The Poetry of Péguy by Charles-Pierre Péguy

First published:Joan of Arc, 1897; Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc, 1910; The Portal of the Mystery of the Second Virtue, 1911; The Mystery of the Holy Innocents, 1912; The Tapestry of Saint Genevieve and Joan of Arc, 1912; The Tapestry of Notre Dame, 1913; Eve, 1913

Critical Evaluation:

Charles Peguy’s life, thought, and poetry are inextricably mixed. He was born in total poverty. His intelligence and energy, with the help of scholarships, got him through excellent schools, but he always remained a man of the people both in his life, religion, and poetry. In school he was deeply influenced by the thought of Henri Bergson, and he adopted a philosophy of motion and change rather than the traditional philosophies of static values.

In his youth Peguy became deeply involved in the Dreyfus affair, but when the cause was exploited by selfish politicians, he became a Marxist. Yet he remained an almost mystically patriotic Frenchman, so that, when his socialist colleagues turned to pacifism and internationalism, Peguy (while maintaining his socialist ethic) turned away. He was convinced that war between Germany and France was inevitable, and he wanted to defend France. Also, in 1908, just before he began writing the largest body of his poetry, he returned to the Catholic faith, a strange and, as always with Peguy, very personal brand of Catholicism. He rejected the dogma of damnation, but in the most literal way he accepted the doctrine of salvation and the cult of the saints, especially the Virgin and Joan of Arc. In Joan, who was an important subject of his poetry, Peguy could simultaneously adore God and France. In one way or another these two things were always the poet’s themes.

Peguy, who is almost the object of worship by a large cult of admirers in France, has never been well received in the United States. His style is simple, incantory, and free. His most obvious characteristic is quantity; some of his poems are hundreds of pages long. He achieves his effects mostly through repetition and expansion of themes, sometimes to the point of diffuseness. His diction is invariably colloquial and purposely naive. Yet he is undeniably a powerful, major poet. Except in his last poems, his verse is entirely free and unlike anything else in French. With one exception, all of the poet’s major work was written in an incredible four-year burst of energy that ended only with his death in battle, leading an attack, in 1914.

JOAN OF ARC, an immense three-hundred-page drama, was Peguy’s first real attempt at poetry, or, rather, lyricism: the texture of the piece is an intermixture of freely rhymed verse, rhythmical and normal prose, and versets inspired by the rhetoric of the Bible, or, perhaps, the choral movement of ancient tragedy. The text, moreover, is given poetic unity by a structure of symbolism that tends to heighten Peguy’s poetic prose still more. The drama, almost impossible to stage, if only because of its great length, is based on the familiar story of Joan of Arc and is divided into three sections: “At the Village of Domremy,” “The Battles,” and “Orleans.” The first section is divided into three parts and ten acts; the second part is divided into three parts and eight acts; and the last section falls into two parts and six acts. The tone is, as was to become usual in Peguy’s poetry, one of solemn simplicity.! The play, written before the au thor’s return to Catholicism, is revealingly dedicated to “all men and women who will have lived, to all men and women who will have died attempting to cure the universal sickness,” and it is further dedicated to “the establishment of the universal Socialist republic.” In the play the mysticism of Joan and the humanitarianism of Peguy are interpenetrating.

After his return to belief in 1908, Peguy once more set himself to writing poetry. In 1910 he published his MYSTERY OF THE CHARITY OF JOAN OF ARC. This was followed in 1911 by THE PORTAL OF THE MYSTERY OF THE SECOND VIRTUE, and in 1912 by THE MYSTERY OF THE HOLY INNOCENTS. Once more he used the verset and lyrical prose as his medium. These vast plays are an innovation in form. By “Mystery” Peguy meant two things: he was writing dramas which are meditations on the Holy Mysteries of the Incarnation, the Redemption, and the theological virtues (faith, hope, and charity); and he was reviving in modern terms the mystery play genre of the Middle Ages.

