At the Abolished Tower

On Gérard de Nerval and the haunting line

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lines of poetry are not explained

Antonin Artaud, letter about Gérard de Nerval, 1946

Who invented the haunting line of verse? It may seem an impossible question: poetry has always arranged words into strangely mnemonic patterns. But one of the distinctive phenomena of modern poetry is the weird earworm that can be remembered more than it can be explained — the ghost, we might say, in the rhyme scheme.

The French poet Gérard de Nerval (1808—1855) has a good claim to have invented this kind of line with the sonnets that he published towards the end of his life. He once said that his aim was to “compress years of anguish, dreams and projects into a sentence, a word” and defended the verses that resulted by saying that they would “lose their charm in being explained — if such a thing were possible”.

Such ambitions earned him the opening chapter of Arthur Symons’ The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), a book which the young T.S. Eliot would read a decade later, as an undergraduate at Harvard. In Symons’ praise of Nerval, Eliot encountered the claim that “here are words which create an atmosphere by the actual suggestive quality of their syllables” — an idea that, in his early essay, “Reflections on Vers Libre” (1917), he would echo when he praised “the inexplicable line with the music which can never be recaptured in other words”.

Even if you’ve never read Nerval’s sonnets, you’ll almost certainly know a line that Eliot admired, because it rings out, untranslated, at the end of The Waste Land:

Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie

This is then followed by Eliot’s own line, “These fragments I have shored against my ruins”. The juxtaposition identifies the speaker of the poem with the legendary figure of the prince of the “abolished tower”: both possess ruins. But Eliot originally wrote “these fragments I have spelt against my ruins”, and this earlier version spells out how, in The Waste Land, lines of verse are felt to have real power, melding the Symbolist grail of the enigmatically magical line with Eliot’s preoccupation with tradition as cultural continuity: if the sound of a line of verse is genuinely unforgettable, then it can never truly be ruined. The poet who sings the catastrophe becomes its hero.

This is also the heroic attitude of the Nerval sonnet where Eliot found the line. Here is the original:

El Desdichado

Je suis le ténébreux, — le veuf, — l’inconsolé,
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie:
Ma seule étoile est morte, et mon luth constellé
Porte le soleil noir de la Mélancolie.

Dans la nuit du tombeau, toi qui m’as consolé,
Rends-moi le Pausilippe et la mer d’Italie,
La fleur qui plaisait tant à mon cœur désolé,
Et la treille où le pampre à la rose s’allie.

Suis-je Amour ou Phébus ?…. Lusignan ou Biron?
Mon front est rouge encor du baiser de la reine;
J’ai rêvé dans la grotte où nage la syrène…

Et j’ai deux fois vainqueur traversé l’Achéron:
Modulant tour à tour sur la lyre d’Orphée
Les soupirs de la sainte et les cris de la fée.

And here is a recently-published translation by Peter Manson from Run Amok press:

I am the tenebrous one, — the disconsolate, — widower,
the prince of Aquitaine at the abolished tower:
my only star is dead, — and my constellated lute
bears the black Sun of Melancholia.

In the night of the tomb, you who have consoled me,
give me back Posilippo and the Italian sea,
the flower that so pleased my desolate heart,
and the trellis where the vine branch and the rose ally.

Am I Amour or Phebus?… Lusignan or Biron?
My brow is still red from the kiss of the queen;
I have dreamed in the grotto where the syren swims…

and twice victorious I have crossed Acheron:
varying turn by turn on the lyre of Orpheus
the sighs of the female saint and the cries of the fairy.

The various proper names here have mythological meanings that illuminate their “constellated” relationship within the poem (Count Lusignan unhappily married a fairy, for example). But the whole still coheres more as declamation than argument, with each line — as many critics have observed — almost a small poem in itself. You can listen to a slow and rich recitation of the French here:

There have been many rhyming English translations of this sonnet, beside which Peter Manson’s word-by-word fidelity to the French might seem rather plain and even awkward (à la tour abolie, for example, is usually rendered “of” the ruined tower rather than “at”, which makes the tower a concrete place the prince confronts, rather than his heraldic symbol). But I like the subtle, lucid oddity of the “semantic translation” method that Manson has developed for French Symbolist poetry, as explained in the afterword to his edition of Stéphane Mallarmé’s The Poems in Verse (2012):