Poetry and Revelation by Hart Kevin

Author:Hart, Kevin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: For a Phenomenology of Religious Poetry
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2017-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

PART FOUR

Religio Poetæ

11

A voice answering a voice

Philippe Jaccottet and the “Dream of God”

Toward the end of Orlando (1928), Virginia Woolf’s main character muses on a poem she wrote long ago:

Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? … What could have been more secret, she thought, more slow, and like the intercourse of lovers, than the stammering answer she had made all these years to the old crooning song of the woods, and the farms and the brown horses standing at the gate, neck to neck, and the smithy and the kitchen and the fields, so laboriously bearing wheat, turnips, grass, and the garden blowing irises and fritillaries?1

The passage is important to Philippe Jaccottet. He quotes it (in French translation) without comment in his notebook for July 1981, now gathered in La Seconde semaison (1996), and takes from it the title of his second volume of articles, homages, prefaces and reviews, Une Transaction secrète (1987).2 It is an apt title for a collection of criticism, although the image of a voice answering a voice is perhaps more telling for how he sees the writing of poetry in the first place. Call and response, the innocence of response, the non-response of the dead, signs from another world, communication across borders, the figures of welcome and the gaze, even prayer (but not addressed to a divinity), organize much of Jaccottet’s writing, while the question of how to respond properly to lived experience and the natural world generates his ethics of writing.3

The opening poem of Jaccottet’s first collection, L’Effraie (1953), turns on hearing a cry, even, in a way, “the old crooning song of the woods,” and the poem itself is a complex response to it, one that is addressed to his partner who sleeps beside him, to himself, and of course to us. At first only a wind that has come a long way to the poet’s bed in a sleeping city one June night is heard. Drifting off to sleep, the poet thinks that the wind breathes, and that a hazel tree rustles in response. Yet this breath merely presages a cry that at the threshold of sleep is heard as a call, “cet appel / qui se rapproche et se retire” [this call / that approaches and recedes].4 And then, in an aside, we overhear the poet say to his partner, who is perhaps still sleeping, “Cet appel dans la nuit d’été, combien de choses / j’en pourrais dire, et de tes yeux” [This call in the summer night, how much / I could say about it and about your eyes]. It is a bird, “l’effraie,” a barn owl (or screech owl or ghost owl) that calls.5 Hearing the owl’s hoot, the poet does not take it to be a natural sound unconcerned with him—a declaration of the borders of its territory or part of a courtship duet—but, in a gesture at once astonishing and ordinary, responds to it and in doing so makes him and his partner the ones called.

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