life

Guillaume Apollinaire’s “Poem for Lou”: War, Love, and Death

/ Niall Madhoo / Leave a comment

If I should die out there on the battle-front,
You’d weep, O Lou my darling, a single day,
And then my memory would die away
As a shell dies bursting over the battle-front,
A beautiful shell like a flowered mimosa spray.

And then this memory exploded in space
Would flood the whole wide world beneath my blood:
The mountains, valleys, seas and the stars that race,
The wondrous suns that ripen far in space,
As golden fruits round General Baratier would.

Forgotten memory, living in all things,
I’d redden the nipples of your sweet pink breasts,
I’d blush your mouth, your hair’s now blood-like rings.
You wouldn’t grow old at all; these lovely things
Would ever make you young for their brave behests.

The fatal spurting of my blood on the world
Would give more lively brightness to the sun,
More color to flowers, to waves more speedy run.
A marvelous love would descend upon the world,
Would be, in your lonely flesh, more strongly grown.

And if I die there, memory you’ll forget —
Sometimes remember, Lou, the moments of madness,
Of youth and love and dazzling passion’s heat —
My blood will be the burning fountain of gladness!
And be the happiest being the prettiest yet,

O my only love and my great madness!

L ong night is falling,
O n us foreboding
U shers a long, long fate of blood.

Poem for Lou – Guillaume Apollinaire translated by Hubert Creekmore

Here’s the original French version, which is similar in terms of structure as the English translation above, apart from the end.

Si je mourais là-bas sur le front de l’armée,
Tu pleurerais un jour, ô Lou, ma bien-aimée.
Et puis mon souvenir s’éteindrait comme meurt
Un obus éclatant sur le front de l’armée,
Un bel obus semblable aux mimosas en fleur.

Et puis ce souvenir éclaté dans l’espace
Couvrirait de mon sang le monde tout entier :
La mer, les monts, les vals et l’étoile qui passe,
Les soleils merveilleux mûrissant dans l’espace
Comme font les fruits d’or autour de Baratier.

Souvenir oublié, vivant dans toutes choses,
Je rougirais le bout de tes jolis seins roses,
Je rougirais ta bouche et tes cheveux sanglants.
Tu ne vieillirais point, toutes ces belles choses
Rajeuniraient toujours pour leurs destins galants.

Le fatal giclement de mon sang sur le monde
Donnerait au soleil plus de vive clarté,
Aux fleurs plus de couleur, plus de vitesse à l’onde,
Un amour inouï descendrait sur le monde,
L’amant serait plus fort dans ton corps écarté…

Lou, si je meurs là-bas, souvenir qu’on oublie,
— Souviens-t’en quelquefois aux instants de folie,
De jeunesse et d’amour et d’éclatante ardeur, —
Mon sang c’est la fontaine ardente du bonheur !
Et sois la plus heureuse étant la plus jolie,

Ô mon unique amour et ma grande folie !

Nîmes, le 30 Janvier 1915 — SI JE MOURAIS LÀ-BA – Apollinaire
Poèmes à Lou

Guillaume Apollinaire offers personal insights into what it meant to go the frontlines of WWI in Poem for Lou. He takes a more direct approach about life, love, eroticism, war, and death than the Romanticists more dramatic approach. I say that because Poem for Lou seems to have less universal metaphors and imagery than Romantic poetry.

But Poem for Lou still contains strong Romanticist elements, especially as Apollinaire uses metaphors based on nature. For instance, he describes Lou’s memory of him that would explode “in space” before flooding “The wondrous suns that ripen far in space / As golden fruits round General Baratier would.” He also writes, “My blood will be the burning fountain of gladness!”

For comparison, Wilfred Owen’s Dulce Et Decorum Est, published in 1920, two years after his death as a soldier during World War I (WWI), remains one of the better known WWI war poems. Owen does not romanticize war like some of the Romanticists did, despite being written in poetic form. The poem seems beautiful in terms of its rhythm. Yet its details contrast this beauty completely, as Owen describes the brutal details of war, the struggle to survive, and the death of those around him.

