For Mr. Léon Bailby1
Serene bird upside down in flight bird
Who nests in the air2
At the boundary where our ground already shines
Lower your second eyelid3 the earth dazzles
When you lift up your head
And up close I also am dark and drab
A mist that has just now obscured the lamps
A hand placed suddenly over your eyes
A vault stood between you and all the lights
And I’ll pull away shining amidst shadows
And the alignments of eyes of cherished planets
Serene bird upside down in flight bird
Who nests in the air
At the boundary where my memory already shines
Lower your second eyelid
Neither because of the sun nor because of the earth
But for this oblong fire4 whose intensity will go on growing
Until one day it becomes the only light
One day
One day I was waiting for myself
I said to myself Guillaume it is time you came
So that I might know at last what I am
I who know the others
I know them by the five senses and some others
I need only to see their feet to remake these people by the thousands5
To but see their Pan-like6 feet a single one of their hairs
Or their tongues when I like to play doctor
Or their children when I like to play prophet
The vessels of the shipowners the pens of my colleagues
The coins of the blind the hands of the mute
Or then again for the vocabulary and not the handwriting
A letter written by someone over twenty
It is enough for me to smell the scent of their churches
The odor of the rivers in their cities
The perfume of flowers in the public gardens
O Cornelius Agrippa7 the scent of one little dog would suffice for me
To describe exactly your fellow citizens of Cologne8
Their wise men and the Ursuline flock9
Who inspired your mistake regarding all women10
It is enough for me to taste the flavor of the bay leaf they grow to decide to love or deride it
And to but touch the garments
To know for sure if someone has cold feet11 or not
O people whom I know
I need only hear the sound of their footsteps
To point out the direction they have taken for all time
All this is what I need to accord myself the right
To resurrect the others
One day I was waiting for myself
I said to myself Guillaume it is time you came
And with a lyrical step those I love came forward
Among whom I was not
Giants clad in seaweed were traversing their towns
Underwater where islands were the only towers
And this sea with the transparency of its deeps
Flowed as blood in my veins and set my heart to beat
Then a thousand white peoples12 came upon this land
Every man of them holding a rose in his hands
And the language they invented along the way
I have learned from their mouths and I still speak today
The procession passed by and I sought my body
All of those who emerged and yet were not myself
Brought along one by one the pieces of myself
They built me bit by bit as a tower is built
The people crowded round and I appeared myself
Formed from all of the bodies and the human stuff
Times past Passed away You the gods who gave me form
I live only in passing much as you passed on
And averting my eyes from this empty tomorrow
In myself I can see the entire past grow
Nothing is dead but that which does not yet exist
Next to the gleaming past the future is colorless
It is formless too next to that which is perfect
Presenting together both effort and effect
The newspaperman Léon Bailby was editor-in-chief and then owner of the nationalist French newspaper L’Intransigeant. He bolstered the paper’s cultural coverage, initiating a daily literary column and hiring Apollinaire as the paper’s arts reporter.
This bird likely represents the Holy Spirit, one of the three aspects of God in the Holy Trinity of Christianity. The Spirit is the aspect that descends to earth from heaven and is symbolized in European painting as a dove.
Birds—along with many other animals, including cats and dogs—have an extra translucent eyelid beneath the outer ones, called a nictitating membrane. It acts like natural sunglasses or goggles, protecting the eye while allowing the animal to see.
Possibly the tongue of flame, a sign of the Holy Spirit, which appeared on the heads of the gathered followers of Christ in the story of the Pentecost.
This idea may allude to the reputation of the French scientist Georges Cuvier (1769–1832), who was renowned for deducing features and relationships of animals from partial fossils. It also echoes Christian eschatology, in which Jesus resurrects the dead at the end of this world. Until very recently, most Christians believed resurrection depended upon the existence of the corpse, and so insisted upon burial instead of cremation. Theological arguments raged for centuries about how much of the corpse would be required—if a bear ate your leg, would there be trouble getting it back?—or whether God would simply, as at the Creation, make new bodies from scratch.
My captive literate francophone insists paniques here means “like Pan” and nothing to do with panic, and he outranks me.
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486–1535) was a German scholar of the Renaissance with broad interests in philosophy and the occult. He is best known for De Occulta Philosophia libri III (Three Books of Occult Philosophy).
It may not be purely coincidence that when the poem moves to the sense of smell, it evokes the city of Cologne, inextricably linked to its namesake perfume. Agrippa was born near Cologne and began his studies there. His wide ranging and skeptical inquiries, engaged with Jewish scholarship and opposed to the persecution of witches, brought him a few times into conflict with church and authority figures.
This could refer to the Order of Saint-Ursule, a Catholic religious order originally composed of lay women who did not live together but gathered for discussion and to perform acts of devotion.
Agrippa’s treatise on women, De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminae sexus (On the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex), is a wonderful piece of flattery aimed at his patron, Margaret of Austria (Marguerite de Bourgogne or “Margaret of Burgundy” on French Wikipedia). The text explains at length why women are far the superior sex. I have found an English translation from 1652 online, which contains such dizzy remarks as this:
“[If] you look into Genesis you shal find that Woman was the last work in the Creation, and so the most perfect and absolute; As we see, when Artificers make an excellent piece, they keep pollishing till the last, as being the perfection and Crown of it.” [Spelling as in the original.]
Yet it does, at least to me, seem only sensible when he states,
“[God] gave one and the same in different soule to Male and Female, in which undoubtedly there in no distinction of Sex: The woman is endued with the same rationall power, and Speech with the man, and indeavoreth to the same end of blessednesse.”
However, Agrippa goes on to argue his point in multiple ways, some less secure to this reader: that women are superior because they are pretty, because they are less hairy, and that in particular, the pressure of their breasts revivifies dried up old men. (I do not doubt the truth of this so much as its relevance to the argument.) He also claims that menstrual blood cures hydrophobia, leprosy, bruises, and madness, among other maladies. He argues that Eve did not sin, because she wasn’t around when God set the prohibition on eating the fruit, whereas Adam knew and did sin. So what is the “error?” Since the Order of Ursulines are cited as the inspiration for this mistake, I assume the poem means to quarrel that only some women are superior.
In the original the word is frileux, which means both to be sensitive to cold and to be overly fearful or reluctant.
These peuplades blanches (white peoples, or white populations) feel, in context and spirit, closely related to the blanches nations en joie (white nations in joy) of Arthur Rimbaud’s prose poem “Adieu” from Une saison en enfer (A Season in Hell) from 1873. The passage is a vision:
Quelquefois je vois au ciel des plages sans fin couvertes de blanches nations en joie. Un grand vaisseau d'or, au-dessus de moi, agite ses pavillons multicolores sous les brises du matin.
My translation:
Sometimes I see in the sky beaches without end covered in white nations in joy. A large golden ship, above me, flaps its multicolored flags in the morning breezes.
In Rimbaud’s image, seen from a distance and in aggregate, the nations’ whiteness reads less an indication of race and more of garb, as of a vast angelic host in the sky dressed in pure white. Therefore I wanted to translate the peuplades blanches as being “in” white rather than being themselves white.
However, in the context of this poem about the creation of a poet, the image occurs in a passage about the invention and acquisition of language. These thousand peuplades blanches emerge upon the land, holding a rose, which can be seen as a symbol of beauty, and as they move along, they invent a language, which becomes the language of the poet. So it is also possible that the peuplades are blanches because they are the Europeans—and Apollinaire’s languages were Polish, Italian and French. To preserve the ambiguity between Europeanness and the possible allusion to Rimbaud, I have left the peoples’ whiteness ambiguous as in the original.