Charms by Paul Valéry

First published:Charmes: Ou, Poèms, 1922 (English translation, 1971)

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

Paul Valéry came rapidly to enduring prominence in French literature on the strength of his earliest work. His abstract poetry was widely noted for its unusually sensate quality, and he is arguably the most important figure in a transitional period of French poetry, forming a bridge from the prior Symbolist school to the subsequent Surrealist movement. Valéry was notably prolific not only as a poet but also as a philosopher and essayist who earned a firm reputation for dealing with a wide range of subject matter. Politics, science, the arts, and language were among the numerous concerns of his voluminous life’s work. His greatest reputation, however, remains for his poetry, and he was deemed by some critics the greatest French poet of the twentieth century. Charms comprises poems written from 1917 through 1921, a period that proved to be significant in Valéry’s artistic growth, and this volume is generally regarded as a seminal work.

The year Charms was published coincides with the death of Édouard Lebey, then director of the French press association and Valéry’s employer since 1900. Having worked as Lebey’s private secretary for more than twenty years, the poet’s sudden state of unemployment caused him a brief period of serious concern as to how he would continue to earn a living. Trusting the encouragement and advice of friends as well as Gaston Gallimard, his publisher, Valéry seized this opportunity to begin earning his living solely from his literary work. This proved to be more easily accomplished than he first expected, as his reputation was on the rise. Charms did much to enhance the poet’s popularity and reputation, containing some of his best-known and most highly regarded work, highly regarded by critics and by the poet himself.

Poetic form held a high degree of importance to Valéry, and the twenty-one poems gathered in Charms indicate the diversity of traditional structures he explored. The book’s title is the French derivation of the Latin word carmina, meaning song, and it includes several odes and ballads that draw from English structures in addition to French. Valéry came to poetry during World War I, finding in it a welcome distraction from the daily pressures of that time of great stress and uncertainty. Even after the war, the period during which he wrote these poems, he continued to perceive the solitary reflection afforded the poet in the act of writing to be of higher intellectual value than the mundane or tedious demands of day-to-day living. Poetry was a vehicle Valéry used to separate himself from those aspects of life. He believed that the higher level of concentration necessary to follow a given structure allowed him to retreat that much further, which may explain his claim that form is of greater importance than content. The manifestation of this concept in Charms is an engaging sense of intimacy between the poet and his work, a sort of private circle, into which the reader enters upon entering the poems themselves.

Valéry adamantly refuted critics who attempted to apply overall conceptual interpretations to Charms, insisting that the poems were written at intervals spread too wide for this to have even been possible. One of his responses to critics was that any particular meaning in his poetry is that which the individual reader may take. His intention was to capture his reader with a more eclectic range of interests and frameworks to house them. There are a number of sonnets, although the styles range from Spenserian to Elizabethan to Italian. There are also several ballads, but again the styles and lengths vary considerably. The first and final poems of the collection are an unusual instance of poems appearing in the same form, both being regular odes.

As such, the thematic map of the work is as multidirectional as the structures of the poems themselves. The reader will find a reworking of the Narcissus myth, along with deeply symbolic meditations on a random array of temperaments and locations. Given Valéry’s attachment to form, however, the collection draws a sense of cohesion by way of a conceptual thread. However secondary an element the poet believed content to be, his subjects are undoubtedly distinguished by the varying rhythms and tones that inform them.

The opening poem, entitled, appropriately enough, “Dawn,” begins as a simple ode to the breaking of day: “at the rosy/ Apparition of the sun./ I step forth in my own mind/ Fully fledged with confidence.” Four stanzas later, the images of the awakening physical world become increasingly laden with deeper spiritual implications: “These spiritual toils of theirs/ I break, and set out seeking/ Within my sensuous forest/ For the oracles of my song.” From here, it is difficult not to see the poem as reinventing itself into a metaphor for poetic inspiration. The poet’s physical world possesses a growing sense of sensuality, embodied within a female presence. This presence bears qualities of both mother and mistress. The poet becomes the “ravisher” of the dawning “world”: “No wound however profound/ That is not to the ravisher/ A fecund wound.” The act of creation is couched in an atmosphere of turbulence, but the closing stanza imagines the nurturing sense of peace awaiting the poet at the other end of his creative journey.

At the end of the book is “Palm,” which shares its formal structure with “Dawn.” These poems do overlap in their subject matter and were in fact a single poem until the author chose to separate them for their divergent handling of their material. Again, at the core of “Palm” is the matter of mental process, yet there is immediately a very different sense of movement. Palm trees require an extremely limited variation in climate to live. In the poem, the palm tree becomes a metaphor for constancy and intellectual patience, unlike the inner passions of the creative process. The poem emphasizes the palm’s immobility, its slight swaying in the wind signifying the image of its rooted permanence: “It simulates the wisdom/ And the slumber of a sibyl.” Here is a more direct statement than may be found in “Dawn.” In general, “Palm” is less given to ambiguity than “Dawn,” and the notion of the steadfast pursuit of wisdom at the poem’s center is rather explicit.

“The Bee” is a sonnet with which Valéry makes a clear, simple statement on the nature of sensation: “A vivid and a clear-cut pain/ Is better than a drowsy torment.” The poem is a direct address to the bee. The poet invites, actually welcomes, the bee’s sting as a deliverance from the numbing effects of complacency: “let my senses be illumined/ By that tiniest golden alert/ For lack of which Love dies or sleeps!” To assume the poet means only romantic love would be to underestimate this work. It would not be a wholly inaccurate response, simply an incomplete one. In the word, “Love,” Valéry really means to include a much more inclusive range of sensory and intellectual passions.

