"La Seine"

Autograph poem by Louis Aragon, signed and dated 31 March 1915. Fourteen lines written in pencil on a single leaf, with unpublished autograph calculations on the verso. Published in 2008 by Michel Apel-Muller in Le Continent Aragon, special issue of L’Humanité, 2008, p. 17, and reissued under the title “Poème” in Le Rayonnement international d’Aragon, Strasbourg, coll. “Recherches croisées Aragon / Elsa Triolet”, no. 16, 2018, p. 251. Numerous traces of handling, with vertical and horizontal folds that have caused minor paper losses, without affecting the text. 

A precious fragment of literary history, this sonnet, published only in 2008, is the earliest known poem by Aragon, according to its discoverer Michel Apel-Muller. Aragon wrote this lyrical reverie, inspired by Baudelaire’s Parisian tableaux and by the Parnassian poets, at the age of eighteen. He gifted it to his schoolfriend and inspiration for his novel Anicet Pierre Maison who succumbed to the Spanish flu in 1918 after fighting in the war.  

The Seine… The pontoons draw away toward the hill

That bounds the horizon with a bluish silhouette.

The river bends at the foot of the quivering slope

Of April reborn amid the hawthorn.

 

In the red reflection of the setting sun,

Rises the factory, black, smoking, and alive.

The smoke and the sky are tinged with sanguine;

A house stands and smiles at the passer-by.

 

How life rises from this valley, and how

The work of nature and the labour of man

Unite, in a tone of evening rust!

 

One senses, amid the peace and the silence,

The song of birds that will rise from the vale

To bring love to human suffering. (translation our own)

Absent from accounts of Aragon’s life up to Philippe Forest’s most recent biography, the sonnet was given to Pierre Maison, this schoolfriend who had enlisted ahead of his call-up, and who, like Apollinaire, succumbed to the Spanish flu in 1918. Aragon portrayed him in Anicet, before burying the painful memory by assuming the character’s identity in the famous phrase “Anicet is me”. Before André Breton and Drieu La Rochelle, it was with Pierre Maison that he shared a profound intellectual friendship. Paradoxically, this newly discovered princeps sonnet by Aragon comes accompanied by a rare wealth of context. The verses can be read in the light of a letter, itself long unpublished, addressed to Pierre Maison a few months later. This sprawling letter reveals that this poetic landscape of the Seine is in fact a memory:

“I thought of our good old [disc]ussions of days gone by. The memory came back to me as I was defending Wagner, from the day we ha[d] gone down the Seine together, talking about The Flying Dutchman, […] Do you remember? The weather was fine, but the sun had something indefinably sad about it, and the new spring resembled an autumn. When we stopped, on the bank, past Javel, the sun was already low though it was not yet five o’clock [sic]. Its rays, already weakened and horizontal, came from behind the distant hill where the houses along the Seine cling, the river vanishing swiftly around a bend. Despite the dark green mass of the trees on the opposite bank, bent over the flowing water, everything seemed covered with an imperceptible tinge of rust: one might have said [sic] it was the dusty grip of the great city so near at hand upon the countryside. […] rise. And behind, in an evening haze, the hills of Meudon rose tier upon tier, their woods concealing arbours and open-air taverns. This bleak landscape, animated only by the movement of the Seine, still lives on intensely in my memory.”

Aragon makes an almost literal reference to the poem, which had captured on the spot this aesthetic emotion of the young student, during an escapade among a band of high-spirited companions soon to be separated by the war: “[Aragon] reminded me, in 1925, that with our friends (among them Pierre Maison, killed in 1918) we had agreed in 1915 to meet again ten years later, to find out what had become of us… He alone kept the appointment,” Robert Alexandre, another schoolfellow, would later recall.

On the back of these verses is a page of unpublished calculations on a geometry problem: at what distance, given the curvature of the earth, does an observer's gaze reach. The contrast is striking between the scholarly rigour of the exercise and its object, almost unintentionally metaphorical. As if the poet, before writing in the poem

"The pontoons draw away toward the hill

That bounds the horizon with a bluish silhouette."

had first wanted to scientifically measure the limits of his own eye!

Aragon’s destiny took shape very early, and his first steps into the world of letters proved precocious: “from the age of six, in the confined atmosphere of a boarding house frequented by beautiful strangers, he was composing little novels inspired by Zola, which he dictated to his ‘sisters’ and one volume of which he later published” (Équipe de recherche interdisciplinaire Triolet/Aragon). After this naturalist debut he was taken with the reading of Baudelaire, Villon, Hugo, Verlaine… As Hervé Bismuth observes, “Breton’s first poems (1913) are, among other things, regular poems in alexandrines. The same is true of Paul Éluard’s first poem (‘Le Fou parle’, 1913), and of Robert Desnos’s first poem (‘Aquarelle’, July 1915). Aragon’s earliest known poem (1915) [the present manuscript] is likewise a regular poem in alexandrines”. The central gesture of this sonnet, which conjures, as an aesthetic fact, industrial beauty within a natural landscape (“Rises the factory, black, smoking, and alive”), recalls Baudelaire’s Paysage, contemplating the modern city from his window: “Rivers of coal-smoke rising to the firmament / And the moon pouring forth her pale enchantment.” One may also detect the influence of the Belle Epoque Parnassians, in the use of the painter’s palette – the “sanguine” and the “tone of evening rust”. This poetry of Paris and the Seine would never leave him. Beyond these verses, his entire body of work is steeped in the image of this river, which had swallowed the famous “Inconnue” portrayed in Aurélien.

The Dada and Surrealist experience would soon lead him to adopt free verse after the war. Yet unlike a good many of the avant-gardistes, Aragon never abandoned this classical form – not entirely, even during his Surrealist years – before making a spectacular return during the Second World War. Aragon theorized this as early as La Rime en 1940, the preface to Crève-cœur (1941), which justifies this return to the alexandrine and to rhyme, retracing its history and explaining its decline in more recent times. This formal choice aimed at a “modern form which would, in appearance, for the public, be the metre of regular verse”, a poetry “directly apprehensible because it would derive from a certain tradition by which the mass of the French people would recognize themselves”: this would give us La Rose et le Réséda, Les Yeux d’Elsa, La Diane française… a return to his roots, in short. The roots of which this sonnet is the very first example.

Unlike the retrospective poems of Le Roman inachevé, this one remains the only surviving composition from that youth about which little is known. In 1915, Aragon was emerging from a childhood marked by countless moves, changes of identity, and family secrets. It was only at the time of his mobilization, shortly after this poem, that Marguerite Toucas, his “elder sister”, revealed to him, on a platform of the Gare de l’Est, the secret of his birth which he had already sensed. Though he saw the war from a distance in that year of 1915, Aragon already felt its violence: the closing lines “One senses, amid the peace and the silence, / The song of birds that will rise from the vale / To bring love to human suffering” attest to the ominous atmosphere weighing on the young graduate, coming of age in a France torn apart by the world conflict. Two years later, “in the front lines, he would be buried by a shell, deprived of breath and speech for long minutes, blinded, his mouth full of earth. A crucial experience of the unspeakable? He came through it. I believe in Aragon’s tremendous energy, in his will to live, even while brushing so close to death,” his biographer Pierre Juquin would write.

The earliest surviving composition of one of the greatest French poets, a soon-to-be ex-Surrealist, whose rhyme endures in our collective poetic heritage.