7.31 Apollinaire — Alcools, 6 poems — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read six poems from Guillaume Apollinaire's Alcools (1913), about 600 words of verse: the Seine under a Paris bridge, poisonous autumn flowers, a dance, a sprig of heather, a peasant in the fog, and a night vision over a glass of wine on the Rhine. Read poetry almost without punctuation, as Apollinaire printed it, finding the sentences through the lines and the rhythm. Recognise the refrain and the song forms Apollinaire took from popular poetry, and the modern images he set beside them. Feel the theme that runs through the collection: time that flows and love that does not come back. Sentences from this text, before the notes. Read the French aloud; all of them come back below. French English Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine Under the Mirabeau bridge flows the Seine Des éternels regards l’onde si lasse The weary wave of endless gazes Oh ! l’automne l’automne a fait mourir l’été Oh! autumn, autumn has made the summer die Comme la vie est lente How slow life is Toutes les cloches sonneront All the bells will ring Qui cache les hameaux pauvres et vergogneux Which hides the poor and shamefaced hamlets Prerequisites : 7.30 — this reading follows 7.30 Reading . You need the verse rules of 7.28 Reading , where you counted syllables with Rimbaud and Verlaine; Apollinaire keeps the old metres while breaking other rules. About this text Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) was born in Rome to a Polish mother and grew up in Monaco and on the Riviera before settling in Paris, where he became the friend and defender of the painters Picasso, Braque and Marie Laurencin, and of the new art called cubism. Alcools , published in 1913, gathers the poems of fifteen years. At the last moment, on the proofs, he removed almost all the punctuation (a few exclamation marks remain, as in Oh ! l’automne ), and the book appeared without a single comma or full stop. He enlisted in 1914, was wounded in the head in 1916, and died of the Spanish flu in November 1918, two days before the Armistice. He coined the word surréalisme . Le Pont Mirabeau , written after the end of his love for Marie Laurencin, is one of the best-known poems in French. Les Colchiques , Marie , L'Adieu and Automne are poems of autumn and lost love. Nuit rhénane comes from the poems he wrote after a year as a tutor in the Rhineland, full of German legends. The text here gives the six poems, about 600 words, from the third edition of Alcools published in Paris by the Nouvelle Revue française in 1920, as transcribed in French Wikisource, which publishes only texts in the public domain in France. Each line of verse is a separate paragraph. Reading Apollinaire No punctuation. Without commas and full stops, the reader must find the sentences alone. Read each poem aloud, line by line, and let the line endings and the sense guide you. Sometimes two readings are possible, and Apollinaire wanted that: in Les Colchiques , Y fleurit tes yeux sont comme cette fleur-là can be read as two sentences that flow into each other. The refrain. Le Pont Mirabeau returns after each stanza to the same two lines: Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure / Les jours s'en vont je demeure . The verbs are subjunctives of wish, vienne , sonne : let night come, let the hour strike. Time passes; the speaker stays. The flowing water. The Seine in Le Pont Mirabeau , the river in Marie , the Rhine in Nuit rhénane : water carries away love and time, L'amour s'en va comme cette eau courante . Old and new. Apollinaire writes in old metres, the alexandrine and the short song line, and borrows the forms of folk songs, but sets strange modern images inside them: the eyes of a woman like poisonous flowers, a glass that breaks comme un éclat de rire . Reading it a second time, poem by poem Le Pont Mirabeau . The Seine flows under the bridge, as love flows away; the lovers stand face to face, hands joined, while the days go by and the speaker remains. Les Colchiques . An autumn meadow, poisonous but pretty, where cows graze and slowly poison themselves; the woman's eyes are like the colchicum, and his life is poisoned by them. Schoolchildren come and pick the flowers; the cows leave the meadow for ever. Marie . A dance, sheep in the snow, soldiers passing, a changing heart, and the river by which the speaker walks, like his pain, which flows and never runs dry. L'Adieu . Five lines: a sprig of heather picked, autumn dead, a farewell, and a promise to wait. Automne . A peasant and his ox walk off into the autumn fog, the peasant humming a song of love and infidelity. Nuit rhénane . A glass of wine, the song of a boatman who saw seven women twisting their green hair under the moon, a round dance, the drunken Rhine, and the glass that breaks. Full translation An English translation of the whole text, made for this course and kept close to the original. The numbers are the paragraph numbers of the original text, so you can move between the two. Alcools The Mirabeau Bridge Under the Mirabeau bridge flows the Seine And our loves Must I remember them Joy always came after sorrow Let night come, let the hour strike The days go by, I remain Hands in hands let us stay face to face While beneath The bridge of our arms passes The weary wave of endless gazes Let night come, let the hour strike The days go by, I remain Love goes away like this running water Love goes away How slow life is And how violent Hope is Let night come, let the hour strike The days go by, I remain The days pass and the weeks pass Neither time gone by Nor loves come back Under the Mirabeau bridge flows the Seine Let night come, let the hour strike The days go by, I remain The Colchicums The meadow is poisonous but pretty in autumn The cows grazing there Slowly poison themselves The colchicum, the colour of shadowed eyes and of lilac, Blooms there; your eyes are like that flower Purplish like their shadows and like this autumn And for your eyes my life slowly poisons itself The schoolchildren come with a clatter