The Convergence: “He Dreamed; He Set Sailed”

With the co-working of both the interior and the outer, the imagining being and the perceived, imagined object, the immensity is unquestionably achieved in the title poem “Ales Stenar” of The Anchor’s Long Chain, a metaphorical verse consisting of two sections inspired by the prehistoric stone circle found near a cliff in southern Sweden. Being arranged to an oval shape resembling a ship with two particularly high stones erected at two ends as the prow and the stern, and with the burial chamber and remnants found underneath the surface, the stone ship is believed to be a tomb that ferries the deceased to their splendid voyage of death. Legend has it that buried underneath the stone ship is King Ale the Strong, a

mythological figure from Sweden. The keynote of the entire poem is established in section I with the interlaced movements of a legendary boat and the poet’s rumination:

I

They say

Boats appear in the sky;

And from some of them,

The anchor’s long chain trails down To our hidden, fleeting earth.

On our prairies, among our trees, the anchor hunts A place to moor—but soon, a higher will

Wrenches it loose.

Elsewhere’s ship does not want a here:

Its horizon opens in some other dream.

Even so, it can happen:

Maybe the anchor, heavier than usual, Drags near the ground, rumpling the trees.

We almost see it catch on a church door, Under the arch where our hope fades away.

Awkwardly, someone from that other world Clambers down the taut, lurching chain, To deliver his sky from our night.

What anguish, as he works against the vault, Grappling with his strange iron hook…

Why must something within us Lure the mind, in this crossing Our words attempt, unknowingly, To reach their other shore? (SS 147)

The whole section is, as seen from the last four lines of the second stanza, the

whimsical glimpse of the narrator’s imaginative mind; the very beginning of the poem (“they say”) not only indicates the hearsay surrounds the stone ship but also aggravates and

foreshadows the agitation aroused from within the speaker (“something within us / Lure the mind”). The need to inhabit a land is particularly visualized and embodied in the allegorical boat (“the anchor’s long chain trails down / … hunts / a place to moor”), implying man’s attempt to get hold to particular concreteness (in this context the earth) which paradoxically

appears to be forever fleeting; when a place is thoroughly familiarized, however, man’s desire of conquering other places bid him depart (“but soon, a higher will / Wrenches it loose”), and once again man is thrown into the abyss of placeless-ness to continue the futile, oneiric quest similar to a ship forever voyaging in anonymous seas (“Its horizon opens in some other dream”). Under the self-contradictory context of mooring and departing, the narrator, however, imagines the proximity of the achieved and the unachievable, of how the anchor nearly reaches out for religious comfort but fails (“We almost see it catch on a church door,”

emphasis added), and how the stranger “from that other world” manages to occupy a

particular land yet relinquishes eventually in the ellipsis with the movement undone (SS 147).

The section ends with the speaker’s doubting of the tempting nature of humankind (“Why must something within us / Lure the mind”), alluding meanwhile to the previously made proximity and the boat image that is doomed to buoyed up eternally in the shoreless sea.

Section II begins by questioning the purpose of constructing the stone ship with the examination of the Swedish legend: “What did he want, the prince of this land, / When he had so many tall stones / Raised upright on a cliff, to rhyme / The form of a ship?” (SS 149).

The speaker then responds to the question, which sees the vitality of life sprouting from within with sophisticatedly arranged tension arose from the conflicting images.

… Maybe to depart

One day, on this sea between world and sky—

Though still faltering, almost in distress—

And at last, perhaps to enter that port Some would seek in death, imagined As a life more intense, a glimmer of lights On the sweep of an empty coast.

The vessel, the nave of his desire,

This prow in rock, this beautiful curved hull, Moves motionless. I try to read

In immobility the going forth

He printed on his dream … (SS 149)

The sea serves as an intermediate passage between world and sky, thus the approachable and the unreached, life and death: it connects the polarity of here and there with its spatial

malleability. The stone ship, on the other hand, bears the subjective will (“the vessel, the nave of his desire”) to wade in the sea even if in a state of confusion or undefined compulsion (“faltering, almost in distress”); its destination is the port named death, a realm ought to be desolate yet serves as a lighthouse, a recognizable place in the immense sea (“a glimmer of lights / On the sweep of an empty coast”). Despite the promises granted, along with all the imaginative movements oscillate in between, the boat of which the speaker envisioned remains motionless, being only the stone tomb on a cliff. The boat’s immobility lasts no longer once the the narrator unravels its embedded, oneiric quality, urging it again to conduct its imaginative performances (“I try to read / In immobility the going forth / He printed on his dream”).

