Collected Works of Paul Valery, Volume 2: Poems in the Rough

by Paul ValTry, H. Corke (Editor)

Overview

Includes some of Valéry's finest strokes of imagination, Broken Stories; some of his wittiest observations, Mixtures, Poems in the Rough; and even two of his great poems, Parables and The Angel-all written in the form of prose.

Originally published in 1970.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691648033
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Bollingen Series , #1823
Pages:	356
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d)

Read an Excerpt

The Collected Works of Paul Valéry Volume 2

Poems in the Rough

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By Paul Valéry, Jackson Mathews, Hilary Corke

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1969 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-09845-6

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CHAPTER 1

    Parables

    To Accompany Twelve Water- colors by L.
    Albert-Lasard

      Suddenly a strident anger rims through
      the aviary. They rise astonished       and take off one by one into the unreal.
        R. M. RILKE, The Flamingos
          (Jardin des Plantes)

    Man is neither angel nor beast.

      Blaise Pascal

    When there were no more than Beast and Angel,
    And GOD lively everywhere, in that Garden;
    The flyers in the air, and on the ground The crawlers, and in
    the profound Soundless abyss the darting shiverers;

    When God and Things and Beasts and Angels
    And Light the Archangel were all that were:
    It was the epoch of the pure.

    Pure the Lion, pure the Ant,
    Pure the Bull and the Serpent,
    Pure the Dragon, pure the Virtues,
    Pure the Thrones and the three high Orders;

    Pure was the Earth, pure was the Light,
    They were all pure,
    Each being that which he was,
    Each doing that for which he was made,
    Faultless and marvelous:

    Each the fruit of a Thought of life
    Exactly converted,
    Without remainder.

    And I, all this I knew
    With an utter strange clarity;
    And yet was aloof, standing
    Apart from my inward word.

    And then, as I was this notable distraction,
    No longer a someone, no more than my own fraction,
    As my mind's eyes reflected this purity,
    Receiving as the mirror of a calm water
    The balance and brilliance of things without flaw,
    Innocent of notion,

    Look! from between the leaves came
    To light a Figure, a Figure came
    Into the light,
    Looked all about him,

    And he was "neither Angel nor Beast."

    The glass of my sheer presence quivered
    As the calm of a calm water
    Wrinkles to the course of a form,
    Or as when from the full depths and the height's
      shadows
    Glances without emerging
    A creature one never sees.

    On my enchantment's mirror of virgin duration
    Appeared a trembling;
    Over the forehead of the pure hour scuttered
    A kind of question that bowled like a leaf
    The rosy picture; and like a cry,
    Like the grip of an unexpected hand,
    An unknown power was closing about my heart.

    Man was this event:
    Such the name that I give you.

    I knew, as if within him, that he was neither
      ANGEL nor BEAST:

    By unexampled suffering I knew him,
    Unexampled, unpicturable,
    And nowhere in the body;

    A wonder of incomparable suffering
    As of the sole and insupportable Sun
    Whose anguish lights the world....
    O pain of the Sun they call joy and splendor,
    Your brilliance is a bitter cry, your agony
    Burns the eye! ...

    He felt, there was, I sensed it,
    A presence of sorrow apart,
    Denied to the Pure Existences,
    Neither ANGEL nor BEAST can sustain it.

    For ANGEL is ANGEL, BEAST BEAST,
    Nothing of either is a thing of the other,
    There is nothing between them.
    But he was neither the one nor the other,
    This I sensed with instant perfect knowledge,
    Knowledge of suffering, suffering of knowledge;
    And MAN's silence and my silence
    Were interchanging spirits instant by instant....

    "Angel," said in me He whose absolute presence
    I had made my own:
    "Angels," he said to them,
    "Eternal marvels of light and love,
    Pure acts
    O only knowable by desire,
    By hope, by pride, by love,
    By all that is a presence of absence, You are
    Still mysteries that burn
    A little higher than my highest I....

    "But you, beast,
    The more I regard you the more I become MAN
    In Mind, O Beast,
    And the more you become strange,
    For Mind knows only the things that are of Mind.

