Poetical Meditations by Alphonse de Lamartine

First published:Méditations poétiques, 1820 (English translation, 1839)

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

When his volume of Poetical Meditations appeared in 1820, Alphonse de Lamartine brought French poetry into the Romantic mode that had already become an established poetic form in England and Germany. Even in this work, however, Romanticism is slow to emerge. The number of poems in different editions of Poetical Meditations varies between two dozen and three dozen, but only a few poems fully exhibit the Romantic style.

Most of the poems are composed in Alexandrines, the basic verse form of French neoclassicism, and the subjects are often drawn from philosophical meditations of the previous century. Still, much is new. The detailed descriptions of external nature evoke emotions appropriate to the poems in a way the more analytical descriptions of, for example, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (1782; The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, 1783) do not. The autobiographical elements are also distinctly Romantic.

An analysis of the first ten poems included in the first edition of Poetical Meditations will define Lamartine’s style, clearly Romantic but with debts to previous literary traditions. The opening poem, “L’Isolement,” finds Lamartine, its first-person narrator, alone on a mountain from which he can contemplate the panorama of the landscape before him. Rousseau had exploited just such a panorama in his Émile: Ou, De l’éducation (1762; Émile: Or, Education, 1911), in which his Savoyard vicar used the view of nature to persuade his young pupil of the existence of God. For Lamartine, the purpose of nature is evocative rather than pedagogical.

The first quatrain of “L’Isolement” sets a mood of quiet melancholy: Lamartine sits sadly under an old oak tree at sunset. The references to age and the end of the day imply a basis for his emotion. The landscape, rather than Lamartine, performs the action of the poem while he remains a spectator of this “changing tableau unrolling at my feet.” The active waters of the river draw his eyes to the calm lake and finally to the rising evening star. The sequence of objects, progressing ever farther from the narrator, suggests vast contemplation.

The description of nature retains neoclassical elements. Lamartine calls the rising Moon “the misty chariot of the queen of shadows,” a periphrasis of the very sort William Wordsworth had hoped to avoid when he advocated that Romantic poetry use “the real language of men.” However, the contrast of the “somber woods” with the moon “whitening” the horizon reflects the dark/light color scheme to which the early Romantics were drawn.

The “gothic steeple” of a nearby church provides an additional Romantic motif, but then, switching to an impersonal invocation of “the traveler” who might observe this scene, Lamartine rejects the tableau because, in his mood of despair, it has no appeal to him. Finally, he turns toward death as his only hope. For the sun of the earthly landscape he will substitute the “true sun” of an idealized afterlife.

In the final quatrains, both neoclassical and Romantic images return. Lamartine hopes to be carried away on the “chariot of Dawn,” a traditional personification. However, he then imagines the similar rising motion of an autumn leaf blown on the evening wind. Emotionally he cries out, “I am like the withered leaf” and appeals to the “stormy wind” to carry him away. The poet’s identification of himself with the leaf and attribution of his own emotional agitation to the wind reflects the Romantic pathetic fallacy through which nature was united with human feelings.

In his second poem, “L’Homme,” dedicated to Lord Byron, Lamartine extols the poetic vision of his Romantic predecessor. While Byron was only two years older than Lamartine, he had already published Childe Harold (1812) and had impressed Lamartine with the “savage harmony” of his verse. Lamartine’s characterization of Byron in the opening section of “L’Homme” uses many Romantic devices. He compares the sound of Byron’s poetry with lightning and wind “mixed by the storm with the voice of waterfalls,” combining many of the sublime elements of nature the Romantics favored. He further portrays Byron as an eagle, dominating the landscape and deriving “voluptuous enjoyment from the cries of his prey.” The important use of natural elements, the linking of the poet to nature using the image of the bird, and the savagery of the predator adding a gothic element combine to create an intensely Romantic passage.

After this preliminary description, however, Lamartine’s tone changes. The balance of the rather long poem retreats from nature imagery to examine philosophically the role of the poet in relationship to the will of God. Lamartine traces the Fall of Man and his own personal evolution as a poet but never returns to the descriptive mode of his first lines.

With “Le Soir,” Lamartine returns to the first-person meditation in a natural setting that he had used in “L’Isolement” with the substitution of more fluid eight-syllable lines for the Alexandrine. As in the earlier poem, however, the moon still appears as the neoclassical “chariot of the night.” The principal action of the poem occurs when the rising Moon casts its light upon Lamartine and causes him to ask whether the moonlight presages philosophical enlightenment. The experience inspires deep emotions. Lamartine says that the moon has “enflamed my heart” and caused “unknown emotions.” The tone of the poem, however—marked as it is by a long series of questions as to the moon’s intent—remains one of philosophical hesitancy.

Only after an abstract consideration of death in “L’Immortalité” does Lamartine return, in “Le Vallon,” to his important use of nature imagery. The world-weary narrator seeks out the valley of his youth to await death. Such emotion coming from a poet who was not yet thirty years old reflects a Romantic despair. The poet then surrounds himself with elements of nature. At first, the “obscure valley” seems mysterious, but then two brooks “joining their waters and their murmuring” flow off into anonymity. Lamartine sees them as an emblem of his own life but notes that his soul is more troubled than their calm waters.

