Poetry
The Graveyard by the Sea
Le Cimetière marin
Paul Valéry · 1920
Opening lines
Ce toit tranquille, où marchent des colombes,
Entre les pins palpite, entre les tombes ;
Midi le juste y compose de feux
La mer, la mer, toujours recommencée !
This quiet roof, where doves are walking,
Quivers between the pines, between the tombs;
Noon the just composes there with fires
The sea, the sea, forever beginning again!
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from fr.wikisource.org
Synopsis
Noon over a cemetery set above the sea, at the hour when nothing moves. The speaker looks at the sea, that “tranquil roof, where doves walk”, then at the tombs beneath his feet. He thinks of the dead who have become earth, questions consciousness in the face of the body and of death, and struggles with the paradoxes of Zeno of Elea, the arrow that flies and does not fly.
Context
The poem was born, according to its author, from the obsession with a rhythm, the decasyllable, and not from a thought. Begun during the composition of a long poem completed in 1917, it appeared in 1920 in a journal, then the same year from Émile-Paul frères, before being included in 1922 in the collection Charmes. It bears as epigraph Greek lines by Pindar. The cemetery in Sète where its author is buried later took the name of the poem.
Who it is for
One hundred and forty-four lines in twenty-four stanzas of six decasyllables. The syntax is tortuous and annotated editions help; the movement, for its part, is heard when read aloud.
Prizes and reception
Often regarded as one of the greatest French poems of the twentieth century, it appeared in English in 1946 in the version by Cecil Day-Lewis.
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