Poetic Faith: “He Seemed Buoyed Up, Forever”

Bonnefoy’s poetry, as I presented rather briefly in the Introduction, desires to cling to centrality, which alludes to the poet’s search for the true place; yet, paradoxically, “the search for center leads to a process of decentering” (Naughton 35). Nonetheless, it is particularly due to this fluctuation and forever dialectics that render Bonnefoy’s poetry a unity and a center. Importantly, Bonnefoy’s evolving attitude toward placial and spatial lures also helps to fortify such a poetic center. I illustrate such an advance by examining three correlating sonnets “He Dismounts,” “He Goes Off,” and “He reaches the High Seas” in the poet’s 2011 work The Present Hour; the development of subjective movements is quite clear even from the titles, that each of the poem recounts the present status of the leading character as well as his/her relative position in the place. Although the poems are presented here in a gradual, developing manner, it needs to be emphasized that each presented phase is a unique response to the poet’s clinging to centrality.

“He Dismounts” narrates a rather fixed context of the here and now, along with the narrator’s care for the earth. The recognition of one’s predicament is explicitly mentioned in the very beginning of the second quatrain; such an interrogation, however, is shortly resolved by the narrator:

Happiness didn’t much smile at me on this earth.

Where am I going? In these mountains

I seek silence, peace of heart. This is my country, I will not stray far from here now.

My heart? Does it go in peace towards its hour?

See, this earth we love is in flower,

It is spring: the earth is once more as if new … (PH 46)

Importantly, the word earth appears three times in this sonnet, entailing Bonnefoy’s self-affirmation of the earth’s essential plenitude as well as the poet’s appeal for readers to recognize the beauty that is at hand, in the here and now: “The earth is,” Naughton implies,

“Bonnefoy will never cease insisting upon it,” that “[t]he earth is our reality” (3). By

claiming the territory in one’s rediscovering of the here and how (“This is my country, / I will not stray far”), one not only reaches a peaceful reconciliation with his interiority but, with such an immersion of one’s intimacy, revitalize the outer landscape (“the earth is once more as if new”).

In the next sonnet “He Goes off” the character continues his/her wander, the similar resolution demonstrated earlier in the poem “Ulysses Passes Ithaca” is now similarly revealed as the bystander “watched him depart” (PH 47). The character, being “[u]ncertain at first,”

shows his confidence in his endless pursuit of either taking the winding paths, “[t]hen taking this road, then that / And others, still others, into his night,” or to venture into the grand, even vacant space:

Tall trees over there, thick, impenetrable, He walks on, immobile, we don’t know

Whether he wants to venture into their other world.

Or if, like the sun whose work is done,

He drops his brushes, and goes to stretch out

In peace, on the stone slab of the evening sky. (PH 47)

The word immobile placed in the first triplet implicitly echoes back to the multifold, spatial development of King Ale in the title poem “Ales Stenar” of The Anchor’s Long Chain, in which death poses the ultimate confinement to the body, yet the imaginative act sets free the mind. The “he” character illustrated here might share the similar corporeal confinement since he departs along “into the night” and “into … other world,” and is fundamentally “immobile”

(PH 47). Considering that Bonnefoy was almost by the time the volume was published, the whole image can thus be interpreted, even biographically, as an aged man walks through his final days to the ultimate death. With the poet’s final imagining twist in seeing the man

“go[ing] to stretch out / In peace” as if “the sun whose work is done,” we understand for certain that the character being described has no fear of this journey even though the

character’s individual reflection is not given. By purposefully relating human beings’ ultimate death to daily routine (“like the sun whose work is done”), Bonnefoy too weakens the inner anxiety as well as the menace of the death.

Such a transcendence found its lucidity in “He Reaches the High Seas:”

He reaches the high seas. I remember His prow, a face

With closed eyes, smiling. He seemed Buoyed up, forever, by this mysterious

Movement of the stem, borne alone By dark forces, but desiring a shore

He would not have known, nor wished to say

Where, in the impenetrableness of his night. (PH 50)

The first quatrain immediately reveals the function of the two characters in this poem, the I narrator and the “he” figure: the former being an observer who narrates the “he” figure’s achievement (“He reaches the high seas”), while the “he” character functions as the double of the poet with his movement identical to the ultimate dialectics of Bonnefoy’s poetics.

Immediately in the first stanza we already sense the undeniable confidence suggested by the figurehead carved on the prow (“a face / With closed eyes, smiling”). Since the figurehead is seen to protect the ship from the damage caused by natural forces or as the emblem of the ship’s spirit, it too implies the sailor/“he” character’s fearlessness in venturing into raging seas. Indeed, the deliberate alignment of the poetic line has further insured that this smile actually indicates the “he” character’s state of mind since the two words are so closely placed (“With closed eyes, smiling. He seemed”). The second quatrain, on the other hand, delineates again man’s vain search and the strangely unresting desire (“borne alone / By dark forces”) in so doing. It is worth mentioning that in previous poems, such as the ones examined in the earlier sections or the boat image examined in “In the Lure of Words” in Chapter Two, the yearning for a place is never explicitly stated; this could be the poet’s first confession of the unachievability of such a craving. As the lines implied, it may be that the “he” character possesses no knowledge of this shore (“desiring a shore / He would not have known”), or he remains purposefully silent on its precise locale even though he does know its place (“… nor wished to say / Where”). The intrinsic conflict is outwardly shown as the “he” character The character ultimately becomes part of the waves; he immerses contentedly in the forever kinetic performances of the ship (“He seemed / Buoyed up, forever, by this mysterious //

Movement of the stem”). Or, to explicitly put and to allude to the previous boat-poetry metonymy in “In the Lure of Words,” the poet follows wherever his poetic boat guides him to. In the end, the emphasis of the whole placial search lies not on arriving, but anticipating and accepting; the destination proves to be illusory, yet one is granted for experiencing various landscapes along the way. In such a distracting, winding path, however, the poet does not lose his center: he proves the depth of his being once more.

The opposing elements are not only visible in the late writings of Bonnefoy; on the contrary, they made their appearances in the very beginning of the poet’s writing career with On the Motion and Immobility of Douve (1953), which title already renders “its central

experience … dialectical” (Maurine 65). In Bonnefoy’s later volumes, particularly In the Lure of the Threshold (1975), the similar dialectical experience prevails again, manifesting the poet’s incessant anxiety for the image, form, and language; the poet, though, still has his unique way of dealing with the dialectical experiences, as explained by Starobinski with the illustration of the poem “The Scattered, the Invisibles” taken from this volume:

Words like the sky Today,

Something which gathers, disperses.

Words like the sky Infinite

And yet contained in this moment within the brief pool. (398)

Although the opposing elements are everywhere to be seen in this poem, Starobinski reminds the reader to focus on their inter-balance, on how pairs of opposition remain perfectly

consistent through their divergence: the unity is retrieved through the arrangements of

juxtaposition of variation (398-399). Starobinski concludes that such balance is Bonnefoy’s poetic demonstration of between-two-worlds. Indeed, through the employment of rival objects, Bonnefoy does not fear the threat to disperse the poetic content; on the contrary, he sees it as a strategy to retrieve or to better demonstrate the center of his poetry. The dialectics ultimately become the aggregation of the poet’s poetic values, a dynamic center to which the poet’s poetry returns.