“The Footsteps,” however, does bring out a more purely personal facet of the poet’s work. The poem is baldly sentimental, dealing with romantic love in lyric simplicity that precludes ambiguous attachments. In juxtaposition to the more complex symbolism of the rest of the majority of the collection, this poem is bound to strike the reader as being deceptively simple. Considering Valéry’s partiality to traditional form, however, it only seems fitting that this classically romantic lyric be included in such an eclectic collection.

Two of the most important pieces in the collection are those that later became regarded as the finest verses Valéry ever wrote; one considered so by the poet himself, the other considered so by critics. “Fragments of Narcissus” is an extended, three-part monologue in the voice of the mythical character named in the title. Though he never fully completed this poem, Valéry believed it was his best. It employs the Alexandrine line characteristic of classical narrative poetry. The story of Narcissus was of particular interest to Valéry, and this poem is not the only example of the appearance of this myth in his writing. In 1938, his “Cantata for Narcissus” would be set to music, but “Fragments of Narcissus” would remain his most successful use of the myth, regardless of its unfinished state. The poet claimed he never completed this work because of a lack of time. It would not be the only work on which he may have intended to spend more time but did not after its initial publication in a periodical. In this regard, Valéry brings credence to the axiom that poems are never finished, simply abandoned. The opening lines of the second section are among Valéry’s best-known and most frequently cited lines.

Fountain, my fountain, water coldly present,Sweet to the purely animal, compliant to humansWho self-tempered pursue death into the depths,To you all is dream, tranquil Sister of Fate!Barely does it alter an omen to recollectionWhen, ceaselessly reflecting its fugitive face,At once the skies are ravished from your slumber!But pure as you may be of the beings you have seenWater where the years drift by like clouds,How many things, nevertheless, you must know,Stars, roses, seasons, bodies and their amours!

While many critics have agreed with the poet’s opinion that “Fragments of Narcissus” was his best effort, at least as many have defended the same opinion of “The Graveyard by the Sea.” This poem’s setting derives from Séte, where Valéry spent time as a child. The graveyard’s reappearance in the poem indicates the lasting importance of the setting in the shaping of the poet’s imagination. Correspondingly, the poem itself is a meditation on meditation as well as on the nature of artistic and intellectual imagination.

The sea and cemeteries are settings that poets of every era since Homer have found conducive to poetic meditation. The combination of these atmospheres allows Valéry an advantageous standpoint from which to move through diverse levels of consciousness as they are informed by the poem’s dual senses of location. In terms of form, this poem is arguably the one in which Valéry is at his best, as the form—six five-beat lines per stanza—is hardly noticeable as one becomes engaged by his seemingly effortless language. The vehicle comes into as perfect a harmony with the journey it accommodates as the poet may have ever achieved. Ironically, the cemetery featured in this poem is the one in which Valéry is buried.

What perhaps confounded critics the most was Valéry’s assertion that the poems in Charms were written as exercises; he was experimenting with a greater diversity of forms than he did at any previous time. The considerable quality of these poems is what led critics to question the credibility of the author’s claim. In all likelihood, the crux of the contention was semantic. Valéry was never overly fond of critics, to put it mildly, although it is certainly their valuable role to second-guess writers. Critics may feel the value of their work to be diminished when so much good attention has been expended on work the author casually passes off as “a collection of prosodic experiments” and not the product of some supposedly higher artistic goal. Had Valéry been a scientist, he would be forgiven his use of the word experiment. These experiments, however, were to signal a key turning point in the career of a poet who was later named the national poet of France.

Bibliography

Anderson, Kirsteen. Paul Valéry and the Voice of Desire. Oxford, England: Legenda, 2000. Uses linguistics, psychoanalysis, and other modern theories to examine the power of voice as both image and theme in Valéry’s work. Argues that his work is characterized by a tension between a “masculine” imagery and a repressed “feminine” dimension.

Gifford, Paul. Paul Valéry: Charmes. Glasgow: University of Glasgow, French and German Publications, 1995. An introductory overview of Charms designed for high school seniors and undergraduate students.

Gifford, Paul, and Brian Stimpson, eds. Reading Paul Valéry: Universe in Mind. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Collection of essays providing various interpretations of Valéry’s work. Includes discussion of Valéry’s mythological models, negative philosophy, fascination with science, and poetics of practice and theory. References to Charms and its individual poems are listed in the index.

Grubbs, Henry A. Paul Valéry. New York: Twayne, 1968. A comprehensive overview of Valéry’s life and work. Charms receives close attention in several sections. For readers new to Valéry, this is one of the best places to begin a detailed study.

Valéry, Paul. The Art of Poetry. Translated by Denise Folliot. Vol. 7 in The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, edited by Jackson Mathews. New York: Pantheon Books, 1958. Collection of essays, including one devoted specifically to Charms, in which Valéry discusses the original intentions at the base of his work. Provides information about the main points of contention between the poet and his critics.

Weiss, Ted, and Renee Weiss, comps. Quarterly Review of Literature: Special Issues Retrospective. Princeton, N.J.: Quarterly Review of Literature, 1976. From the publishers of one of America’s foremost literary quarterlies, this issue presents chronological sequences of critical works on an eclectic variety of poets. There are six essays on Valéry, beginning with one by T. S. Eliot.