Bonnefoy’s Homecoming

Places can be geographically delineated or spiritually, confidently inhabited; the former is presented in Bonnefoy’s poetry with different encounters of disparate places and spaces, the later, to be precise, lies in the poet’s particular stance on his poetics, such as the fearless gesture of venturing in Chapter Two and the confident, promising attitude given in Chapter Three. These performances have further fortified Bonnefoy’s poetic structure, rendering it habitable and solid for placing the poet’s poetic being: Bonnefoy’s poetry is where he inhabits. In Heidegger’s contemplation on Hölderlin’s poem as well as the idea of poetic dwellings, he mentions that “poetry is what really lets us dwell;” since the performance of that dwelling requires a building to live in, “poetic creation, which lets us dwell,” therefore,

“is a kind of building” (213). Adhering to such an idea along with vivid, structural

components, Bonnefoy’s poetry too serves as a kind of building, the poetic space as I name it, in which the poet’s poetic being resides. Considering Bonnefoy’s approach to and even his faith in poetry, this poetic space is indeed the manifestation of the poet’s belief in this earth.

Oftentimes, Bonnefoy would compare poetry to a structure, a place to live in, and particularly a place of religious context, which is a temple. In the essay “The Act and the Place of Poetry,” Bonnefoy has explicitly justifies the very purpose and function poetry needs to perform in its nowadays plight; he also clarifies in it his long-term expectation as well as

the hope of poetry. In the beginning, Bonnefoy alludes poetry to a certain structuring when mentioning Dante’s evocation of Beatrice through poetic devices “to build for her a castle or presence, immortality, returning” (APP 101). He then directly relates literary works to man’s dwelling, bringing about the perception of seeing poetry as a form of structure that places particular, placial experience. Of course, such experience of man’s dwelling should not be misunderstood as a comforting shelter; we might, however, encounter the obscurity that forces us to escape into this structure in the first place.

The truth is that there is always something ambiguous about all great works. And this makes them more deeply akin, among all edifices, among all mansions whose eternity is assured, to a temple, to the dwelling of a god. For the temple … seeks to establish in the dangerous region the security of a law. Here we escape from the shadowy and the indefinite into the crystal clarity of the timeless. But in the secret heart of the temple, on the altar or deep in a crypt, the unforeseeable is present … as though a well had been pierced in that luminous enclosure to reveal the

unknowable depths of the place. (APP 104)

The depths of the place imply the depths of the poetry. Although Bonnefoy encourages the reader to see poetry as “always preserv[ing] within its closed dwelling the sense of an unknown existence, an alternative way of salvation, a different hope,” he reminds us still the uncertain, fluctuated depths embedded in its very nature (APP 104). How to secure this structure? What is the right “act” of performance to redeem the hope and recognize this

“place” anew?

Bonnefoy insists that we must believe in the here and now, identify every presence, and have faith in the earth. In Introduction, I already stated that the act of poetry, as Bonnefoy observes from Baudelaire’s poems, is the act of love and of building connections with the

surrounding elements, no matter how transient or subtle they are. I also mention, though in a brief manner, that Bonnefoy’s search for the divine is without God/gods and is in this world, along with his recognition of the earth as our only reality. I would like to return to and further elaborate these ideas to demonstrate how Bonnefoy retrieves his poetic act and founds his poetic space by developing his own unique poetic voice. What must be focalized first is Bonnefoy’s cautious attitude toward concepts, language, and speech. As the poet sees it, language presupposes the danger of fixation and conceptualization; it also possesses the

“well-known incapacity to express the immediate” (APP 113), corresponding to what Bonnefoy says in “Baudelaire’s Tomb” from The Anchor’s Long Chain that “words we can but guess” (SS 187). Yet, the employment of language is inescapable, and we, being restricted to the only tool at hand, is bound to its limitation. Bonnefoy, in this regard, encourages us to recognizes its failure and to “take it merely as the means of an approach” (APP 133); he further directs our attention to simple and real words, words that can “be an action” and restores hope:

And it is true that in authentic poetry nothing remains but those wanderers of the real, those categories of possibility, those elements … which are the earth, wind, fire, earth, the waters—all the indefinite offerings of the universe, concrete but universal elements. Here and now, but everywhere beyond the here and now, under the canopy and in the forecourt of our place and our moment. Omnipresent and alive; one might say that they are the very speech of being that poetry draws forth.

One might also say that they are words, being no other than a promise. They appear on the confines of the negative of language, like angels retelling of a still unknown god. (APP 114)

The elements are Bonnefoy’s words of reality, and the earth is taken as the manifestation of

the divine; being everywhere and forever vital, they speak to us and in us in the form of words. “[T]he most vividly perceptive objects of this earth … must be named,” Bonnefoy insists, “[t]herein lies all our hope” (APP 113).