    "In vain by Mind I hunt you,
    In vain by Mind set snares
    Baited with gifts of Mind:
    Origin? PURPOSE? PRINCIPLE? CAUSE?
    (Or chance even, and all the TIME that needs)
    O life,
    The more I think of you, O LIFE,
    The less to thought you yield....

    "To die, not less than to be born,
    Eludes all thought:
    Love, death, are not for Mind
    That eating amazes, sleeping abashes.
    My face is a stranger;

    The contemplation of my hands
    Poses me questions; to their latent powers,
    To the numbers of their fingers, no reply.
    Not by thought could one divine
    The roll call of his members nor their forms:
    And yet through them alone I know the Other.

    "The happiness of the BEAST is all happy,
    A joy without shadow.
    He does not and he cannot know
    The adulteration of joy with sorrow,
    Of sorrow with joy,
    Nor the mixing of time with time,
    Or of sleep with waking.
    No matter how quick to the leaf's least bruising, He savors
    the moment, consumes the gift:
    Pure he is thereby.

    "And no regrets, remorse, suspicions, care:
    For what is not is not;
    What will be is not; and what would be;
    What was, what might have been,
    They are not....
    Nothing departs from order: his mindings backward,
    His lookings forward, do not dilute his present.
    Pure he is thereby.

    "But we! ..."

CHAPTER 2

In Praise of Water

Many have sung WINE.

Innumerable the poets who have lyrically ennobled their drunkenness, pledging the gods in the strong cup their soul has desired.

Most precious WINE, worthy of all praise! And yet the folly and ingratitude of those among them who have spoken ill of water....

Divine limpidity, living crystal, marvelous agent of life, universal WATER, I shall offer you unbidden the homage of litanies without end.

I shall speak of STILL WATER, landscape's ultimate luxury, stretching her sheets of total calm in whose pure face the reflections of all things seem more perfect than their origins, and all Nature is Narcissus and with itself in love....

Of moving water, by sweetness and violence, oozings and usings fabulously slow, by the weight of its currents and unbridled whirlpools, by fog and downpour, by streamlets, waterfalls, and cataracts, fashioning rock, polishing granite, wearing marble, interminably sphering pebbles, lulling and trailing in idle drifts and soft beaches all her finished sand. She works and alters, she shapes and adorns, the sad brutal face of callous soil.

Of multiform water, tenant of clouds, amasser of the abyss: she lies in snow on sunlit peaks, whence issuing pure she goes by tracks she knows, blind but strangely certain, down unconquerably to the ocean where she most abides.

At times, swift, slow, lucid in the light of day she chases herself with a mysterious murmur that alters suddenly into a leaping torrent's bellowing, soon swallowed in the perpetual thunder of shuddering, dazzling falls with circlets of rainbow in their mist.

But at others steals away to travel secret, penetrative, below the earth. She searches mineral beds, picking and winding into them by devious ways. She seeks herself in the absolute night, finds herself and is one. She pierces, rummages, dissolves, sweats through, slides down rock veins, is busy about her fantastic labyrinth in which she is never lost ; and then subsides in tombs of lakes she nourishes with long tears that set in marble columns, cathedrals of darkness venting infernal streams that breed blind fishes and shellfish older than the flood.

And in these perilous adventures what strange things WATER has known! ... And strangely she knows them. For her sub-. stance is her memory: she picks and gathers memorials of all she has brushed against, bathed, in her course rolled — of the limestone she has scooped, the rockbeds she has smoothed, of the rich sands through which she has sunk. When she gushes into day she is charged with all powers and virtues of her traversed rocks. With her she fetches scatterings of atoms, of elements of naked energy, of bubbles of subterranean gas, at times indeed of the very heat of the molten middle earth.

And so she rises, laden with the gleanings of her way, to offer herself to the needs of LIFE.

How not venerate this very essence of all LIFE? And yet how few men understand that life is no more nor less than water organized!

Consider a plant, regard a mighty tree, and you will discern that it is none other than an upright river pouring into the air of the sky. By the tree WATER climbs to meet light. Of a few salts in the earth WATER constructs a body that is in love with the day, to the whole universe stretching and out-stretching liquid powerful arms that end in gentle hands.

