CONTEMPORARY FRENCH POETRY
63
and 1948, partly in France and partly in America. In spite of its
depressed, tense atmosphere, its clutter of cryptic images, its formal
rigidity, its constant recoiling into attitudes of immobile waiting, its
stubborn refusal of proffered existence, one may already detect here
and there attempts at a breakthrough in the direction of terrestrial
daylight, surges towards inconceivable joy and resurrection at the
very depth of loneliness, anguish, real exile and winter:
M es cris d'enfant montent comme des futs
par la foret de mes nocturnes salles
au s' arme un jour issu de man refus.
The present is but agony, but from it a new splendid day will
emerge. This contradictory begetting of joy in agony (not unlike
the duality of the poets discussed above) seems to be the charac–
teristic trait of my own sensibility, and the main theme of my work.
Such a strange capacity for reversal
in extremis
produces, in the
most hopeless hours, a sense of absolute invulnerability. Sometimes,
in periods of greatest inner upheaval and fragmentation, these two
unreconcilable components of my ground-feeling towards life have
revealed themselves in separation. Usually, however, they manifest
themselves in simultaneity, through a spiralling movement, a kind
of dialectical relationship. Issuing from one another, they then re–
solve themselves into a brief synthesis which is at once agony
and
exultation, violence .and appeasement, struggle and surrender. This
revealing conflict can be sensed even in the style. It often presents
an alternation of tight, nervous, strongly rhythmical formulae, ac–
cumulated images bursting like hand-grenades,
L'arbre est explosion du roc vers la lumiere
with murmuring elegiac modulations and avowal of human warmth:
"Toute rna force est faite
/
de tendresse secrete."
In this endless
counterpoint of living and failing, exile and earthly rootedness, aliena–
tion and love, the conflicting inner forces of man find their shifting
balance and their approximate expression. The critic
E.
Noulet, quite
rightly, sees in
La Corne du Grand Pardon
(1955) "the contrary
of a book of lamentations. It is a book of remission: the sufferings
have borne fruit, and the harvest is prepared." This remission, how–
ever,
is
achieved throught the medium of a voice rising out of a