The way that language’s plenitude appears exactly on its confinement is the

demonstration of what Bonnefoy calls a negative theology. This idea of showing the presence of God by what He is not appears throughout Bonnefoy’s oeuvre, which is similar to his exemplifying of presence through the absence, life through death, and movements through the immobility. By directing our concentration onto the earth itself, the poet seeks in it “the divine or sacred in the material and existential real. It is the ‘word’ made flesh … [or] [t]he

‘flesh’ made word” (Naughton 25). Whether it to be steady or fluctuated, the words that point to the most real grants us the possibility to get near to our divinity and plenitude; though they

“prove our nothingness, opening an abyss beneath our feet,” they still “offer us a home”

(APP 65). Words also, by their requirement for us “to act” and “to conceive of a true place,”

help construct and to revitalize the initial poetic temple anew (APP 115). Bonnefoy would confess straightforwardly that the true place “does not exist, that it is only mirage;” however, he would simultaneously claim that “a longing for the true place is the vow made by poetry”

(APP 115-116). The act of poetry is to get near to this true place, anticipating it to be the possible home. Bonnefoy would never be certain whether or not he had reached this promise;

nonetheless, in his incessant attempts of approaching, he does demonstrate, with his poetic creations, the possible poetic space in which he places all his anticipations and unfading hope.

As demonstrated throughout, Bonnefoy has found the particular dealing with his desire; he also learned, gradually as well as faithfully, to live alongside with not only himself but the world. The poetry is his final home, in which he names out the ambivalences as well as the promises; he also understands well that the very poetic act, one that encourages us to realize the very reality of our earth, might emerge in words: “[t]he immense outside

reconciled / With what is done and undone / Or wants and unwants, in words” (“Low Branches,” PH 32). Although the dream of the poet remains forever fluctuated, Bonnefoy never strays from his poetics; he encourages the reader to fully engage in the plenitude and immerse in our own dreaming depth and faith instead:

But remember

Childhood’s meadows: remember walking On the way to lie down and look at the sky Charged with so many signs but immense Within you this benevolence,

Flashes of heat lighting of summer nights.

Present hour, do not renounce,

Take back your words from the lightning’s errant hands, Listen to them making of nothing speech,

Risk, risk

Even the confidence that nothing can prove,

Will us not to die despairing. (“The Present Hour,” PH 71)

This final remark is indeed Bonnefoy’s defense of poetry. The poet is well aware of the ambivalence of poetry, of the limitation of words, and the unsteadiness of our dreams and beings. Still, he chooses to live alongside all these ambivalences (“Risk, risk / Even the confidence that nothing can prove), and he sees that act as the fundamental gesture of restoring man’s dignity (“Will us not to die despairing”). Bonnefoy confesses:

I myself am prepared, envisaging the future of poetry, seeing speech as invention or

recovery, and pursuing the path which is the only possible one, to affirm

passionately this here and this now which, indeed, are already an elsewhere and a past, which no longer exists, which have stolen from us but which, eternally in their temporal finitude, universally in their spatial limitation, are the only conceivable good, the only place that deserves the name of place. (APP 112-113)

Poetry is Bonnefoy’s sacred place. Over and over, he would return to the things that lure and haunt, learn the failures and limits in such encounters, then repolish his poetics anew. It is in such an ultimate dialectics that the poet restores the centrality to his poetry: with his ceaseless returns to the center, along with the constant revitalization of his poetic confidence and faith, Bonnefoy fulfills the roundness of his poetic space, in which he poetically dwells. This is indeed a gesture of homecoming, of returning to his final home that is found in poetry.

CONCLUSION: POETIC SPACE

Inspired by Gaston Bachelard’s influential work The Poetics of Space, this thesis aimed to explore the manifestations of place and space in four of Yves Bonnefoy’s poetry

collections, to see how these poems in a gradual phase constitute collectively and ultimately to what I referred to and justified as the poet’s poetic space. The reason for interpreting Bonnefoy through Bachelard’s theory was due to the similarities shared by two: both strived to see in the imagined object the active working of the imagining being, which further proved the depth and profundity of the subject. To reach the aim, the related themes such as

imagination, poetic image, dynamism, dialectics, and roundness in Bachelard’s discourse were discussed; though The Poetics of Space was mostly quoted due to its maturity, other early works of Bachelard written in the stage of elemental analysis were also examined to provide much thorough, theoretical frame. The foremost methodology this thesis employed was close reading of both the primary and secondary texts. Since one of the purposes of this thesis was to build a continual delineation of Bonnefoy’s evolving poetics, the poetic works were chronologically examined with exceptional focus on their forms and contents; in such examination, Bachelard’s ideas were provided in the beginning of each section to give a possible trajectory to the reading of poems.

I proposed that this poetic space was a unity of roundness that includes and performs multiplicity: it abounded in various sensations, lived or experienced places, imagined spaces, earthly matters, humanitarian care, and many other themes valued by the poet. In another word, this poetic space became the visualization as well as the integration of the poet’s particular care and concern for this earth. For this reason, the things cared by the poet had incarnated into different poetic images that dominated his works, namely snow, stones, water, fire, a house, a boat, a child, etc. Through the poet’s retrospective glances on these images, not only their implications were changed over time but also the poetics of Bonnefoy was