Interestingly, Apollinaire’s Zone (English translation and original French version), published in 1913, seems to break all the rules. The poem contains no punctuation apart from the apostrophe and accents used in certain French words, which seem necessary. This omission creates a stream of consciousness, a common feature of modernist literature. But given that Apollinaire published Zone in 1913, this poem is one of the first examples. The poem also varies in line and stanza length. It does have a half-rhyming couplet scheme, however.

Yet, Apollinaire wrote Poem for Lou in 1915 with a strict rhyme scheme and 5-line stanza length apart from the single final line. I think the difference between this strictness and the free nature of Zone is modernism. Apollinaire wrote Poem for Lou for his object of love, Louise de Coligny-Châtillon, one of the first French female aviators, whom he met in September 1914 shortly before going to war. The couple broke up in February 1915 but maintained correspondence despite Apollinaire fighting on the frontlines in Champagne, France.

Modernist poets wrote using different personas. The person writing Zone and Poem for Lou is Apollinaire, yet you wouldn’t imagine that if his name weren’t written on both. One is modernist, the other romanticist, which are completely different because modernism was a reaction to romanticist excess. Poem for Lou, essentially a love poem, was written for one person, the object of Apollinaire’s love. Apollinaire may never have intended for it to be published. He did publish Zone for the public. Could you imagine him writing his thoughts about his relationship Louise de Coligny-Châtillon as a stream of consciousness, then send that to her? That’d be creepy!

Poem for Lou was published posthumously in the 1950s as part of the Poèmes à Lou collection of poems by Guillaume Apollinaire. Apollinaire dedicated these 76 poems to Louise de Coligny-Châtillon, which he wrote on the back of correspondence letters to her. The 220 letters were published separately. Poem for Lou was dated, January 30, 1915, right before the couple split in February 2015.

Perhaps Apollinaire knew they would split, and thus thought Louise de Coligny-Châtillon would not care if he died. But I’m not so sure about that. I think Apollinaire perfectly describes the reality of death, that those left behind will eventually forget about you. Your body and even your ideas may give birth to new life and ideas on earth, yet you’ll be forgotten and gone nevertheless.

I am writing about Apollinaire and you are reading about him, yet neither of us know what he was really like as a person, meaning he is still forgotten forever as he suggest will happen in Poem for Lou.

Intricacies of Marriage Explained in A 14 Word Poem

/ Niall Madhoo / Leave a comment

Marriage

So different, this man

And this woman:

A stream flowing

In a field.

William Carlos Williams – Marriage

This early 20th-century imagist poem by Puerto Rican American poet, William Carlos Williams, explains marriage in such a simplistic but magical way. I’ve written about marriage and love in modernist poetry before here, namely Ezra Pound’s translation poem, The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter. Pound’s poem was not imagist, but it did reveal a deeply personal and intimate side of a wife’s love for her husband. But Williams’ poem does not mention emotions, and it’s only 14 words long. Yet it evokes strong sentiments in me, just like imagist poets intended.

Imagist poetry aspires to depict a specific moment in time in an exact location while still being universal enough to evoke a strong response in the reader. Imagism also emphasizes using the minimum number of words necessary to create meaning and elicit the reader’s emotions and intellect.

Pound described the masses of people in a metro station so succinctly in another imagist poem, In a Station of the Metro which I explained here. That poem is also 14 words like Williams’ Marriage. For comparison, Shakespeare’s famous Sonnet 18, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” contains 114 words, one hundred more than Pound’s and William’s poems. I felt a strong sense of individuality and confusion in a metro station a few weeks ago when I realized what Pound meant in saying “these faces” merge together in an almost ghost-like manner.