Man comes to rest where there is WATER. What more necessary than that cool sweet nymph? The nymph and the spring stand at that holy place where life sits down and looks around her.

And here one will understand that there is also a drunkenness of WATER. To drink! ... To drink.... Well one knows that pure thirst is quenched only in pure water. There is something exact and satisfactory in this matching of the real desire of the organism with the element of its origin. To thirst is to lack a part of oneself, and thus to dwindle into another. Then one must make good that lack, complete oneself again, by repairing to what all life demands.

The very language is filled with the praise of water. We say that we THIRST FOR TRUTH. We speak of a LIMPID discourse. At times we burst into a TORRE NT of words....

Time itself has drawn from the coursing of water the figures in which it presents itself.

To WATER be all praise!

CHAPTER 3

The Anagogical Revelation

An abstract tale

I. At this date (MDCCCXCII) two terrible angels, Nous and [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], showed me a way of destruction and of domination, and a fixed Boundary at the far end of that way. I knew the certainty of the Limit, and the importance of that knowledge. which is as valuable to us as the knowledge of the Solid — or (to symbolize it otherwise) may be used analogously to that of the wall against which a fighter sets his back, so that he fears no assault a tergo but dares all his enemies equally face to face and so makes it an even contest — (this being the most remarkable feature of this discovery for, amongst his adversaries, he who is Himself or those who are the Person that he is, with all his diverse insufficiencies, figure as extraneous and adventitious concomitants.

And the two angels, themselves in person chasing me before them, coalesced into one; and I, turning to face them, had but a single power to fight against, once I felt the Wall behind my shoulders.

2. I sought to see this limit and to define this wall. — I wished to "write," both for and within myself, in such a way as to make use of this knowledge, the laws of this limit or sealing-off; or (what comes to the same thing) those of the reduction to unity of all that is hurled against it; and further those which determine that in the ordinary way we do not perceive these things, but rather that thought builds herself illusory castles on the far side of the Limit, as though the Wall behaves like transparent glass — s a thing which I do not believe. A mirror rather: but do not forget that you will not recognize yourself in a mirror unless you see someone else there, and that in this mirror you will not.

CHAPTER 4

The Angel

A kind of angel was seated upon the rim of a well. He looked far his reflection and found that he was a Man, and in tears, and he was dumbfounded at the appearance in the naked water of this prey to an infinite sorrow.

(Or, if one wishes, it was a Sorrow in Man's shape that lacked a cause in crystal heaven.)

This face that was his, the grief that racked it, both seemed alien to him. So wretched an apparition aroused the interest of the fabulously pure spiritual matter of which he was composed; exercising it, asking questions that found no answers.

"O my Evil," he said, "what are you to me?"

He tried to smile: and wept. This infidelity of his features confounded his perfect intelligence; they had assumed an air of the particular and accidental, and their expression had become so unequal to the universality of his limpid knowing that he was mysteriously wounded in his unity.

"I have nothing to beweep," he said; "nor could that be possible to me."

The Movement of his Reason within the light of his eternal expectancy found itself halted by a nameless query; for what would create pain in our own imperfect natures does no more than arouse questionings in essences that are absolute; — while indeed far us every question too is or will be a sorrow.

"Then who is this," he said, "who loves himself to the point of self-torment? I am all-knowing; and yet I see that I suffer. This face is certainly my own, these tears are my tears.... And yet am I not that power of clarity of which this face, these tears, their cause and what might eliminate that cause, are but the merest particles of its extent?"

But, in vain did these thoughts grow and multiply in all the amplitude of the sphere of thought, in vain did the similes chime, the contradictions announce themselves only to be resolved, in vain was the miracle of clarity incessantly achieved, with each Idea sparkling in the glitter thrown off by every other, jewels as they are of the circlet of undivided knowing: nothing at all resembling a harm offered itself to his faultless gaze, nothing by which to explain this visage of sorrow, these tears that he saw through his tears.