The juxtaposed opposition continues till the end of the poem, in which the “immobile”

speaker observing from here and now contrasts sharply to the “going forth” of the legendary prince in his most extreme immobility (sleep/death). Then, unexpectedly, the two layers of narrative interlaced despite their different spacetimes:

He dreamed; he set sail. But here, today, Before us and around us, there’s nothing But the sky of this world—clouds, rays of light;

Then, on the stones that blacken and merge,

The thunder’s arrow; and suddenly, the rain.

Headlong, a downpour engulfs us, and now The steles shape a single presence, bursting Into view, there and there again—until it vanishes, Though the lightning still runs through them.

…

Later, turning back

To the ship of rock, under skies Of summer morning once again (And what can we do but turn back,

In this life where nothing stands still?) (SS 151, 153)

Till this moment, a locale for the whole poem becomes clear: the speaker is facing the stones, observing and contemplating; the weather in the meantime is intense, with clouds gathering, lightning striking, and rain pouring down. The “here” in which the speaker confronts is fierce and overwhelmed by natural forces, reminding the reader the placeless landscape described in The Curved Planks. Such a bleak and identical illustration is already given by the first three lines of the stanza with the words “but” and “nothing but;” the pessimism is further denoted by Bonnefoy’s employment of parenthesis in which another “but” and “nothing” are stressed (“And what can we do but turn back, / In this life where nothing stands still?”).

In the most depressing state where double negation is aligned, the speaker still sees something miraculous; a gift from nature, performing almost a miracle:

I see a big seabird alight

On the stone meant for a prow: an instant Of the mystery, motionless and wordless,

A simple life can live. The bird looks off Into the distance; he listens, and hopes.

He guides the ship on—and others, others Surround him with their cries; around him, Above him, they fade into the wake. (SS 153)

The message carried by this seabird image is multifold: it distracts the speaker’s attention from the former hostility received from the external world; it embodies what Rogers proposed as “fraternal solidarity” between man and nature (SS xviii); its surveying gaze diminishes the distance between here and there, rendering the unattainable probable; the most fundamental one being its appearance which alludes to Bonnefoy’s humanistic care of the chipmunk seen in Beginning and End of the Snow. Importantly, not only the worlds of man and nature interlaced but also the real and the legendary: the seabird’s movement has awakened the prince, urging him to act in a most fearless and emblematic stance of veering the ship, “Il mène le navire” (“He guides the ship on,” SS 153). Although the prince’s activeness immediately diminishes with the line “they fade into the wake” reassuring his dreaming state, the message is still lucid: the greater, spatial immensity is no longer confined to the motion of the corporeal but through the emancipation of the imagining being.

What “Ales Stenar” demonstrates is the superimposition of multiplicity framed by the narrator’s daydream state. The two characters, the narrator and the legendary prince,

consistently resonate with each other in their doubling, both strive for a larger capacity for their subjective agency to consciously, purposefully, and actively engage with the world notwithstanding their physical inactiveness: the former being merely as an observer, and the later forever quiet in his death (“I try to read in immobility;” “He dreamed; he set sail”).

Daydream manifests the working of the imagination which is so different from the nocturnal dreams; since it “produces an attitude that is so special, an inner state that is so unlike any

other,” from the very moment of its functioning it immediately “transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity” (Bachelard, PS 201).

The activity of the mind frees the condition of the body, which along liberates “all obligations of dimensions” including that of the spatial or geographical boundaries (PS 173). “Daydream is not geometrical,” Bachelard therefore concludes, “[t]he dreamer commits himself

absolutely” (PS 185). With the thorough infiltration into the oneiric realm and let oneself be seized by the puniest image of the external world, one is fully aware of his/her capacity to dream: “by detaching me from my life, it transforms me into an imagining being” (PS 186).

With the juxtaposition of different spacetimes, movements, status, and the doubling of two characters, the poem explains how dreaming subjects, both the prince and the narrator, breakthrough their confining state with the inbuilt agency. Though being physically confined, they still successfully acquire the spatial immensity as the two characters co-constitute a promising gesture: “he listens, and hopes” (SS 153).

