Solitude
Paraphrase on Saint-John Perse, Anabase IV
The gannet I found stranded in a car-park,
something all wrong with its wings
and its head too heavy for the neck to bear,
beautiful bird, beautiful ugly bird.
*
Not the street-parties day and night tomorrow,
but the morning after that, and the bin-men
redding up shredded pieces of palm-trees
like the débris of enormous wings.
*
The gannet’s eyes, the gannet’s big clown-face.
*
A touch of yellow, and the town in yellow light,
close, damp, and heavy now with a storm coming;
shadows that latch the streets, and windows open
where dresses flap and hang, and never dry.
*
A great sea-going bird’s single blue egg.
Peter McDonald makes exceptionally interesting use of the art of paraphrase in his 2024 collection, One Little Room. He expands on the texts of a small but varied selection of authors, making the original a launch-pad to his uniquely different and contemporary planet.
Anabase, by Saint-John Perse, translated from French to English by TS Eliot, has a particular hold on his imagination in this collection. In fact, its epigraph is from Anabase, canto 1: “et la mer au matin comme une présomption de l’esprit.” Eliot, the endnote reveals, translated this initially as “and the sea at morning like a pride of the spirit” before revising it to “and the sea at morning like a presumption of the mind”. Here’s the sea-phrase in its later context: “This husk of earth given over to our horses / delivers to us this incorruptible sky. The Sun is unmentioned but his power is amongst us / and the sea at morning like a presumption of the mind.”
Perse’s 10-part allegory is set as prose, but, introducing it, Eliot is very firm in asserting it to be a poem: “Its sequences, its logic of imagery are those of poetry, not of prose.” He complains of the lack of an adequate term for such writing. The gap remains un-filled today: although we’d now want to mention the ‘prose-poem’ and, perhaps, the ‘lyric essay’, Perse’s sequence represents a distinct form.
Anabase, also referred to as Anabasis, can be found here. In Anabase, IV, the “conqueror” who was only contemplating the building of a city in its first canto, has now reached the moment of its founding. McDonald dispenses with ancient grandeurs and takes us straight to the contemporary urban car park and the unfortunate gannet. Perse’s possibly mythical seabird is a very different creature. It appears only briefly at the end of the section. It seems to have made a lucky escape from the triumphant expressions of human achievement.
From the perspective of McDonald’s speaker, the fun is nearly over for Earth’s conquerors. “Not the street-parties day and night tomorrow / But the morning after that.” We can assume that “the morning after” is now, or a period not far into the future, and it represents some wretched aftermath. There has been serious destruction – of “palm-trees” and “enormous wings” – for the bin-men to start “redding” up. The Scottish verb means “to make tidy”, but, as sound-association, it evokes the dropping of blood from the maimed wings. The morning light is lurid, the air “heavy” and threatening. The sight of the deformed gannet, a bird which has either suffered a horrible injury or represents some equally horrible genetic mutation, changes before our eyes, from “beautiful bird” to “beautiful ugly bird”. It may, like Baudelaire’s l’Albatros, also symbolise human forms of alienation.
The bright treasure plucked from Anabase is the “single blue egg” of the second single-line verse, on which Solitude ends. This is Perse: “Solitude! the blue egg laid by a great sea-bird, and the bay-leaves at morning all laden with gold lemons! Yesterday it was! The bird made off!” Such rhetoric seems to indicate the conqueror’s excited ambition for further exploration and conquest. It belongs to a moment when rich achievement is gloried in, but with a certain sense of emptiness, a hunger that asks for more. In the paraphrase, there is a different note altogether, a sense that the bird has laid its egg at the wrong time and in the wrong place – a damp, grubby, exposed car-park with a storm on the way. The literary origins of the paraphrase are never stressed, but it’s their visibility in the last line which heightens the tragedy. The solitude of the title becomes overwhelming. The bird will die. The egg will fail to hatch. There will be no migration, no anabasis. Although the colour of the gannet’s egg may hint at a mythological being, I felt bereft at the end of the poem, as if I’d been made to witness the extinction of a species.
Peter McDonald’s memorably read selection from One Little Room includes Solitude. The Good Morrow by John Donne, the source, as McDonald reminds us, of his collection’s title, may be read here.
