Five Great Odes (Cinq Grandes Odes) comprises five confessional poems composed by French poet, dramatist, and diplomat Paul Claudel between 1901 and 1908. They were collected and published in book form in 1910.

The first poem, The Muses (Les Muses), was written in the tumultuous time between Claudel’s consideration of monastic life and his encounter with Rosalie Vetch, a married Polish woman of whom he became deeply enamored.

The four subsequent poems—Spirit and Water (L’Esprit et l’eau) (1906), Magnificat (1907), The Muse Who Is Grace (La Muse qui est la Grâce, 1907), and The Closed House (La Maison fermée, 1908)—were produced after his return from a diplomatic mission to China and his subsequent marriage to Reine Sainte-Marie Perrin.

The odes exhibit many of the central themes of Claudel’s verse (biographical allusions, biblical motifs, and so on) and often express a penitential tone, perhaps tied to his deep Roman Catholic faith, perhaps a result of his illicit relationship with Vetch.

In The Muses the poet is inspired by a classical frieze in the Louvre museum and comments on the way in which God preserves the poet’s beloved, who is protected, at least in part, from the ravages of time. The poet’s present is connected to the ancient, pagan past through the poetic inspiration of the Muses, the nine goddesses of the arts of ancient Greece.

The other poems in the collection focus on the quest of the poet to achieve absolution from his sins, which culminates with his return to Catholicism (in Magnificat) and his opportunity to pass along his faith to his daughter, Marie.

The final poem of the collection, The Closed House, rejects the paganism of the first poem, The Muses, by celebrating four theological virtues: prudence, strength, temperance, and justice. The poem also honors the triumph of wholesome conjugal love within a church-sanctioned marriage and condemns the poet’s earlier, illicit erotic love, found in The Muses.

Structurally, Five Great Odes follows a musical evolution—moving from the erotic, uninhibited Bacchanalian attitude of The Muses toward the devotional tone that the Muse Grace adopts in glorifying God. Overall the poems sustain a powerful personal lyricism that conveys the power of love—whether adulterous or married—while favoring the religious culmination embodied in the emotive musicality of the Catholic Mass, which Claudel attended almost daily throughout his life.

Categories: British Literature, French Literature, Literature

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