Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The poem as hypothesis of origin: Lamartine's ‘Le Lac’
- 3 The rhetoric of contemplation: Hugo's ‘La Pente de la rêverie’
- 4 The designs of prosody: Vigny's ‘La Mort du Loup’
- 5 The lyric persona: Nerval's ‘El Desdichado’
- 6 Under-reading at noon: Leconte de Lisle's ‘Midi’
- 7 Intertextuality and interpretation: Baudelaire's ‘Correspondances’
- 8 Questions of metaphor: Gautier's ‘La Nue’
- 9 Training for modernity: Verlaine's ‘Le Paysage dans le cadre des portières …’
- 10 Sylleptic symbols: Rimbaud's ‘Mémoire’
- 11 Poetry and cliché: Laforgue's ‘L'Hiver qui vient’
- 12 Genius at nightfall: Mallarmé's ‘Quand l'ombre menaça de la fatale loi …’
- Appendix: French versification: a summary
- References and suggestions for further reading
- Index
9 - Training for modernity: Verlaine's ‘Le Paysage dans le cadre des portières …’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The poem as hypothesis of origin: Lamartine's ‘Le Lac’
- 3 The rhetoric of contemplation: Hugo's ‘La Pente de la rêverie’
- 4 The designs of prosody: Vigny's ‘La Mort du Loup’
- 5 The lyric persona: Nerval's ‘El Desdichado’
- 6 Under-reading at noon: Leconte de Lisle's ‘Midi’
- 7 Intertextuality and interpretation: Baudelaire's ‘Correspondances’
- 8 Questions of metaphor: Gautier's ‘La Nue’
- 9 Training for modernity: Verlaine's ‘Le Paysage dans le cadre des portières …’
- 10 Sylleptic symbols: Rimbaud's ‘Mémoire’
- 11 Poetry and cliché: Laforgue's ‘L'Hiver qui vient’
- 12 Genius at nightfall: Mallarmé's ‘Quand l'ombre menaça de la fatale loi …’
- Appendix: French versification: a summary
- References and suggestions for further reading
- Index
Summary
Le paysage dans le cadre des portières
Court furieusement, et des plaines entières
Avec de l'eau, des blès, des arbres et du ciel
Vont s'engouffrant parmi le tourbillon cruel
Où tombent les poteaux minces du télégraphe
Dont les fils ont l'allure étrange d'un paraphe.
Une odeur de charbon qui brûle et d'eau qui bout,
Tout le bruit que feraient mille chaînes au bout
Desquelles hurleraient mille géants qu'on fouette;
Et tout à coup des cris prolongés de chouette. –
– Que me fait tout cela, puisque j'ai dans les yeux
La blanche vision qui fait mon cœur joyeux,
Puisque la douce voix pour moi murmure encore,
Puisque le Nom si beau, si noble et si sonore
Se mêle, pur pivot de tout ce tournoiement,
Au rhythme du wagon brutal, suavement.
How does one read a poem? Obviously, a poem would not be readable (as a poem) if one did not approach it with at least some vague pre-existing generic ‘theory’, a notion of what a ‘poem’ is or does. What I want to suggest is that what such an enabling theory enables us to read is however the way the poem theorizes itself, that is, specifies its own situation as poetic discourse. It does so, generally, with respect to the tradition of pre-existing understanding of what ‘poetry’ is and does in which – but also against which – it exists.
In contemporary culture, the two major ‘axioms’ with which people approach poetry appear to be these.
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- Nineteenth-Century French PoetryIntroductions to Close Reading, pp. 157 - 177Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1990