A couple of weeks ago we listened to a song by Gabriel Fauré, Avant que tu ne t'en ailles, in which the poem by Paul Verlaine was structured as if it were two interwoven poems. That made me think of another song, Sanglots, this one by Francis Poulenc with a poem by Guillaume Apollinaire.
In Sanglots we also find two poems, different both in tone and in metre. The first is written in alexandrines and expresses the idea that all human beings have been interconnected since the beginning of time, in joy and, above all, in pain; we are part of a whole. The second poem uses less elaborate language and a simpler metre, with eight-syllable lines. Altogether it has something of a folk-poem quality, speaking of someone who walks through the world with their heart in their hand; even the first line, “C’est la chanson des rêveurs” [This is the song of dreamers], suggests a kind of tale.
Apollinaire wrote Sanglots in 1917. The manuscript of the poem, which you can see below (click on the image to enlarge it), clearly shows the two poems: the first takes up the whole page, and the second is written in the left margin, its lines finding space between the lines of the first. Did the first poem inspire the second? Or had Apollinaire conceived both beforehand? And did he intend to publish them in this interwoven form?
No one knows for sure. When he wrote the verses, the poet was weakened by the after-effects of a head wound received during the war; a shell had struck him while he was in the trenches, and a risky operation (including trepanation) was needed to save his life. The operation went reasonably well, Apollinaire was able to live more or less normally and continue creating, but he remained weakened and died the following year during the influenza epidemic.
What we do know is that the poem was published in this form in the magazine «Nord-Sud» a few months after he wrote it, and this became more or less the definitive version (there seems to have been some doubt about where one of the last lines of the second poem should go). I have tried to reproduce that version below the song.
If Apollinaire wrote Sanglots in the middle of the First World War, Francis Poulenc composed the song during the Second, in 1940, in Nazi-occupied France, and chose it to close the cycle Banalités. The composer used to keep poems he selected for future settings, and among them were four by Apollinaire: two published in the magazine «Littérature» in 1919 as part of a group titled Banalités, and two published in 1925 in the book Il y a, among them Sanglots. Since he knew very clearly that he wanted to end the cycle with the gravity of this poem, he looked for a fifth poem to open it with lightness and found it in a work of poetic prose, Onirocritique. As we can see, although the composer insisted that Banalités was not a cycle and that the only link between the songs was the poet, he took great care to give it a solid structure.
Sanglots is a complex song, speaking of love and hope, of fatality and pain, with longing and with pessimism (or realism); the two parts, one for each poem, blend with subtlety. In the music there is all the fragility and all the compassion in the world. And yes, perhaps the world evoked by Guillaume Apollinaire and Francis Poulenc was collapsing, the same Europe bleeding again little more than twenty years later, but the song tells us this with captivating elegance, tenderness and serenity. Sanglots is a kind of balm that can accompany us in many moments; for example, in the splendid version by Gérard Souzay and Dalton Baldwin.
Notre amour est réglé par les calmes étoiles
Or nous savons qu'en nous beaucoup d'hommes respirent
Qui vinrent de trés loin et sont un sous nos fronts
C'est la chanson des rêveurs
Qui s'étaient arraché le coeur
Et le portaient dans la main droite
Souviens-t'en cher orgueil de tous ces souvenirs
Des marins qui chantaient comme des conquérants
Des gouffres de Thulé, des tendres cieux d'Ophir
Des malades maudits, de ceux qui fuient leur ombre
Et du retour joyeux des heureux émigrants.
De ce coeur il coulait du sang
Et le rêveur allait pensant
À sa blessure délicate
Tu ne briseras pas la chaîne de ces causes
Et douloureuse et nous disait
Qui sont les effets d'autres causes
Mon pauvre coeur, mon coeur brisé
Pareil au coeur de tous les hommes
Voici voici nos mains que la vie fit esclaves
Est mort d'amour ou c'est tout comme
Est mort d'amour et le voici
Ainsi vont toutes choses
Arrachez donc le vôtre aussi
Et rien ne sera libre jusq'à la fin des temps
Laissons tout aux morts
Et cachons nos sanglots
Human love is ruled by the calm stars.
We know that within us many people breathe
who came from afar and are united behind our brows.
This is the song of that dreamer
who had torn out his heart
and was carrying it in his right hand
Remember, oh dear pride, all those memories:
the sailors who sang like conquerors,
the chasms of Thule, the tender skies of Ophir,
the accursed sick, the ones who flee their own shadows,
and the joyful return of the happy emigrants.
Blood was flowing from that heart;
and the dreamer went on thinking
of his wound which was delicate
You will not break the chain of those causes
and painful; and he kept saying to us:
which are the effects of other causes.
My poor heart, my heart which is broken
like the hearts of all men
Look, here are our hands which life enslaved.
has died of love or so it seems,
has died of love and here it is.
That is the way of all things.
So tear your hearts out too!
And nothing will be free until the end of time.
Let us leave everything to the dead,
and let us hide our sobbing.
(translation by Peter Low)
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