Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 2. On Poets and Poetry
Comments on Some Examples of Western Poetry (up to 1900)

Mallarmé

Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui

Va-t-il nous déchirer avec un coup d’aile ivre

Ce lac dur oublié que hante sous le givre

Le transparent glacier des vols qui n’ont pas fui!

Un cygne d’autrefois se souvient que c’est lui

Magnifique mais qui sans espoir se délivre

Pour n’avoir pas chanté la région où vivre

Quand du stérile hiver a resplendi l’ennui.

Tout son col secouera cette blanche agonie

Par l’espace infligé à l’oiseau qui le nie,

Mais non l’horreur du sol où le plumage est pris.

Fantôme qu’à ce lieu son pur éclat assigne,

Il s’immobilise au songe froid de mépris

Que vêt parmi l’exil inutile le Cygne.

I tried to break this nut of Mallarmé’s... but, pardi, it was a hard nut. Really what a tortuous trend and how he has turned the images! “The transparent glacier of flights haunting the hard lake under the frost”! The frost or snow has become the glacier (icefield) and the icefield composes the lake — that’s what I imaged.

How does hoar-frost or rime become the glacier? “Givre” is not the same as “glace” — it is not ice, but a covering of hoar-frost such as you see on the trees etc., the congealed moisture of the air — that is the “blanche agonie” which has come down from the insulted Space on the swan and on the lake. He can shake off that but the glacier holds him; he can no more rise into the skies, caught in the frozen cold mass of the failures of the soul that refused to fly upward and escape.

What do you think of the sonnet?

One of the finest sonnets I have ever read.

Magnificent line, by the way, “Le transparent glacier des vols qui n’ont pas fui!” This idea of the denied flights (imprisoned powers) of the soul that have frozen into a glacier seems to me as powerful as it is violent. Of course in French such expressions were quite new — in some other languages they were already possible. You will find lots of kindred things in the most modern poetry which specialises in violent revelatory (or at least would-be revelatory) images. You disapprove? Well, one may do so,— classical taste does; but I find myself obliged here to admire.

16 December 1936