The failure of acquiring the spatial capability through the daydream is given by Bonnefoy in one of the sonnet sequences “A Stone” which landscape reminds the reader of the ship stones displayed in “Ales Stenar.” The character of “he” still appears, yet unlike the former presence continuing sailing in his dream, this “he” is bereft of any potential for subjective transcendence.

He dreamed. He died. Where is his tomb?

Passer-by, if you venture these slopes, Will you unearth the words he scrawled

On frost-split stone? Will you detect his voice Below the insects’ rasp? With a careless tread, Will you push his life even further down? (SS 209)

A sequence of questions is given without answers, each gradually enlarges the distance between the passerby and the “he” figure buried beneath the ground. Contrary to the observing narrator in “Ales Stenar” who bestows the poetics onto the stone tomb, the passerby depicted here neglects the possible, imaginative opening of the image, walking indifferently by (“With a careless tread”). Without the surveying gaze (“Will you unearth the words”) and the active mind (“Will you detect his voice”), the spatial potential perishes.

Unlike the hope regained in the interaction between the observing and the observed in “Ales Stenar,” here the immobility of the “he” figure represents nothing but lethal (“He dreamed.

He died”).

The image of immensity is also abundantly given in a prose “Remarks on the Horizon”

which title already explains the purpose as well as the object of the prose. Bonnefoy begins his inquiry straightforwardly:

We always talk about it—or in it, we might say. When we make plans, when we love.

When we love: because loving a being, a path, a work, is seeing that this line over there, so far ahead … is right here, just as well; that it crosses them over and over, like the surf when it slides back and forth on the sand, lifting the restless algae’s hidden life, dropping it again.

The line of over there, the line of right here: each throws the foam of the unconscious mind beneath our steps, the sparkling phrase that glides to the breaker’s crest—the wave swelling upward like a night, then crumbling to rise again. (SS 215)

Given the clues from these lines, the horizon for Bonnefoy might refer to a nexus between two relative ends, embedding in its implication the ability to collide, converge, or realign. As seen from the opposition of here and there, or the wave in its ongoing, conflicting movement (“slides back and forth,” “swelling upward…then crumbling to rise again”), the relative ends function not as a rivalry but a companion of proximity, one that used by Bonnefoy to

encourage the reader to accept a space in between: “[w]hoever has thought of the horizon has no need of any god: he’s content with these distances” (SS 217).

Since the relation of two ends is nothing but relative, they are, to some extent, reversible, as illustrated in Bonnefoy’s discovery of the tall tree on a hill:

The tree was far away enough to mean the absolute, but close enough to seem like a point in this world. If you reached its trunk … you would still have time to discover, from underneath its sturdy limbs, the valley unknown till this moment, and the familiar house. (SS 221)

The tree in this image stands metaphorically as the horizon the poet endeavors to describe: it functions as a precise place for convergence, “unit[ing] the two movements that concentrate and dilate” (Bachelard, PS 207). The tree also finds its familiarization in the observer when the later clings to it wholeheartedly; the intimacy exchanged between the seen and the perceived has triggered off the most primal value of man, rendering the tree trunk “the valley” and “the familiar house” (SS 221). The poet then speaks in a more straightforward manner: “[o]ver there, we’d probably find our country from over here” (SS 221). By

humanizing the landscapes, constantly crossing over here and there to draw them closer, and

“keep[ing] their hold on us for the rest of our lives,” the values granted to the place’s concreteness are rooted in the subjects. Bonnefoy eventually recognizes that “at last, the

horizon is with us. We touch it; we cross it at random, back and forth” (SS 225). Such an exclamation is the true awareness and also an ecstasy: it points to a nexus opened from within to contact with the external expanse, the awakening of the conscious being to attune to the phenomenological world. Similar to “the house opened from within” as demonstrated in Chapter Two, the inward horizon suggests also the power of the imaginative mind. A greater liberation arises, and “[i]n this activity of poetic spatiality that goes from deep intimacy to infinite extent,” Bachelard claims, “one feels grandeur welling up” (PS 218). The poetic opening within the imagining subject is the effect done by the horizon, which, concluded by Bonnefoy in the prose, also has its promising effect: “[h]orizon … A word that would favor the landscape-painter among us, pledging him the future earth hopes for, and needs” (SS 225). With this final remark, Bonnefoy’s confidence in the horizon as well as the primitive, intimate feelings it arouses are clearly seen.