Leconte de Lisle, the leader of the Parnassian poets; four by Théophile Gautier, their spiritual mentor, whose verse heads the first volume of Le Parnasse contemporain; three poems by the movement’s quirky philosopher, Sully Prudhomme; and ten by Armand Silvestre, cited in a notable 1882 essay as one of the four “chefs d’école” of Parnassus.8 Fauré was indeed “caught up in the Parnassian period movement,” as Nectoux noted, yet his relation to that movement remains almost entirely unexamined.9
This chapter explores Poème d’un jour as a manifestation, or perhaps even a manifesto, of Parnassian aesthetics. As I shall argue, the work constitutes a sort of Bildungsgedicht, a coming-of-age poem in which the protagonist passes through trials to reach artistic maturity. This reading helps explain Fauré’s curious rigor in crafting the song cycle, a genre to which he would not return until 1891. It also makes sense of the theatricality of “Rencontre” and “Toujours”: far from betraying a lapse of taste, the flamboyant style sets off the Olympian restraint of “Adieu.” Coming at a pivotal moment in Fauré’s career, Poème d’un jour marks a break with his youthful apprenticeship and announces his new mastery as a composer. It also provides a barometer of the music-text relationship at this stage in his songwriting career.
PARNASSIAN AESTHETICS
In 1852 Leconte de Lisle published his Poèmes antiques from which Fauré derived three mélodies. The poet suffered the sense of alienation that afflicted many artists after the disappointing revolutions of 1848–49. Leconte de Lisle loathed the modern world and found solace in Greek, Roman, and Hindu antiquity. His epic verse portrays world-weary ascetics, followers of dispossessed gods, and dying sages, all symbols of the poet’s mal du siècle. He would even dip into Norse mythology, writing “La mort de Sigurd” and “La légende des Nornes” (Poèmes barbares, 1862). Yet Leconte de Lisle and Richard Wagner offered opposing antidotes to modernity: whereas Wagner aimed at emotional immediacy and disdained formal artifice, Leconte de Lisle strove for impassivity and embraced an exacting formalism. His programmatic poem “Vénus de Milo” expresses this detached aestheticism:
Du bonheur impassible ô symbole adorable,
Calme comme la Mer en sa sérénité,
Nul sanglot n’a brisé ton sein inaltérable,
Jamais les pleurs humains n’ont terni ta beauté.
Oh, captivating symbol of impassive bliss,
Calm as the serene Sea,
No sob has burst from your immutable breast,
Never have human tears tarnished your beauty.
Leconte de Lisle rejected the autobiographical candor of the Romantics as well as their social commitment. Condemned to a prosaic age and politically impotent, the modern poet’s sole redemption lay in the study of healthier epochs. As Leconte de Lisle counseled his fellow poets in the preface to Poèmes antiques, “You are also destined, under pain of complete effacement, to isolate yourselves in the contemplative and learned life as in a sanctuary of repose and purification.”10 The young poets who flocked to Leconte de Lisle’s salon eventually published three volumes of Le Parnasse contemporain (1866, 1871, 1876) and even had their own house publisher, Alphonse Lemerre.
José-Maria de Heredia summoned classical antiquity most imposingly in Les trophées, a collection of 121 sonnets that he eventually published in 1893. The opening sonnet, “L’oubli” (Oblivion), captures the historical nostalgia that haunted the Parnassians:
Le temple est en ruine au haut du promontoire.
Et la Mort a mêlé, dans ce fauve terrain,
Les Déesses de marbre et les Héros d’airain
Dont l’herbe solitaire ensevelit la gloire.
Seul, parfois, un bouvier menant ses buffles boire,
De sa conque où soupire un antique refrain
Emplissant le ciel calme et l’horizon marin,
Sur l’azur infini dresse sa forme noire.
La Terre maternelle et douce aux anciens Dieux
Fait à chaque printemps, vainement éloquente,
Au chapiteau brisé verdir une autre acanthe;
Mais l’Homme indifférent au rêve des aïeux
Écoute sans frémir, du fond des nuits sereines,
La Mer qui se lamente en pleurant les Sirènes.
The temple lies in ruins atop the promontory.
And Death has mingled, in this tawny landscape,
The marble Goddesses and the bronze Heroes
Whose glory lies buried beneath the lonely grass.
All the while, a lone cowherd who leads his buffaloes to water
And fills with his conch, sighing an ancient refrain,
The calm sky and sea horizon,
Raises his dark form against the infinite azure.
The Earth, maternal and sweet to the ancient Gods,
Each spring with vain eloquence
Bedecks the broken capital with a green acanthus;
But Man, indifferent to his ancestor’s dreams,
Hears without shivering, in the depths of the serene nights,
The Sea that tearfully laments its lost Sirens.
Heredia’s elegy mourns the disenchantment of nature and mankind’s indifference to bygone glory. Yet it holds out hope for modernity. The sonnet turns upon the image of the acanthus: both natural plant and inspiration for the Corinthian column, the acanthus symbolizes the regenerative power of ancient art. Modern poets may yet recapture the lost music of the Sirens as they immerse themselves in antiquity.
The sonnet, with its demanding rhyme scheme, provided an ideal vehicle for the Parnassian craftsmen. They found paragons of formal perfection in the jeweled miniatures of Théophile Gautier’s Émaux et camées (1852). Gautier’s concluding poem, “L’Art,” distills the formalist creed:
| Les dieux eux-mêmes meurent. | The gods themselves die, |
| Mais les vers souverains | But the sovereign verses |
| Demeurent | Endure |
| Plus forts que les airains. | Stronger than bronze. |
| Sculpte, lime, ciselle; | Sculpt, file, chisel; |
| Que ton rêve flottant | Let your floating dream |
| Se scelle | Be sealed |
| Dans le bloc résistant! | In the resisting block! |
The Parnassians emulated Gautier’s chiseled verse as they rejected the negligent flow of Romantic poetry in favor of more concentrated structures. Characteristic, too, is Gautier’s dense rhyming—both the rich rhyme of “meurent”/“demeurent” (three shared sounds instead of the normal two) and the sonorous near rhyme of “ciselle”/“Se