In “Le Vallon,” Lamartine again progresses to a meditation on his life. This time, however, he never leaves the landscape. He calls on it to become for him a “place of forgetfulness” like the river Lethe, a refuge from trouble, and finally a place to hear the voice of God. Despite occasional classical allusions, the continued presence of nature and its close relationship to the speaker make this one of Lamartine’s most Romantic poems.

In “Le Désespoir” and “La Providence à l’homme,” general meditations on God and humankind displace the personal tone and nature imagery. However, in “Souvenir,” the personal element returns as Lamartine recalls a lost love. Still seeing himself as old as an oak tree that is dropping its leaves, he remembers “your young, brilliant image/ Embellished by regret.” The breeze reminds him of his beloved at their last meeting, when its “loving breath” caressed her hair. The linking of the love experience to nature gives a new meaning to this imagery.

The theme of lost love introduced in “Souvenir” was surely a reference to Julie Charles, whom Lamartine called Elvire in his poetry. Although Julie was married, Lamartine had fallen in love with her during the summer of 1816. He hoped to see her again the following summer but did not because she died from tuberculosis. Lamartine had already included a reference to her in the last line of “L’Immortalité,” in which he called on Elvire to answer him. In the ninth edition of Poetical Meditations he would also insert the poem “À Elvire” in the third position in the volume. An important evocation of Julie Charles occurs in the tenth poem of the first edition, “Le Lac,” which would become the piece for which Lamartine is best known.

Before “Le Lac” in the first edition, the Romantic elements are again restrained in “L’Enthousiasme.” While enthusiasm appears as an eagle bearing inspiration to Lamartine, the dominant focus of the poem is not on the natural elements. In “Le Lac,” however, nature dominates. Lamartine begins with a plea that it might be possible to stop advancing time if it leads inevitably to the death of a beloved. This appears, however, as dropping an anchor while crossing an ocean surrounded by “eternal night” that isolates humans from both past and future. The image of the ocean yields to that of a lake, emblematic of a shorter period of life, near which Lamartine waits in vain for Julie.

In the first section of the poem, Lamartine addresses the lake as if it were his friend and witness to his joy with his beloved. Not only has the lake “seen” Julie sitting beside it, it has seemed to speak through the murmuring of its waters. Thus, Lamartine asks the lake directly, “Do you remember?” as he recalls words Julie had spoken on its bank.

Julie’s speech forms the central portion of “Le Lac,” set off from the rest by a distinct verse structure. Elsewhere Lamartine varies the Alexandrine quatrains by reducing the fourth line to six syllables. As Julie speaks, the second line is also reduced, emphasizing how quickly her utterance will pass. The sense of her speech reinforces the desirability of halting time for those who are happy in the present. If a new dawn must come, however, lovers should seize the “fugitive hour” of their joy.

While Julie implores passing time to have pity on lovers, Lamartine sees it as jealous of them. In the final section of the poem, returning to his own voice and distinctive verse form, he groups together “eternity, nothingness, and past time” as “dark abysses” swallowing human life. Faced with this prospect, he finds hope for immortality only in nature. Thus he calls on the lake, rocks, and surrounding forest, a scene he had already endowed with human sensitivity, to retain the memory of his love for Julie.

The lengthy enumeration of objects in nature coupled with the intensity of emotion in this final passage exemplifies the fusion of feeling with landscape that typifies Romanticism. The contrast of “black fir trees” with the silver moon reflects the extremes of Romantic nature description, and the lyricism reinforces the meaning of the lives.

The remaining poems in Poetical Meditations incorporate the same varied tendencies seen in the early texts. In “Le Lac,” however, Lamartine has established Romantic lyricism as a component of French poetry.

Bibliography

Birkett, Mary Ellen. Lamartine and the Poetics of Landscape. Lexington, Ky.: French Forum, 1982. Places Lamartine’s poetry in the tradition of landscape description, focusing on his descriptive techniques. There is no specific section devoted to Poetical Meditations, but material from the collection is quoted extensively throughout the work.

Boutin, Aimeé. Maternal Echoes: The Poetry of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore and Alphonse de Lamartine. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001. Feminist and psychoanalytical critique of maternal imagery in the two poets’ works. Argues that both poets found their own voices by echoing their mothers’ voices.

George, Albert Joseph. Lamartine and Romantic Unanimism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1940. Analyzes Lamartine’s work in terms of his ideas concerning philosophy and his views on politics and history. An extensive index directs the reader to comments on the Poetical Meditations.

Lamartine, Alphonse de. The “Méditations poétiques.” Edited by David Hillery. Durham, England: University of Durham Press, 1993. An introduction to a selection from the poems, this volume includes brief essays on the social, political, literary, and technical background to the poems, as well as the themes of love and death, religion, and nature.

Lombard, Charles M. Lamartine. New York: Twayne, 1973. This volume presents a standard approach to Lamartine’s life and work accompanied by a useful chronology of his life and a selected bibliography. Chapter 2 introduces, summarizes, and comments on the importance of Poetical Meditations.

Scott, Clive. The Poetics of French Verse: Studies in Reading. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Discusses the use of rhyme, accent, syllable, and other “expressive resources” of French verse. Provides interpretive readings of several French poems, including selected poems of Lamartine.