As poetic, painterly and epic as Proust's multi-thousand-page memoir weaves, poems were not the form that characterized his genius.
Of the manageable number he left behind, only a few were published during his lifetime.
Most of them are dedication poems to friends, which he often passed on to them in letters, the most numerous being the love poems to the composer Reynaldo Hahn, with whom Proust remained connected until the end of his life.
In addition, there were so-called pastiches by himself, which were copied from the great models Baudelaire, Verlaine or Anatole France, as well as portraits of painters and musicians.
All of them homages, expressions of admiration for the honored and in this respect quite similar to the fondly flattering alter ego of “Research”.
More original and related to the great work in another, subtly and enigmatic way, there appear to be sketches such as this small poem, which gives an impression of Dordrecht, the southern Dutch town washed by the sea, which some great painters such as Aelbert Jacobsz Cuyp, Samuel van Hoogstraten or Arent de Gelder, a pupil of Rembrandt, who in turn, like Cuyp in particular (whom Proust also portrayed poetically), immortalized this place in many views.
In 1901 Proust had met the young diplomat-to-be Bertrand de Fénélon (in some respects the model for Robert de Saint-Loup in the "Research"), had made several trips with him, including to Dordrecht in the autumn of 1902.
Proust wrote two poems about it on the front and back of a page.
Fleetingly, like a sketch, they seem to have been thrown
especially this second one, which appears on the original sheet under a drawing showing the characteristic spire face of the cathedral situated between a boat harbor and a canal.
A chain of small houses and boats stretches from its foot in a horizontal line, halfway hinting at their reflection in the water, to abruptly collapse into the now upside-down, steep and vertical tower, the sharp point with the tiny to end cross.
The poem is set under the mirrored half.
which halfway indicates its reflection in the water, to abruptly end in the now upside-down, steep and vertical tower, the sharp point with the tiny cross.
The poem is set under the mirrored half.
which halfway indicates its reflection in the water, to abruptly end in the now upside-down, steep and vertical tower, the sharp point with the tiny cross.
The poem is set under the mirrored half.
hour of Pan
The German translation is not able to reproduce the sound of the original, which glides so smoothly in its rhymes.
But the sunny, sleepy mood of the midday hour on the empty square, occupied only by a baker and a single pigeon, the laconic, melancholic charm of almost complete uneventfulness: the baker with his baking tin, but not in activity, but only captured in the reflection in the water, where again the only movement is a barge crossing a water lily, interrupting the reflections of the sun and causing the terror of a fly nibbling on the berry cake in the mirror depths.
Only in the reflection, in the perspective illusion, does the panic mini-drama take place - as a fleeting impression that dissolves the hierarchy of things and living beings, whose grandiose, always new description and analysis Proust in the "Research" using the example of the (fictitious ) painter Elstir undertakes.
As if the scene captured here were an etude in terms of Impressionism, which in those years was still a provocative avant-garde art, hotly debated, admired or criticized in the salons of the Guermantes or Madame Verdurin.
The what of the naturalists is not the object of painterly investigation, but only the how, the painter's subjective gaze, which follows his personal impressions and associations, the source of which in turn is involuntary memory.
"When I try,
And yet the dreamy illusion, accentuated only by a few dabs of colour, seems to be followed by an awakening when the Sunday church square suddenly comes to life at the end of the mass and thus the end of the reflected reflections is announced, to which the lyrical I, for its part, as if awakening, greets a greeting Call to a boat party “after” the afternoon nap.
However, this dreamy scenery on the canal, the blue of which characterizes the other Dordrecht poem as a pure play of sounds, was not already the siesta itself?
The sequence of rhymes in the original, their melodic-rhythmic gliding - first criss-cross (abab), then with two intertwined rhymes (cddccd) together with the soft, formally embracing sounds of: soleil (sun),
groseilles (currants) and sommeil (sleep) as the last word – makes the awakening call at the end appear almost as much a part of this hour of Pan as the whole poem itself as a light dream-moved sleep, enveloped by the gentle lapping of the water and the midday sun.
More expressive than any unmirrored reality, than any waking, active movement itself.