THE CHARITY OF JOAN OF ARC is essentially a dialogue between Joan and Madame Gervaise, a fervent, contemplative, simple-hearted young nun who had figured in Peguy’s earlier Joan of Arc trilogy. The central theme of the piece is the love, the “Charity” of Joan. In THE PORTAL OF THE MYSTERY OF THE SECOND VIRTUE and in THE MYSTERY OF THE HOLY INNOCENTS it is, for the most part, God who speaks through the mouth of Madame Gervaise. Both of these Mysteries celebrate “Hope,” which is the universal animating force. Without hope the world would wither to nothingness; it is everything. God himself is amazed at it. “Faith doesn’t surprise me, love doesn’t surprise me,” says God, “what does astonish me is hope.” God’s tone and voice in Peguy’s poetry are not at all what we hear in Job: mighty, distant, imperious. Rather, Peguy’s God, speaking through the mouth of a very ! simple woman, is familiar, human , and just a little innocent. And he is very French: “Our Frenchmen are favored above all. They are my witnesses. Preferred. They don’t need me to tell them the same thing twenty times. Before I’ve finished talking, they’ve left. Intelligent people.”

After writing THE MYSTERY OF THE HOLY INNOCENTS, Peguy in 1912 began writing regular and formal verse. He published a number of shorter lyric poems in regular stanzas in 1912 and 1913. Among the better known of these is “Seven Against Thebes” (“Les Sept contre Thebes”) a remarkable new version of the classical Theban story; “The Loire Chateaus” (“Chateaux de Loire”); and “Seven Against Paris (“Les Sept contre Paris”), a strange paean in praise of the expansion, growth, history, and cultural development of Paris. The major part of this poem is one long sentence, constituted of thirty quatrains, which does not conclude or make sense until the last line. Peguy also wrote during this period of his career a long series of quatrains which he felt were too private to publish; they did not appear until 1941. In the quatrains he dramatized a private struggle between desire and his duty. These ! poems are apropos of a personal involvement Peguy, for the sake of his family and faith, resisted successfully.

Most important in this change to formal verse, however, are Peguy’s Tapestries (Tapisseries). Once again looking for a new poetic form to carry his artistic and spiritual vision, the poet looked to the Middle Ages. Modeling his poetry, metaphorically, on the carefully worked, slowly woven wall coverings made during the high Middle Ages by master craftsmen of great patience, Peguy sought to weave poems by interlacing threads of theme, symbol, and idea to form an orderly, repeated, but varying design. The poems are written in the way tapestries were woven: the design is slowly worked in until at the end, and only the end, the whole picture becomes visible. These poems, like medieval tapestries that took religious themes for their designs, are meant to grace a holy sanctuary. Like most of Peguy’s work, they are of great size and length.

Altogether Peguy published three Tapestries before his death: THE TAPESTRY OF SAINT GENEVIEVE AND JOAN OF ARC (1912); THE TAPESTRY OF NOTRE DAME (1913); and EVE (1913). THE TAPESTRY OF SAINT GENEVIEVE takes the form of a novena in which the patron saint of Paris and Joan, the French national heroine, are paid homage. The piece is made up of nine separate poems, one for each day of the novena—the movement is toward a crescendo in the eighth poem, then to a decrescendo in the ninth. THE TAPESTRY OF NOTRE DAME is divided into two large sections, each made up of several smaller poems. The first part is the presentation of Paris to Notre Dame in which Peguy places the city in the care of the Virgin. The second part is the presentation of the countryside of Beauce to the Virgin at Chartres. The presentation takes the form of a pilgrimage to Chartres; it reflects a pilgrimage the poet actually made in fulfillment of a vow he had made when his son was ill with typhoid.

The last of the Tapestries, EVE, is thought by many to be Peguy’s finest work. It is a single poem made up of about three thousand quatrains, over twelve thousand lines, and it has been called the most impressive piece of Catholic literature produced in France, with the exception of Corneille’s POLYEUCTE, since the fourteenth century. Also, in its sweep and size and power it has frequently been compared to Victor Hugo’s epic of the world, the LEGEND OF THE CENTURIES. The poem is impossible to describe; it is too all-inclusive. It progresses in a series of gradations of “climates,” the climate of the earthly paradise, the climates of the Incarnation, the Fall, the Judgment, and so on. If the poem has a single theme, it is the double and inter-penetrating spiritual and carnal creation, of which Eve is the archetypal symbol. It is from EVE that the most often quoted and best known lines of Peguy come: “Happy are they who die for the carnal land” (“Heureux ceux qui sont morts pour la terre charnelle”).