"The purity that I am," he said, "Intelligence that effortlessly consumes all creation, without anything affecting or altering it in return, can recognize nothing of itself in this face of lamentations, in these eyes whose light, of which they were made, is as it were softened by the moist imminence of their tears.

"And how can he so suffer, this lovely weeper who is mine, is of me, considering that after all I see all that he is, being in myself the knowledge of all things, and that the only sorrow could be to be ignorant of something?

"O my astonishment," he said," charming and sorrowing Head, is there then something other than light?"

Thus he questioned himself within the universe of the fabulously pure spiritual matter of which he was composed, and in which all the ideas dwelled equally distant both from one another and from himself. in so absolute a perfection of their harmony and a promptitude of their correspondences that he himself could almost have disappeared, leaving the system of their synchronous ordinance, coruscating like a diadem, to subsist independently in the ample sublime.

And for an eternity he never ceased to know and fail to understand.

CHAPTER 5

    MIXTURE IS MIND

    Prose, poem, recollection, image, phrase,
    From sleep what comes, what comes from love, each chance
    The gods donate by way of circumstance:     Here see the swept-up pieces of my days!

    According to its moment droll, nice, rich,     Master of law or servant of a fly,
      Mind is mixture out of which
    Each instant disengaged uprears the I.

Mixture

SEA

I

Glassy sea — gray, with great clotted areas of local activity, curdlings, pins-and-needles of the skin.

Wave is form. Motionless, of moving substance; or moving, and its matter "still."

"A wave" — in what is that an identity? It is a continuum of forms and movement. A light upon a turning but invisible wheel, and a series of points in a circle lighting up one after the other are not distinguished by the eye. Duration always involves both "space" and "time."

II

Stones rolled by the sea, and the same worked upon in air by frosts and rains, belong to different classes of form. These are not comparable wearings: they do not share hazards. The action of the sea is various: that of weathers and gravity not. The one is rolling and hurling: the other lashes, cracks, picks apart.

III

A crest of foam in the wide plain of the sea from time to time catches the light: these times too are the creation of chance.

IV

Morning — black blowy dawn — cannon-shots of wind Notable tension of the nerves Remarking, reverberating at, the least event, alteration —as onto the loaded present issued from sleep Of resonance, illumination, expectation, Three-quarters slumberous, and the rest a point vibrating. Fine waves, potent, but pent in a little space.

THE CATHEDRAL

Windows of Chartres — lapis, enamels. The Orient.

Ingredients of some complex drink, the innumerable little elements of living color (that is to say, emitting a radiance not polarized, not reflected, but a mosaic of intense tones), sharp1y divided and in every possible juxtaposition inch by square inch, produce a soft dazzle that is more of a taste than a sight, the delicate intricacy of the designs allowing one to see or to not see them — ad libitum — or to see only combinations picked out by unusual frequencies, here of blues, here of reds, and so on.

A look of grains, stones of miraculous jewelry, cellular, seeds of the pomegranates of paradise.

Effect of other world.

A rose-window puts me in mind of a huge expanded retina, suffering under the diversity of the vibrations of its living elements, color-producers....

Certain prose phrases of Mallarmé are such windows. Their subjects could not matter less, they are caught and drowned in the mystery, vivacity, depth, laughter, reverie of each separate fragment, each one feeling, singing....

Right porch — the middle one not good, the figures imbecile — the left spire unpleasing.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Collected Works of Paul Valéry Volume 2 by Paul Valéry, Jackson Mathews, Hilary Corke. Copyright © 1969 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

• Frontmatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. v
• Introduction, pg. xi
• Parables, pg. 1
• In Praise of Water, pg. 8
• The Anagogical Revelation, pg. 12
• The Angel, pg. 14
• Mixture, pg. 17
• Poems in the Rough, pg. 59
• Moments, pg. 73
• Broken Stories, pg. 85
• Odds and Ends, pg. 153
• Miniatures, pg. 191
• Early Pieces, pg. 203
• Variety, pg. 221
• APPENDIX: From the Notebooks, pg. 273
• NOTES, pg. 307