Marie Laurencin: More Than Dead – Forgotten

Last week I wrote about the wonderful French painter Marie Laurencin and her paintings of wistful, dreamy girls in soft pastel colours. Today I thought I’d share a poem that Laurencin wrote in 1917 and it’s called “La Calmant”, translated in English as “The Sedative”. To go with the melancholy verses I chose Laurencin’s painting of a girl called Valentine. I love her face expression, the way she placed her head on her hand, and again, those gentle, pastel shades of pink, lavender and yellow typical for Laurencin’s artworks.

Marie Laurencin, Valentine, 1924

The Sedative (La Calmant):

More than annoyed
Sad.

More than sad
Unhappy.

More than unhappy
Suffering.

More than suffering
Abandoned.

More than abandoned
Alone in the world.

More than alone
Exiled.

More than exiled
Dead.

More than dead
Forgotten.

Reneé Vivien: I am drunk from so many roses redder than wine

These days I am swooning over the sensuous, dreamy and languid poetry by a French poetess born in England, a lesbian in love with death and flowers, a turn of the century Sappho: Reneé Vivien (1877-1909).

Maurice Denis, Portrait of Mlle Yvonne Lerolle in three poses, 1897

She was born on 11th June 1877 in Paddington, England, in a prosperous family. Her childhood was laced with coldness from her mother’s side and an inexplicable longing. Sensitive and introspective, as a teen she was introduced in the world of poetry through a correspondence with an older poet who was her father’s friend. At one point she ran away from home, but she quickly ran out of money on that quest and she was just about to throw herself in the Thames when she was caught and returned home. Still, by that point, she had made up her mind to be a poetess and as soon as she could she moved to Paris and changed her name to Reneé Vivien. Always a hopeless romantic, always bitterly disappointed by poly-amorous attitudes of her lovers. After many love affairs, loneliness and sadness remained, and her withered soul, yearning for raptures and delights, found relief in alcohol, deliberate fasting and a drug she was addicted to since she was a teen.

Her entire life she dreamed of death as a romantic escape from the dreariness and misery of this earthly existence. She particularly daydreamed of drowning just like the melancholy heroine Ophelia. After an unsuccessful suicide attempt by laudanum in 1908, when she stretched herself on a divan clutching a little bouquet of violets in her hand, she was weakened and pneumonia took her on the 18th November 1909. Violets were her favourite flower, and purple her favourite colour. Rich in visual imagery, rich in sounds, laced with longing and desire at once, intense and nocturnal, her verses make one imagine a lady from a Symbolist painting, strolling slowly in a garden, at night, dressed in a long loose white gown, her hair left down, caressed by the moonlight, inhaling the fragrance of midnight roses and white jasmine as her bosom invitingly rises and descends… Here are two of her poems that I particularly loved; “Undine” and “Chanson”:

***

Undine

Your laughter is light, your caress deep,

Your cold kisses love the harm they do;

Your eyes-blue lotus waves

And the water lilies are less pure than your face..

 

You flee, a fluid parting,

Your hair falls in gentle tangles;

Your voice-a treacherous tide;

Your arms-supple reeds.

 

Long river reeds, their embrace

Enlaces, chokes, strangles savagely,

Deep in the waves, an agony

Extinguished in a night drift.

Reneé Vivien, born under the name Pauline Mary Tarn, below with her lover and muse Natalie Clifford Barney:

***

Chanson

The flight of the fluttering bat

Is tortuous, anguished, bizarre.

Then, beating her bruised wings thereat,

She turns, and looks back from afar.

 

Have you never felt, just one time,

How, drunken with painful defeat,

My soul, in a mad flight sublime,

Soared to your lips, distant but sweet?

Arthur Rimbaud – The First Evening

Spring upon spring, I find myself deeply in love with Rimbaud’s poetry over and over again! This poem in particular I’ve loved for years and have fond memories of reading it while sitting by my windowsill, at dusk, and inhaling the dazzling perfume of the lilac trees in bloom, raising my head from the book at times only to hear the secret whispers exchanged by the blooming apple trees dressed in splendid whiteness.

Egon Schiele, Blondes Mädchen im Unterhemd, 1913, gouache and pencil on paper

Her clothes were almost off;
Outside, a curious tree
Beat a branch at the window
To see what it could see.

Perched on my enormous easy chair,
Half nude, she clasped her hands.
Her feet trembled on the floor,
As soft as they could be.

I watched as a ray of pale light,
Trapped in the tree outside,
Danced from her mouth
To her breast, like a fly on a flower.

