The opening poem of "Hymn to the Goddess" offers Emmanuel's belief in woman as the source of spiritual consciousness. The central image is light. In the first five lines, he prays to her for enlightenment, which will come in the form of a sudden revelation. Like a bolt of lightening, it will penetrate the soul and bring the poet into contact with the universal divine principle that infuses nature as well as the individual soul. The poem's conclusion evokes the biblical Garden of Eden and highlights Eve, the first female and the first incarnation of wisdom. For Emmanuel, the tempter snake is a positive figure because it initiates Eve in the quest for wisdom. The final line unites eroticism and religion, a common trait of Emmanuel's poetry.
Poem #7 is one of the most difficult parts of "Hymne à la déesse." The thirst evoked in the first line is the desire for self-knowledge, or authenticity. This thirst proves more complicated than the poet first imagines, because the search for the self leads him to confront sexuality and the body. The goddess is the aqueduct that brings water to quench the spiritual search, yet both she and the water are ambiguous. In the poem's final lines, the aqueduct becomes the human viscera, filled with dark liquids, and the goddess both the bird in flight promising transcendence and a bird of prey that destroys any possibility of transcendence. In the final line, the tangled entrails change into a thick shrub that hides the sun, the "eye" of heaven. In this poem, Emmanuel recalls both the English Metaphysical poets, such as John Donne, and the Late-Renaissance French Baroque poets in his complicated imagery that requires a good deal of mental gymnastics to understand.
The subjects of Poem #11 are old age and the approach to death. The metaphor of the wine harvest in the poem's first half presents old age as a positive time of life, when the poet is satisfied with his accomplishments and his erotic experiences. The second half of the poem then moves from a communal setting to a hillside, where the bare grapevines remind him that death is a solitary moment. Peace, the gift given by the goddess in this poem, infuses the poet in the final lines. The cairn at the closed end of the valley becomes a ship's prow and then a star , both of which guide the poet to heaven. Although Emmanuel lived his adult life in Paris, he was born in the shadow of the rugged Pyrenees Mountains of Southern France. His love for this land, its people and their work appears in all of his poetry and relates him to the nineteenth-century Romantic poets of France, Germany and England.
Mary Anne O'Neil
Whitman College
“Hymne à la déesse”
à Loo
1. Puissance qui
es Conscience en toutes choses
Révérence à Toi, révérence à Toi,
révérence à Toi,
Révérence, révérence.
Rien ! pôle incandescent dont l’incendie
est l’Être
Cautère éblouissant la nuit de douleur
bleue
Crépite, aiguille : innerve au nœud
de sa ténèbre
L’éther électrisé dont l’écaille se meut.
Immense et nulle ! Fais-moi signe par
surprise
Brin d’or dans la prunelle ou feu aux
joues d’un mot
Fil de l’herbe aux reflets émoulus par la
brise.
Ame du Ciel ! ta flamme affole ses
rameaux
Vers l’extrême où l’esprit endure dans le
vide
Rosée d’astres saignant des pores de ma
peau.
Pour baume ardent j’ai ton ubiquité ô mère
Œil liquide coulée turquoise du serpent
Cuisses offertes au mystique foudroiement.
( Sophia, p. 53)
Hymn
to the Goddess
for Loo
1. Powerful One, You who are Awareness in all things.
I bow to You, I
bow to You, I bow to You,
I bow, I bow.
Nothing! Incandescent pole whose fire is Being.
Cautery dazzling
the night with blue pain
Crackle and guide
us: stimulate in the heart of darkness
The electrified
ether whose outer shell is already moving
Immense and
empty! Beckon, take me by surprise.
Oh You, speck of
gold in the eye’s pupil, or blush in the cheeks of a word
Reflections
caused by the breeze in a blade of grass.
Soul of the Sky!
Your flame terrifies the tips
Of the branches
where the spirit tolerates the threat of nothingness.
Starry dew
bleeding from the pores of my skin.
For burning balm
I have your ubiquity, oh Mother.
Liquid eye,
turquoise flow of the snake
Thighs open to
the mystical thunderbolt.
7. Puissance qui
es Soif en toutes choses
Révérence à Toi, révérence à Toi,
révérence à Toi,
Révérence, révérence.
Authentique : ce terme en forme
d’aqueduc
Combien d’arches sur l’infini de mes
figures
Pour qu’à ma source je me boive lui
faut-il ?
Et cette eau de si loin filtrée est-elle
pure ?
Altérée par l’effort de l’être elle paraît
Douteuse aux lèvres altérées : une
soif autre
La crache et s’y attise aux premières
gorgées
L’inexhaustible se tarit au creux des
paumes.
Tout aqueduc est vain qui n’est l’arc de
l’oiseau
Portant d’un vol la source aux lèvres, la
rapace
Jusqu’au ventre, pour en jaillir ! Ce
qui en sort
Est noir, poisseux, lapé dans sa
boue : les viscères
Buisson inextricablement d’esprit en
cachent l’œil.
( Sophia, p. 59).
7. Powerful One, You
who are Thirst in all things
I bow to You, I
bow to You, I bow to You
I bow, I bow.
Authentic: this
word has the form of an aqueduct.
How many arches
over my infinite appearances
Are necessary
for me to drink from the spring of my true self?
And is this
water, filtered from such a distance, pure?
Changed by the
effort of existing, it has a dubious taste
For parched
lips: a different thirst
Provoked by the
first gulps spits it out.
What was
inexhaustible runs dry in the cupped hands.
Every aqueduct is
worthless unless it be the arc
Made by the bird
in flight that carries the spring to our lips.
You, Bird of
Prey, plunge into the entrails only to re-emerge from them.
What gushes out
is black, sticky, lapped up in its muddiness: the viscera,
Like a bush
dense with spirit, hide the eye.
11. Puissance qui es Paix en toutes choses
Révérence à Toi, révérence à Toi,
révérence à Toi,
Révérence, révérence.
Septembre. Les deux tiers de la vie ont passé.
L’homme et son ombre cheminent
réconciliés.
Des chapeaux de soleil dans les
vignes. Des filles
Jadis aimées vendangent la
mémoire : bonne
Cuvée ! La porte est grande ouverte sur le chai
Le moût entête la saison, le cœur est
gai.
Mais à mi-pente le versant devient
abrupt
La terre remontée à dos d’homme
s’assure
Par des murets. L’oubli seul y pousse, le seigle
Pierreux, moulu pour l’amertume de
l’hiver.
Là, plus de rires. Le silence comme un cairn
Tout au bout de la combe étroite. C’est la proue
Haut soulevée la verticale de l’étoile.
(Sophia, p. 63).
11. Powerful One,
You who are Peace in all things
I bow to You,
I bow to You, I bow to You,
I bow, I bow.
September. Two thirds of life
has passed.
Man and his
shadow walk along together, reconciled.
Sunbonnets in
the grapevines. Girls that I
Loved in the
past harvest the memory: It is a good
Vintage! The door of the barrel room is open wide.
The smell of
grape must prolongs the season. The
heart is gay.
But halfway up
the slope, the hillside becomes steep.
The soil
heaped into mounds by man is held steady
By low walls.
Nothing grows here but forgetfulness, that gritty
Rye grass
ground down by the bitterness of winter.
No more laughs
there. The silence is like a cairn
At the very
end of a narrow coomb. It is the prow of a ship
Lifted straight up from the ocean, the
sheer rise of the star.