Green-Green

Green-Green or voyages of the parrot of the Visitation of Nevers (another C-W communication: Worm-Green… ) is a Poème in four songs in Décasyllabe S of Jean-Baptiste Gresset, published in 1734.

Subject

Green-Green tells the humorous history of a Perroquet collected in a Couvent of Nevers. The work is pleasantly presented like a “heroic poem”.

Raised by the sisters Visitandines of Nevers, Green-Green, “devout parrot” indeed a Christian language speaks. Claimed by Nantes nuns, he is entrusted to a boatman of the Loire. Naturally, he learns on the boat, the vocabulary of the Matelot S and the light women. Arrived at destination, the parrot swears like a marine. The Nantes nuns, terrified, return it to Nevers where one has the greatest evil to make him relearn the Latin , but where it finishes his days surrounded by solicitude.

The subject of this poem is, one sees it, rather thin; the intrigue hardly comprises bounces; the rate/rhythm inherent in the decasyllable is in general rather monotonous; Green-Green is thus supported only by the quality of the style, the harmony of versification and the happy choice of the images and the formulas. The poet gives a relief unexpected and charming to the negligible details of the conventual life - the small jealousies of the nuns, their tiny concerns… - which makes Green-Green a single and unequalled work in French poetry badine.

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