of the French Romantic group has a more ardent public today than Gérard de Nerval, whose haunting poetic visions have influenced poets from Baudelaire to the Surrealists. Yet his visionary powers also brought him poverty, madness and repeated failure in love, and finally led him to take his own life. Numbering scarcely more than fifty, his poems remain more strangely suggestive than any other writing of the period and reveal a true poet’s sense of the secret sources of lyricism. The finest of them carry this lyricism into a world of illusions and shifting forms, where “dream overflows into real life.”
Setting aside his earliest poems, Nerval grouped the others under three different headings: the Odelettes, short lyric pieces; the poems composed specifically to be set to music, Lyricism and Operatic Lyrics (Lyrisme et vers d’opera); and finally, separate from the others, the twelve sonnets (plus nine published long after his death) of Les Chimeres (Chimerae, or Visions). He also made collections of the folk songs, poems, and legends of his native Valois and some remarkable translations of the German mystical and Romantic poets, including Heine and Richter. His rendering of Faust (Parts I and II), a scrupulously careful, yet eminently poetic text which remains the standard French version of Goethe’s great poem, earned high praise from the author. Alone among the French poets of his generation, Nerval felt a spiritual kinship with the metaphysical orientation of the German poetic tradition. From the fantastic, hallucinatory tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann he learned what fragile boundaries separate the realms of poetry, dream, and external reality—the central discovery of his life.
Characteristic of all his work is a perfect technical control. The directness of German and folk poetry taught him to avoid the pretentiousness and bombast which mar the work of so many of his more famous contemporaries. From the lightest song to the densest sonnet, meter and rhyme sustain the poetic movement, seconding and enhancing its suggestions. The lyrics achieve that rare feat of retaining their charm in the absence of the musical setting for which they were created. Even his prose expresses delicate nuances of perception with a musicality in which not a word is wasted.
The Odelettes are vibrant with the same sort of limpid enchantment. Avoiding the pompous rhetoric, didactic tendencies, and factitious allegory inherited by his contemporaries from the eighteenth century, Nerval looked back for his models to the greatest period of pure lyrical expression in French literature, the Renaissance of Ronsard. In this collection the exuberant rhymes of a bacchic song such as “Gaiete” stand beside shimmering, whispered evocations of the natural world “In the Woods” (“Dans les bois”) or in early springtime (“Avril”):
Deja les beaux jours, la poussiere,
A lament for lost loves—“Les Cydalises”—follows a sensitive, half-mocking rumination on “Butterflies,” hovering flowers which “pass like a thought/of poetry or of love.” Whatever the subject of the approach, the result is a gem of pure lyrical expression. Where his contemporaries posture and declame, Nerval simply sings.
Some of his fundamental preoccupations appear in the Odelettes free from the obscurity and cypher-like transmutations of Les Chimeres. Long before Marcel Proust, he asserted the superiority of affective memory over immediate experience. “It is now three years since my grandmother died,” he says in “La grand’mere”:
Depuis trois ans, part le temps prenant
The poet had a sense of very real participation in the past, not only his own, but that of his race, and even the occult, mythical past of the ancient Eastern-Mediterranean peoples. In “Fantasy” he is transported to the early seventeenth century:
Il est un air pour qui je donnerais
Many of these poems were written before Nerval’s encounter with the actress Jenny Colon, who, after her death at twenty-five, came to incarnate in his imagination the feminine ideal. Only one, the often anthologized “Une allee du Luxembourg” (“A Lane in the Luxembourg Gardens”), suggests his constant search for the Beloved Woman “who, coming into [his] profound night/would light it with a single glance,”
Qui venant dans ma nuit profonde
Here the unknown girl is as yet only a passing ray of light (“doux rayon qui m’as lui”).