I kissed her delicate ankles.
She had a soft, brusque laugh
That broke into shining crystals –
A pretty little laugh.

Her feet ducked under her chemise;
“Will you please stop it!…”
But I laughed at her cries –
I knew she really liked it.

Her eye trembled beneath my lips;
They closed at my touch.
Her head went back; she cried:
“Oh, really! That’s too much!

“My dear, I’m warning you…”
I stopped her protest with a kiss
And she laughed, low –
A laugh that wanted more than this…

Her clothes were almost off;
Outside, a curious tree
Beat a branch at the window
To see what it could see.

I found this translation on this website where you also have the original in French, but there is also a different translation by Oliver Bernard from “Arthur Rimbaud, Collected Poems” (1962) which you can read here.

*All pictures of blossoms by Denny Bitte.

Rimbaud – Sensation – I shall not speak, I shall think about nothing…

My heart leaps up when I behold the charms of spring; tree branches adorned with leaves and gorgeous little white or pink blossoms, daisies and buttercups gracing the meadows, violets smiling devilishly from the grass, sunsets in shades of lilac, pink and orange. These days my soul is filled with sweet restlessness and my mind is alive with ideas, and I found a special delight in aimlessly walking around town and by the river, listen to the water murmuring, feeling the cool breeze on my bare head. Every flower lures me to ‘rescue’ it from someone’s garden and put it in my vase. Flowers, flowers, just give me pretty flowers and I shall be happy!

Some things are synonymous with spring for me; paintings of Impressionists, Schiele and Klimt, music of Debussy and The Stone Roses, Vincent van Gogh’s letters and Rimbaud’s poems! When I first discovered Rimbaud, I instantly fell in love with his poetry. Oh, it was a mad love! His book of poems was in my hands always. Every evening I’d sit by the window, breathing in the chill evening air filled with the sweet fragrance of lilac trees, gaze at the distant hills covered with a veil of pinkish mist, and read his poems over and over again, for a moment stopping to rest my head and daydream, while the distant church bells permeated the air, along with an occasional dog bark. Inspired by what I felt, what I saw, and what I daydreamed about, I wrote many and many verses too, not very good admittedly, but it was Rimbaud who unlocked that creativity in me, and I shall never forget that! Sunsets are heartbreaking, not dawns, and every moon is indeed atrocious and every sun is bitter!

Claude Monet, Woman with a Parasol, 1875

This evening, the same book is in my hand, the same verses, the same view from the window and yet the feeling the poem awakes is more subtle. The excitement upon reading something for the first time is just exquisite, and you can’t get it back. Rimbaud wrote this poem in March 1870; not even sixteen years old. I first read it in March too, and I was overwhelmed by the fact that there was a boy who lived more than a hundred years before me, and yet felt the same things that I do, and managed to express it more eloquently than I ever could. It appealed me immensely that he was my age when he wrote all of his poetry. This verse from another poem was amongst my favourites as well: “Seventeen! You’ll be so happy!/Oh! the big meadows/The wide loving countryside! – Listen, come closer!…”

These days, his poem Sensation is on my mind constantly and I think it goes very well with Claude Monet’s portrait of his wife Camille and their son Jean. It’s a beautiful en plein air study on a windy summer’s day, look how Camille’s veil playfully dances in the wind, and how green the grass, how blue the sky, how white the clouds? It was painted in just a few hours, and the intensity of the colours really shows that it was painted outdoors on a summer day, and not in the studio. Colours are intense just like they really are when the sun is high. Camille is shown dressed like an elegant Parisian woman, walking down the meadows on a blue summer afternoon, crushing the short grass and getting prickled by the corn… but will the endless love mount in her soul too, as she walks silently, her face covered with a mysterious flimsy veil?

Sensation

“On the blue summer evenings, I shall go down the paths,
Getting pricked by the corn, crushing the short grass:
In a dream I shall feel its coolness on my feet.
I shall let the wind bathe my bare head.

I shall not speak, I shall think about nothing:
But endless love will mount in my soul;
And I shall travel far, very far, like a gipsy,
Through the countryside – as happy as if I were with a woman.”

And here is the poem written by the man himself, what elegant handwriting!

Claude Monet, Woman with a Parasol, facing left, 1886

If this poem hasn’t awoken a sense of excitement and rapture in your soul, I don’t know what could. My plans for the rest of the weekend: Rimbaud, Debussy and a healthy dose of Egon Schiele, and you?