In Valéry’s “Anne,” Stevens’ “palm… beyond the last thought” may have at first been “la palme… au delà du remords.” In Stevens, Valéry’s “l’oiseau calme” who begins “le chant seul qui réprime les morts” may become the “gold-feathered bird” “in the bronze décor” who “sings… a foreign song” from the tree outside. A poem does “not present, but receive,” Valéry once noted. It “is waiting for a meaning.” Is the Valéry, then, waiting for “Of Mere Being”? Perhaps in that sense, Valéry’s quiet phoenix who sings from the fire, beyond remorse, “parmi trois feuilles,” as it awaits meaning in Stevens’ poem, can also be a figure for poetry, perhaps even for Valéry’s verse as Stevens turned toward it in “Of Mere Being,” finding it “at the end of the mind.” Valéry writes that poetry can be phoenix-like, “constantly reborn from its own ashes… as the effect of its effect — its own harmonic cause.” If for the moment Valéry’s phoenix is also a poem “beyond the last thought” (that is, “waiting for a meaning” as in Stevens’ poem, which, in turn, is also “waiting for a meaning” because, as Valéry suggests, the poet too “is only a mere reader”) then Of Mere Being may offer a way of characterizing a possibility for Valéry’s verse in English — as an effect in English of Valéry’s poetry in French — “in the bronze decor” where “the wind moves slowly in the branches.”

Even in these poems, however, as in all the texts in Charmes, the reflecting surface balances between mirroring and reflections of otherness.

For a translator of Valéry into English, Wallace Stevens’ poetry is probably an inevitable reference. It is difficult to read “Le cimetière marin” and not find Stevens. Who else in English is more like Valéry, particularly if the English involved is also to be found in an American idiom? While Stevens’ feel for oceanic rhythms recalls Whitman’s and Wordsworth’s, doesn’t it also recall Valéry’s and thereby connect two traditions? Just as childhood in Whitman or Wordsworth is associated with the Atlantic Ocean, the mariner’s cemetery by the Mediterranean in “Le cimetière marin” is a memory from childhood (of this seascape of which he once reported that “nothing formed and impregnated me more,” and that nothing “taught me better.”) “The mobile and the immobile flickering / In the area between is and was are leaves,” Stevens wrote in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” leaves “resembling the presences of thought,” but also that would seem wave-like as they “covered the high rock” “as if nothingness contained a métier… in the predicate that there is nothing else” in Stevens’ poem “The Rock.” Like the “waves [as they] scree and dare, leaping from rock to rock” among “dazzling pages” in the last stanza of “Le cimetière marin.” In “Of Mere Being,” this flickering becomes the fire of Valery’s phoenix, transposed from “is” and “was” onto a reflective screen between mind and world, while in “Le cimetière marin” this screen is called “ce toit tranquille,” a figure of speech for a presencing in which the dazzling light of sea, churchyard, and fluttering pines, of doves (or dovelike sails) among the graves and pines, have become verbal reflections on the pages (or leaves) of Valéry’s text. (In the first edition of Charmes, all the pages resemble leaves of a much older book). “Ce toit tranquille,” the poem begins, “où marchent les colombes / Entre les pins palpite, entre les tombes” where “Midi le just y compose de feux / La mer, la mer, toujours recommencée,” and in this fire even doves (and sails) will begin to seem pheonix-like. “Et toi,” Valéry had written in a much earlier poem “Été”: “Et toi, maison brûlante, Espace, cher Espace / Tranquille, où l’arbre fume et perd quelques oiseaux”; perhaps “Le cimetière marin” begins by offering a roof for this burning house where, as Geoffrey Hartman writes so beautifully, “what is described is a yielding… to the brightness of burning space” in “the unprejudiced splendor of the eye.”

“Ce toit” — in English, “this roof”: presumably the antecedant of “this” is the mariner’s graveyard named in the title, “Le cimetière marin,” but inasmuch as the title also names the poem, won’t the antecedant of “ce toit” also be the poem itself beginning with “ce toit tranquille”? Just as the deictic opening of “The Auroras of Autumn” refers to both the auroras and the poem, Valéry’s graveyard by the sea is also the poem in which the seascape occurs.^[2] Poem and world coincide like complementary realities. How to translate this reflective surface where a sailors’ graveyard is also Le cimetière marin? Valéry wrote that for him “the Narcissus theme” became a “poetic autobiography.” In La Jeune Parque, “Narcisse parle,” and “Fragments du Narcisse,” reflective surfaces mirror explicitly what “Narcisse parle” calls “ma chair… à mes yeux opposées,” and “Fragments du Narcisse,” “la face des eaux” and “mes charmes,” in that way also naming the volume of poetry in which the poem appears.^[3] Even in these poems, however, as in all the texts in Charmes, the reflecting surface balances between mirroring and reflections of otherness. The poet’s gaze in “Le Cimetiére marin” may have first been trained to see in a mirror, but insofar as that gaze has been brought from mirror to landscape, where the eye might still expected mirroring, reflections have a freedom of their own. The experience is analagous to the novelist’s recognition that the novel’s characters have come alive and freed themselves of their author. As a pragmatic fiction, this may also be what Valéry means when he says that a poet is only another of the readers to whom “the verse is listening.” Like “un grand calme [qui] m’écoute où j’écoute l’espoir” in “Narcisse parle,” for the poet, it is not a question of “his intentions” but “of what he has made independent of himself.” Like Milton’s Eve, Valéry’s Narcissus may need to recognize the image he sees as his own, though Valéry’s poet will also go beyond this recognition and learn not to see the image as his own. He will go from self-reflection to the elation that Wordsworth celebrated, that reflection begins to offer otherness. For example, in “Tintern Abbey,” where the poem’s narrator gazes at his own reflections in the landscape and knows not to call these thoughts his own, but, regarding them as thou, as if in the second person, “see[s] into the life of things.^[4] “Ce toit tranquille, où marchent les colombes,” Le cimetière marin begins. Ce toit, but perhaps also as a near homonym since the the sound is the same: ce toi. And in English, perhaps, this thou.