66
PARTISAN REVIEW
Je ne suis que parole intentee
a
l'absence,
L'absence detruira tout man ressassement.
Qui, c'est bient8t perir de n'etre que parole,
Et c'est tache fatale et vain couronnement.
For the metaphysical pride of the Mallarmean tradition, for the
haughty and sterile refusal of Herodiade or M. Teste, Yves Bonnefoy
substitutes the existential drama itself: a humbler subject perhaps,
but is there a more compelling theme than that of human conscious–
ness straining in anguish towards the real in a movement born from
its innermost sources, and falling back again, like poetry itself, which
is its verbal mirror, into the darkness of absence? Bonnefoy's poems
all witness this clash of consciousness with the ever imminent instant
of its death. The aim of this spiritual search, and of this poetry, is
nothing less than the inner taming of the night, the continual ap–
prenticeship to dying as the crucial experience of the life of con–
sciousness, and by extension, of the poetic life. This is what the
Hegelian epigraph of the book expresses: "The life of the spirit,
however, is not afraid in the face of death, and does not withdraw
from it.
It
is the life which endures it and maintains itself
in
it." We
are far here from the Ivory Tower, from the surrealist
divertissement
in the depths of the unconscious, far also from the Byzantium of
Yeats, or from Valery's spiteful Faust who felt "weary of being a
creature." Up to now Bonnefoy's work has ended with an anguished
and ambiguous questioning, containing hope, a challenge, and an
apprehension of defeat:
Le jour franc hit Ie soir, il gagnera
Sur la nuit quotidienne.
Q notre force et notre gloire, pourrez-vous
Trouer la muraille des morts?
Thus speaks, in our generation, the voice of a responsible poetry.
