I can only read in tiny snatches at the moment. Gérard de Nerval’s sonnets have been a great recourse in such a situation: brief, crystalline and endlessly evocative, they’re things I can dip into in spare moments, particularly the ones I know by heart and can think about as I walk to the shops or do the dishes. I have no academic grounding in them and my French is limited so my responses are personal and subjective, but I think in the case of these poems that’s as it should be. Anyway, I thought I’d set out some of my current thoughts about ‘Horus’. I’m going to discuss the poem in French because that’s how I hear it in my head and the subtlety of Nerval’s ordering of sound and idea are vital to the poem’s effect.

……………………………………Horus

………….Le dieu Kneph en tremblant ébranlait l’univers :
………….Isis, la mère, alors se leva sur sa couche,
………….Fit un geste de haine à son époux farouche,
………….Et l’ardeur d’autrefois brilla dans ses yeux verts.

………….– Le voyez-vous, dit-elle, il meurt, ce vieux pervers,
………….Tous les frimas du monde ont passé par sa bouche,
………….Attachez son pied tors, éteignez son oeil louche,
………….C’est le dieu des volcans et le roi des hivers !

………….L’aigle a déjà passé, l’esprit nouveau m’appelle,
………….J’ai revêtu pour lui la robe de Cybèle…
………….C’est l’enfant bien-aimé d’Hermès et d’Osiris !

………….La déesse avait fui sur sa conque dorée,
………….La mer nous renvoyait son image adorée,
………….Et les cieux rayonnaient sous l’écharpe d’Iris.

One of the most remarkable things in this poem, it seems to me, is the second volta (change of direction) at line 11. It underlies the haunting power of those last three lines. We’ll come to that later.

The poem begins in packed, highly condensed drama. I think this is embodied in the very sounds and rhythms of the language as well as being evoked by the images. There’s an explosive power to that first line, sweeping us through astonishing ideas and imaginative reversals. “Le dieu Kneph” sounds powerful with its hard plosives, as if about to announce a powerful action by this exotic but so familiarly-mentioned god; “en tremblant” startlingly suggests his weakness; “ébranlait l’univers” takes us back to power in a stunning expansion of perspective. As I hear it, both this expansion and the contradictory suggestions of the line are held together by strong patterns of sound, especially the assonance between “tremblant” and “ébranlait”. Though strictly speaking the first four lines are in a narrative mode they feel dramatic because their jagged, leaping surprises keep our responses on edge, and because they’re so full of violence. With the direct speech of the second quatrain we’re in full dramatic mode. And how vividly embodied it is: “le voyez-vous” challenges the reader to react to Isis’s spitting vituperations. These fuse the tones and claustrophobic intimacy of marital dispute with the mythic perspectives in which god and goddess incarnate fundamental cosmic processes. Surely it took genius of a very high order to fuse such different fields of reference and to compress such vast, fissile ideas into this brief, lucidly structured quatrain. Kneph and Isis aren’t people, though, they’re states of nature or states of mind. If they were people, the state inhabited by Kneph, trembling, squinting, crippled, and with all the freezing fogs of the world passing ambiguously into and out of his mouth, would be as much a state of victimhood as the Isis state is at this stage. Isis’s hatred of him would seem callous. Admittedly, there’s nothing attractive about her at this point. Hard plosives make “Attachez son pied tors” sound violent and “éteignez son oeil louche” is horrifyingly so. Kneph and Isis both seem to belong to the same savage, hate-filled world.

The “volta” or turn in line 9 is clean, sharp and exhilarating, a complete change in the feeling of the poem:

………….L’aigle a déjà passé, l’esprit nouveau m’appelle,
………….J’ai revêtu pour lui la robe de Cybèle…
………….C’est l’enfant bien-aimé d’Hermès et d’Osiris !

Kneph and his world of bitterness, sterility and frustration are forgotten. Rapid changes of tense fill the lines with movement. “L’esprit nouveau m’appelle” thrills with anticipation. In a sense it’s still Isis speaking but she’s been transformed to an excited, buoyantly loving, rejuventated figure that seems to have nothing in common with the old one. Fleeting suggestions move round “J’ai revêtu pour lui la robe de Cybèle…”, intertwining ideas of religious ceremony and amorous courtship. In a deeper sense it seems to me that we’re no longer seeing Isis from outside, as a dramatic personification; her voice has become the voice of the poem itself, living through this enormous transformation.

This is a huge change, although in a sense we’re still in the drama of Kneph and Isis. The wholly unexpected change of direction comes with line 12, where we’re suddenly outside that drama, contemplating what seems to be its after effect. Had the final tercet begun “La déesse a fui” it would have seemed like a simple narrative continuation. The extraordinary stroke of shifting the goddess’s departure to the pluperfect (“avait fui”) sharpens the sense that these three lines involve a radical change. We’re suddenly in a different time scheme in which the events of the first eleven lines are seen as belonging to a remote past.  Now we see the goddess with an extraordinary combination of wistfulness and delight. Wistfulness, because she’s gone – gone in a reversal of the arrival of Aphrodite on her conch. Delight, because although she herself is gone the sea and air still shine with the beauty of her remembered presence.

Loss and recovery are fundamental, recurrent notes in the Nerval poems I’ve read. We see them here in “l’ardeur d’autrefois brilla dans ses yeux verts”, in “J’ai revêtu pour lui la robe de Cybèle” and in “la mer nous renvoyait son image adore” – the first two full of energy and forward-looking purpose, the third ethereally reflective. In fact the more I think about it the more the whole poem seems a magical orchestration of the tenses in three movements – a first, eight line movement revolving round the bitter stasis of a present that seems inescapable, a second, forward-looking three line movement which draws life from an eagerly anticipated future, and a third three-line movement of rapt retrospection.