White on Black on White: Yves Bonnefoy's Début et fin de la Neige

Abstract

In the poetry of Yves Bonnefoy, the dynamic sense of place and spatial movement, of the site of his celebrated présence, has long animated the relationship of language to concrete form. Powerfully charged images of strangely three-dimensional force enliven Bonnefoy's texts, as the pure forms of natural origin — the stone, the flame, the snowflake — take on unexpected potential for poetic meaning. Such images, punctuated by a dialectical relationship between silence and the cry, establish an aesthetic realm founded on the mutability and contingence of plastic form. Bonnefoy's verse, as in his 1991 Début et fin de la neige, reflects the poet's intuitive sense of an elusive tangibility perceptible beyond the discursive level of language, and in Début et fin de la neige the poet constructs an imagistic space in which traditional poetic motifs — the beauty of nature, the wonder of infancy, the uncertainties of religion, and the virtue of art — find new significance in writing that explores its own difference from the history that engendered it. A tribute to Bonnefoy's lyricism and to his lucidity, Neige evokes the ephemeral yet very real phenomenon of snow within a linguistically grounded frame, as the natural objects of the physical world are transformed into signs of the poet's theoretical and aesthetic reflection.