Louis ARAGON – Autograph poem – Lyon-les-mystères. 1943

Louis ARAGON (1897-1982)

Autograph poem – Lyon-les-mystères.

One page in quarto on thin paper. Fragile at the folds.

[Lyon] Spring 1943.

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Everywhere large handkerchiefs dry between the fingers of branches / There are so many flowers it's maddening / And the suburbs seem seized before the season / By a panic of white communicants

Gardens, gardens like a grand operatic aria / That everyone hums on returning home each evening / Private cemeteries where the living surrender themselves / The man in his shirtsleeves in the sun of the plaster casts

The gravelly dream dies near the edges / The budding wisteria exhales its fragrance / Everything here unravels with a dying smile / The lilacs' sleep is too heavy to last

And when the curfew returns the street to danger / Barely a window stifles a golden plot / Under the blue awning a song falls asleep / That one hears rising in the warm and light air

A thousand suburban Lusignans without Melusines / Leaning on their moonlit cushions, they spy / If nothing disturbs, deep within the slumbering city / The nearby breathing of the factories

What trampling denounces the flock / That passes over the rooftops like prehistory / Invisible birds, deadly trajectories / Silence, the shadow makes folds in its flag

In this heart of coal, ferns of turmoil / Will unfurl their crooks in the midnight sun / Is it a monster that passes and is pursued by another monster / Night of man and sky, oh double violet

Spring 1943

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Written in the spring of 1943 in Lyon, this poignant text is part of the poet's superb collection, La Diane Française , published in 1946. This collection, a tragic hymn to the national Resistance and odes to lost loves, remains considered the poetic quintessence of Louis Aragon.

The French defeat at the hands of Nazi Germany led Aragon to Périgueux. Captured, he managed to escape, took refuge in the unoccupied zone, and met Pierre Seghers (1940) and then Henri Matisse (1941). He became politically active and joined the Resistance, creating, with Elsa Triolet, the National Writers' Committee for the Southern Zone and the newspaper La Drôme en armes . He also expressed his commitment through his poems, published clandestinely, in which love for women ( Les Yeux d'Elsa , 1942) is intertwined with love for his country ( Le Musée Grévin , 1943; La Rose et le Réséda , 1944; Il n'y a pas d'amour heureux ).