The marine Cemetery

the marine Cemetery is a Poème of Paul Valéry, published in 1920.

Summary and analyzes

Published initially in review, this poem, most famous of Valéry (1871-1945), was collected in " Charms " (1922). Valéry had begun the drafting at the time of it when he worked with the Young person Parks (1917). The two texts present common points: relationship between conscience and body, presence of the sea.

They is, of 24 stanzas, a metaphysical meditation, but it revêt a dramatic form, presenting in four acts an action to the theatrical direction of the term. The first four stanzas present the sea like an object similar to nothing (the " chose" of Hegel) immutable and unconscious, to which (stanzas 5 to 9) the mobility of the conscience is opposed which exists in the time and which fascine the desire to be thought pure; the confrontation of the two characters of this drama gives birth to (stanzas from 9 to 19), with the intervention of the body, a meditation on death: the refusal of the illusion of the immortality of the heart accompanies temptation to die and put an end to the opposition between conscience and existence. This temptation is isolated in the five last stanzas: pushing back the paradoxes of the pure thought, the subject chooses the life, the movement of the body, poetic creation, the action: " The wind rises, it is necessary to try vivre." It is thus a reflection over time, contradiction between conscience and object, conscience and body. The final choice exceeds this contradiction but does not solve it. However, it should not be forgotten that it is about a poem: it was born, of the consent of the author, of the obsession of a rate/rhythm, that of the decasyllable, and not of a thought.

Paul Valéry even underlined, with perhaps a will of paradox, that it was only among its poems comprising of the memories of things seen: the cemetery of Sète. (With died of Paul Valéry, the cemetery Saint-Charles was renamed " Cemetery marin" and it was buried there).

This abstract meditation is significant and sometimes sensual. It is not a pure thought but a " fruit" who " melts itself in jouissance".

Famous for its hermetism, the marine Cemetery was the object of the many interpretations, most known being those of Alain and Gustave Cohen.

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