In spite of the variety of forms taken by the Odelettes, there is not a sonnet among them. Nerval reserved this lyric form for his most intense, anguished and difficult works, Les Chimeres, composed in a state of “supernaturalistic revery.” In such a state, said his friend Theophile Gautier, “the soul becomes aware of invisible relationships, of previously unnoticed coincidences.” To express his discoveries, Nerval invented a cypher-like poetic language. So unlike anything being written at the time were the Chimerae that recognition of their mysterious beauty has come only recently, the result in part of the Surrealists’ explorations of the subconscious. If Nerval’s more lyrical poems sing to an Orphic lyre, these sonnets chant in the haunting semi-tones of Eastern mysticism. Insisting on their basically incantatory nature, he remarked that they “would gain nothing by being explained—if the thing were possible.” Despite the poet’s comment, they have given rise to numerous studies and exegeses and their meaning, if not entirely agreed upon, is at least much clearer today than it was to his contemporaries.
Basic to the whole set is the anguish stated in the “Christ on the Mount of Olives” group of five poems. There, imitating the German mystical poet Jean-Paul Richter, he depicts Christ as the eternal embodiment of man’s despair in a silent, godless universe. “Brothers,” he cries to his disciples, “I deceived you: All is emptiness! Abyss!/The god is missing at the altar where I am the victim. . . . /There is no God! God is no longer!”
“Freres, je vous trompais: Abime!
Faced with the inevitability of physical death, and the less of his belief in the Christian salvation, the poet was to find a new hope of immortality in the animism of the pagan past. His Pythagorean conception of a sentient universe is formulated in the final poem of the Chimerae, “Vers dores” (“Golden Verses”). This personal kind of religious eclecticism, which he called “syncreticism,” allowed him to see Christ as but one more archetypal incarnation of the “sublime fool”—the visionary, the poet, the discoverer—destroyed by his own aspirations, “this forgotten Icarus who ascended the heavens.”
Cet Icare oublie qui remontait les cieux.
In his desire to force the “gates of ivory” which conceal that ineffable reality of whose existence his mystical beliefs—and his dreams—assured him, he threw himself into the study of the occult like another Faust, no longer aspiring to anything but “knowledge of things supernatural, no longer capable of living within the limited circle of human desires.” Events from his life, processed by memory, came to exist on the same plane as myth, illusion, dream, and those historical events which he adopted as part of his personal past. Through these revelations he was assured not only of personally overcoming death, but of recovering his beloved in another world. “It would be consoling,” he muses, “to believe that eternity conserves in its bosom a sort of universal history, visible only through the eyes of the soul.” If the past continues to exist in the present, then time and death are no longer to be feared. “Artemis,” one of Nerval’s most beautiful poems, postulates the fusion of past and present, expressed in the opening lines in terms of the indefinable period between the last (twelfth) hour and the first, which is at the same time the thirteenth, continuation and renewal:
La Treizieme revient . . . C’est encor
Just as dreams “flowed into real life,” revealing the “super-reality” he sought, myth became for Nerval the key to the cycle of universal history, the retainer of archetypes. “Artemis” continues, applying to the lover and his beloved this same principle of eternal rebirth:
Car es-tu reine, o toi! la premiere ou
In the quest for his personal reality, Gérard Labrunie reveled in pseudonyms—his noble pen name is an example—and identified himself with many a figure of history or myth. The effectiveness of “El desdichado” (“The Outcast”), his most famous poem, is largely due to the interplay of these shifting identifications.
Je suis le tenebreux,—le veuf,—l’i-
Through the loss of his beloved (his “sole star”) he has become several almost allegorical types and a figure from medieval legend. Again, when he asks if he is Amor or Phoebus, Lusignan or Biron, he is seeking his true role—lover or poet?—and wondering whether his love has been a real woman or a creature of fantasy. These names, however, are not simply literary symbols. The poem is a distillation of Nerval’s mystical experience.
Like so many aspects of his life, his search for the Eternal Feminine developed within the context of a play of opposites. Woman is “saint” or “fee,” source of life and light or mysterious apparition from the world of darkness. Although she took on many contradictory forms during his lifetime, there was only one object of Nerval’s love. Having twice crossed the frontiers of madness (the Acheron) and returned successfully, he knew that only in death could he find his Beloved. On the night of January 28, 1855, he stepped into that other existence, fulfilling the prophecy in “Artemis”:
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