To return to “the palm at the end of the mind”: Bloom finds in Stevens’ last poem, not only a memory of “Palme,” but also of Stevens’ “Sunday Morning” which denies the “cloudy palm / Remote on heaven’s hill” but concludes with the image of “casual flocks of pigeons,” with their “ambiguous undulations as they sink, / Downward to darkness, on extended wings.” Bloom suggests there is a memory of the same image in “The Broken Tower,” in the “visible wings of silence sown / In azure circles, widening as they dip / The matrix of the heart” and build “within a tower that is not stone.” Recollections of “Sunday Morning” may be one way that Crane’s death poem and Stevens’ join in each other’s company. “Sunday Morning” was published in 1915 — of necessity without Valéry in mind — but after “Le cimetière marin” appeared, perhaps both Stevens and Crane could have found “Sunday Morning” in the opening of Valéry’s poem. I would like to think that as Stevens’ “casual flocks of pigeons” descend, they become Valéry’s doves as they “march among the graves.” In this connection, for Stevens and Crane the concluding lines of Rilke’s Duino Elegies might have also provided a gloss: “Und wir, die an steigendes Glück / denken, emphfänden die Rührung, / die uns beinah bestürzt, / wenn ein Glückliches fällt.”

“Le cimetière marin” ends where it begins, with doves but now as sails (were they always sails to begin with?), with “ce toit tranquille où picoraient des focs !” From the Mariner’s graveyard at Seté, the Mediterranean can have the appearance of a roof, irregularly supported by tombstones. Sails on the water can become like doves, walking this roof and feeding. As a repetition where the poem’s initial image happens again but differently, the conclusion of Le cimetière marin seems to sharpen the focus. But here too for me English runs into its limits since in English what the French would literally say lacks Valéry’s luminous precision: “this tranquil roof where sails are pecking.” For “ce toit tranquille,” I have again substituted a repetition: “this tranquil ceiling — / this quiet roof.” For the implied metaphor in “où picoraient des focs,” I have substituted a simile: “where sails like doves are brooding.” “Brooding” cannot pretend to be a literal translation of the French; instead it ends Valéry’s poem with an allusion to two poems in English that helped shape an American idiom: to Paradise Lost where the spirit of God “with mighty wings outspread / Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss,” and to “Resolution and Independence” where the Miltonic sublime recurs very quietly: “over his own sweet voice the Stock-dove broods.” The “Stock-dove is said to coo,” Wordsworth later wrote in explanation, “but, by the intervention of the metaphor broods,” the image “react[s] upon the mind… like a new existence.” In recalling this “intervention” at the end of “Le cimetière marin,” I hope that the image from Milton and Wordsworth has once again found “a new existence,” in this case for Valéry in English.