William’s Marriage seems like an eternal yet ephemeral moment. It’s eternal because it could apply to any marriage anywhere on earth at anytime, past, present, or future to any man and woman. But it’s ephemeral because so much could happen after the moment ends. And in fact, there isn’t really a sense of time in this poem. Are the two individuals getting married? Are they already married? Were they once married? None of it is clear. This poem is really meant to be perceived by the reader, and our interpretation of it could differ.

To me, the key in understanding this poem lies in “A stream flowing / In a field.” Is the stream supplying fresh water to the field? Why does the field surround the stream? What is the field? These questions don’t really matter to me.

When I first read Marriage I thought about how a stream often merges into a river, just as two people become one in a marriage. They’re somehow individuals as part of the stream but become one united stream on the river of life. That river eventually becomes an estuary, feeding the sea. So, the stream symbolizes the path this couple might take before they eventually die and become one with nature again in the sea, a mass of souls no longer suffering life’s struggles.

Streams represent water, a life-giving substance. Marriages give birth to children. Okay, around the time this poem was written in the first half of the 20th century, childbirth was mostly through marriage. In 2018, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) says that, “On average across OECD countries, 40% of births occur outside of marriage.”

According to the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention, only about 40% of 2017 births in the U.S. occurred outside of marriage. So even today, marriage is the most common way children are born. See Williams’ universality and near-timelessness yet?

The stream could also be fast or slow depending on the situation, revealing how the marriage could be stagnating, exciting, or somewhere in-between. The stream could become a river that flows through the turbulence of rapids, the troubles, the fights, the struggles of a healthy marriage. Or it could flow as a waterfall, perhaps representing an affair or another type of severe betrayal.

But streams and rivers can also separate, bifurcating to different routes and locations. This bifurcation could represent a couple’s divorce, with each going their own way toward entirely separate lives.

There’s also a sense of irony in Williams diction and phrasing. The man and woman are different yet amalgamate as a stream. A stream suggests movement, but the poem is stuck in an eternal time loop, a single moment.

Now, I probably shouldn’t have extended the stream image to a river, especially as even streams have forks, rapids, and waterfalls. Marriage also represents a fleeting moment in time, thus extending an analysis further makes less sense. But my analysis is what the poem evoked in me, and it seems to comply with what Williams wrote. Somewhat.

You see, the “stream flow in a field,” and William’s preposition choice here adds much meaning. The stream is flowing “in” rather than through “a field.” How can a stream flow in a field? Surely it must end somewhere, in this case probably feeding the field. And this is why I suggested my river analogy detracts from the poem’s meaning. Marriage depicts a moment in time, a solitary and somewhat generic event. Therefore, it doesn’t matter that the stream “must end somewhere,” as I just said. It will end, but not in this moment, just as the marriage will one day end, in death or in divorce.

Marriage reminded me of Snow Patrol’s Chasing Cars:

Snow Patrol – Chasing Cars

These lyrics stood out most:

  • “We’ll do it all / Everything / On our own,”
  • “If I lay here / If I just lay here / Would you lie with me and just forget the world?”
  • “Forget what we’re told / Before we get too old / Show me a garden that’s bursting into life”

The two people suggested in the poem, ambiguous like those in Marriage, are on the journey of life together. But one of them calls for a moment, “Would you lie with me and just forget the world?” to enjoy each other’s company and forget everything. That’s similar to how Williams places the couple from Marriage in a solitary moment with noting else described around them. That is apart from the field, like “a garden that’s bursting into life.” A fruiting, flowering, thriving garden requires water like that of a stream.

Despite the lack of time, this poem leads to a single conclusion that isn’t mentioned anywhere. People die. Obvious, I know. But this man and woman will one day die if they haven’t already. Their stream will stop one day. Maybe they divorced before that. Who knows? Marriage shows the future as undecided, the past as irrelevant. But it also reveals to us that moments of the present, whether big or small, ambiguous or detailed, really do matter, especially as those moments could end as quickly as it takes for you to read a momentous 14-line poem.

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay