Sebastian Hayes

Regrets

Leave me among the graves, I wish to linger here,
The dead are in the ground, the day is bright and clear,
I smell sweet odours, water, leafy trees and hay,
The dead are in their death for ever and a day…
My dancing body will be hard to recognize
Quite soon, my temples cold, dark gaps instead of eyes;
(…)

[Allez, je veux rester seule avec les tombeaux :
Les morts sont sous la terre et le matin est beau,
L’air a l’odeur de l’eau, de l’herbe, du feuillage,
Les morts sont dans la mort pour le reste de l’âge…
Un jour, mon corps dansant sera semblable à eux,
J’aurai l’air de leur front, le vide de leurs yeux...]

Anna de Noailles returns European poetry to the twin themes that obsessed the poets of the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance, love and death : the Elizabethans rarely write about anything else. We may perhaps trace this duality back to the enduring  cultural impact of the Black Death in the early fourteenth century which wiped out between a quarter  and a third of the entire population of Europe in two or three years — an incredible figure that no other disease has even remotely emulated as far as we know.  As Huizinga notes, the gruesome paintings of dancing skeletons led by the figure of Death with his scythe fade imperceptibly into enthusiastic celebrations  of the here-and-now.  As the troubadour verse goes which I translate :

Our yesteryears have vanished quite,
And years to come are yet to be,
Fair maid, take thy delight, delight,
Before the shadow falls on thee.

But has not everyone always been afraid of death?  Perhaps at some level, but there is considerable variety in the human response to the challenge from one society to another. Medieval man, during the ‘High’ Middle Ages at any rate, was concerned quite as much, or more, with the afterlife than with this life — and with good reason since the afterlife lasted for ever while this life  lasted little more than thirty of forty years on average. After the disastrous fourteenth century which saw both the Black Death and the start of the Hundred Years War, this perception changed markedly and by the Elizabethan period the fundamental preoccupation is not with eternal life but rather with the ephemeral nature of this one.

In Anna de Noailles we come across a truly late medieval fascination with, and horror of,  physical decay and death which we would look for in vain  amongst her nineteenth century poetic predecessors. To die young  was even fashionable within a certain milieu during the early nineteenth century and so many young people committed suicide after reading The Sorrows of Werther and suchlike books,  that the authorities even got a little alarmed.  Shelley opened one of his poems with the astonishing line,

“How wonderful is death, death and his brother sleep…”

I had to check to see if Shelley (who drowned before he was thirty ) really did write this, but it is so. The line first comes up in The Daemon of the World and the first verse ends

“both [death and sleep are] so passing strange and wonderful!”

Anna de Noailles  draws much the same conclusion as the libertines who reacted to the onslaughts of plague by eating, drinking  and making love as much as possible ignoring the probably disastrous morrow and even  the Last Judgement which   all of a sudden became somewhat irrelevant. If God dished out a hideous death indiscriminately to both bad and good, there seemed little reason to suppose things would be any different in the hereafter.

Following Nietzsche, whose philosophy she admired, Anna de Noailles  goes even further in emphasizing the absolute finality of physical death. For

“Il n’est rien qui survive à la chaleur des veines !”

(“There is nothing that survives the [loss of] heat within our veins”)

‘Happiness’, envisaged entirely in physical terms, thus becomes a challenge, almost a spiritual discipline : in Exaltation she urges herself to
“Accoutumer ses yeux, son vouloir et ses mains
À tenter le bonheur que le risque accompagne ;“

(“To accustom one’s eyes, will and hands to strive for happiness which is always accompanied by risk.”)

Anna de Noailles thus stands poised, in her uncompromising atheistic pantheism, between the interesting but ultimately unconvincing attempts of the Symbolists to create a sort of aesthetic hinterland between physical life and extinction, and the even more unconvincing  attempts of the surrealists to muddy the entire issue by retreating into   ‘the unconscious’.

It may be worth stating that the recurrent Western obsession with the duality Love/Death, which perhaps reaches its paroxysm in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and certain poems of  Anna de Noailles,  is firmly based on biological fact. Love and death  constitute the twin poles of our biological reality. Sexual differentiation as we know it  is far from being universal in nature : it is  only one reproductive system amongst many, and if, as some claim, it  is the root cause  of human ‘progress’, it is also the cause of humanity’s quasi-permanent state of  chronic insecurity and anxiety. As von Bertalanffy, a biologist,  writes in Problems of Life (pp. 49-50)

“It is obvious that a fish, a dog, or a human being is an individual.  (…) But in unicellular organisms the notion of the individual becomes muddied. Through many generations they multiply merely by division. [But] individual means something ‘indivisible’…  Can we insist on calling a hydra or a turbellarian worm an individual, when these animals can be cut into as many pieces as we like, each capable of growing ihnto a complete organism?
With individualization death enters the world of the living. …Higher animals, that are incapable of reproduction by fission as opposed to the primitive ‘dividua’ in the lower phyla, are incapable of unlimited existence; by natural wear and tear they decline into old age and death. Not inappropriately the individual could be defined in terms of death.”

Were hydra, or other unicellular creatures that reproduce by fission, to develop into intelligent beings — which is not completely inconceivable and is an eventuality I consider in my SF novel The Web of Aoullnnia — they would find it very difficult to understand what we mean by death. To us death comes from the inside, it is a consequence of being human,  whereas for hydra, for whom the notion of  individuality would be meaningless, they — or rather ‘it’ — would have a sense of being immortal. True, hydra or other unicellular creatures, could be wiped out as a species by a natural disaster or could become extinct through lack of food, but this would, for intelligent hydra, be no more than a distant hypothetical possibility like the prospect of our inevitable demise when the sun runs out of fuel, a notion which has never troubled the sleep of anyone (except seemingly the young Bertrand Russell). For humanity death is not just a scientific hypothesis, it is  always with us whether we accept it or not, and in epochs when both the sense of communal bonds and/or religious faith fails, this sense of mortality becomes dreadfully  acute.

Since Anna de Noailles’ time death has made, of course, made  a strong come-back in poetry and novels but usually only  in the context of warfare, which is slightly different — since just conceivably warfare could be dispensed with, but death not (though some scientific crackpots claim the contrary).  Today, in the age of triviality,  society ‘resolves’  the entire  issue by reducing love to sex and sex to a casual pastime which it is necessary to indulge in at least occasionally to be socially acceptable, and, as for death, it is kept well out of sight, or more rarely,  is  harnessed for the insatiable requirements of the media as a somewhat unusual form of reality TV.

Note: The poem Regrets along with other poems of Anna de Noailles translated by Sebastian Hayes will be found on the website www.annadenoailles.com

Sebastian Hayes