This poem by Anna de Noailles, from Les Forces éternelles (1921), explores themes of betrayal, isolation, and renewal. Its persona, or narrative voice, expresses frustration at finding oneself, after an implied moment of intimacy, alone beside a now somnolent lover. Many of Noailles’s male contemporaries dismissed her work as “feminine,” but this persona is conspicuously androgynous, both lover caressed by hope and “warrior madness” cleaving a passage through a maze of paths.

The voice is tempered by stanzas in traditional French meter and rimes croisées (alternating rhyme, abab). The first five stanzas are quatrains, with three alexandrines (12-syllable lines), followed by an eight-syllable line. The sixth and final stanza expands (appositely) to five lines: four alexandrines and an octosyllabic line.

In the opening stanza the persona identifies the lyric present as “après les moments” of lovemaking. Caesura, an internal pause within a line that comes at the midpoint in the traditional alexandrine, separates the present from recent ecstasy:

C’est après les moments | les plus bouleversés
(It is after moments | the most convulsive)
De l’étroite union | acharnée et barbare,
(Of intimate union | keen and savage) . . . (literal translation)

The “keenness” of that unbridled passion is implied by enjambment, the syntax of the second half of the first line running on, without grammatical break, to the close of the second.

In the second stanza the speaker acknowledges a silence within which the miracle of “union,” with Noailles’s possible allusion to Genesis 2:24, comes apart. The course of this dissolution is mapped out by the sequence of pronouns: “nous” (we) becomes, in line three, “chacun de nous” (each of us); and, in line four, “soi-même” (a self).

In the third stanza the speaker addresses her silent partner “près de moi” (beside me) as “vous,” the pronoun reserved for formal address; and this emotional distance is reinforced by an apt use of synecdoche, as she reduces her lover to vacant eyes that moments earlier “seemed to burn [her] beneath [her] eyelids.” This lover is then diminished to “a puny animal gorged on its meal” and, finally, regarded as “a dead man sculpted on his stone.” In either instance there is no fulfillment. The puny animal has overindulged, and the dead man hardly “possesses” the stone that captures his likeness.

Thus the speaker acknowledges, in stanza four, that she cannot penetrate her satiated lover’s “vision,” even as she feels an inexpressible hope “wafting its young palms” over her.

In the final stanza the speaker likens her unquenchable desire to a “warrior madness” that even at rest wishes to “cleave itself a passage along a thousand winding paths!” Lying beside a “contented” lover within whom she detects no evidence of the silent confusion “in which [her] ecstatic sadness struggles,” she asks: “What can there be, O my love, in common between you and me!”

Bibliography
Noailles, Anna de. “It is after . . . .” In French Poetry: 1820–1950. Translated by William Rees. New York: Penguin Books, 1990, 434–436.

Categories: British Literature, French Literature, Literature

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