Light, sound, silence – Philippe Jaccottet on his 100th birthday

The type that has to be traced on the page appears in the same way as the brindilles don't have to be saved.
Tracer encore des lignes comme on jetterait des filins à la surface d'une étendue d'eau, mare infime ou mer à perte de vue,
afin qu'ils supportent a spèce de filet qui nous éviterait la noyade.
“Poèmes de sauvetage”… Paroles, n'importe lesquelles même peut-être, pour différer l'effondrement.
(La Clarté Notre-Dame, II)

Thus, every word placed on this page would be like one of those twigs from which Char once dreamed of building a defensive wall.
To draw lines once more, like stretching ropes across reflective water, whether a small pond or a boundless sea,
so that they carry a kind of net that could save us from drowning.
“Rescue poems”… words, any words perhaps, to delay further decay.

The echo of the song

Reading Philippe Jaccottets Le dernier livre de Madrigaux and La Clarté Notre-Dame Together, one crosses the outermost threshold of a poetic life that was always in search of "clarté," that glimmer of the worldly which the Swiss poet understood as the only legitimate place of transcendence without dogma. Both collections, although separated by decades in their creation, form a compositional unity in the 2021 edition (with the poet's 2020 notes), published in 2021 (the year of the artist's death, a century after his birth): The lyrical afterglow of one book opens into the meditative prose of the other, and together they constitute a final variation on Jaccottet's great theme—the uncertain brightness that language can only bear witness to, searchingly, almost reluctantly.

Le dernier livre de Madrigaux The work begins with a throwback: the poems were written in 1984, revised until 1990, and consciously echo the tone of the earliest European lyric forms. The madrigal—a light, polyphonic song since its beginnings in the Trecento—becomes here an elegiac form of remembrance. The very first poem, "En écoutant Claudio Monteverdi," points the way: hearing an old song becomes a metaphor for poetic existence. Monteverdi's voice evokes an "ombre tendre," a delicate apparition from the past, which the singer wishes to hold onto "au prix de son âme." In this dramatic tension—between the desire to preserve and the realization of the impermanence of what is seen—Jaccottet's entire poetics unfolds: the movement of seeing, which immediately turns into loss, and language, which can only capture the afterglow, never the origin itself. Jaccottet explains that in the spring of 1984, inspired by Italian music and images, and after seeing three ladies in white dresses in a boxwood garden, he attempted to set verses from Dante's happy poem (Guido, I'vorrei…) to integrate into a contemporary poem, which he ultimately failed to do. Jaccottet interprets the multitude of these “encounters” (like the sound of the bell), which over the years evoked profound wonder and joy, as a convergence toward meaning. His life, drawing to a close, could thus reveal itself as a fragile but tenacious “appearance of meaning.” He sees himself as a collector (cueilleur), Picker (recueilleur) and an awkward interpreter of these always tiny, fleeting, but intense and precious signs.

The realization of his own hands, marked by age, led to a rejection of illusory notions. He decided to speak about himself in the third person to signal distance and the rejection of any illusion. The poem then turns to the "other barge" that is supposed to protect him from the "ever colder mists," recalling Ungaretti's last, tormented poem about the "uncanny barges" of death.

The starting point for La Clarté Notre-Dame It was the sound of a small vesper bell in the vast, still, gray spring panorama on March 4th of the previous year (2011/2012). He had to preserve this pure, light, fragile, yet clear sound so that any potential upsurge would not be thwarted by clumsiness, fatigue, or distrust of words. The reaction to the sound of the bell was intense and confused. Although it fulfilled the religious function of the place (La Clarté Notre-DameAlthough he was familiar with the religious resonance, this played surprisingly no role in his immediate, happy astonishment in the colorless, silent room. He found himself compelled to resort to the risky, almost mechanical tool of poets, the "comme" (analogy). He compared the crystalline, yet delicate sound to morning dew that had taken flight and transformed into heavenly tones.

The poem is permeated with images of transition: the nocturnal grove, the white blossom, the fleeting lamp of cherry blossoms. It concludes with a view of the summer sky, “un grésillement dans les éteules / comme d'étoiles à ras de terre” – a cosmic image that evokes both light and transience. It is not a song of triumph, but a delicate celebration of appearance in the moment of its disappearance. The “baptism of the long summer night,” which the poet speaks of, interprets this experience as a ritual purification: in the darkness of night, light is reborn, but only for those who have learned not to cling to it.

The second poem, "Le Chariot," continues this motif. Again, an allegorical movement appears—a chariot carrying not death or love, but "Grâce ou le Plaisir" (Grace or Pleasure). The image alludes to ancient triumphal processions, yet Jaccottet strips it of all historical splendor: the chariot rolls through the "collines colorées par l'été" (colorful hills by summer), a pastoral landscape whose beauty transforms into transience the very moment it is perceived. The recurring drinking, the toasts "À la beauté du monde!" (To the beauty of the world!), are accompanied by a premonition of blood: the wine-red color tips into the color of sacrifice. This ambivalence is typical of Jaccottet's late work—the beauty of the visible is never pure; it is inextricably linked to the experience of mortality.

In the middle of the poem, the "vieux forgeron" appears, a mythical figure, both artist and victim. His tool, an emblem of creative activity, is consumed by the flame. "Où l'on m'emmène je n'en aurai plus l'usage…" – here speaks the awareness of age, the knowledge of the limitations of the poetic instrument. Yet in this gesture of surrender, a remnant of light resonates: the lamp, "pareille à une ruche," remains as a symbol of sweetness and gathering, of the poetic honey harvested from the ephemeral.

As the madrigals unfold, images of light and color appear in ever more intense variations: “Les ruisseaux se sont réveillés,” “Le tissu bleu du ciel,” “Vert, rose et bleu.” This chromatic abundance is not mere idyll, but an attempt to salvage the invisible by inscribing it in the movement of the elements. Light is no longer conceived as a metaphysical principle, but as a vibrant presence that dissolves into water, wind, and sound.

The second half of the cycle reveals a heightened exploration of the motif of ascent. The lark, “fragment ascendant de ce feu,” represents the possibility of overcoming the weight of earthly existence through song. Yet the movement remains ambivalent: ascent is also a burning. “Il est une beauté… qui fait faire au cœur un premier degré dans le chant. / Mais l'autre se dérobe et il faut s'élever plus haut…” – the “autre,” the other, is the invisible side of the light, defying all language.

Subsequently, animal images appear—the stag, the birds—figures poised between victim and messenger. At the end of the cycle, the light transforms into snow, the flame into ash: “La lumière n'est plus aujourd'hui qu'un lit de plumes / pour le repos du cœur.” Death does not appear as a catastrophe, but as a transformation into peace, into a final, gentle radiance. The madrigal is no longer a love song, but a meditation on the dying of song itself: The poet sings to prepare for silence.

The Prose of the Last Light

La Clarté Notre-DameWritten in the 2010s, the book begins at this point, on the border between song and silence. It is no longer a volume of poetry, but a prose text, a series of notes, memories, and meditations. Yet the movement remains the same: the search for a fleeting light, which, “comme un oiseau dans la paume de la main,” must be preserved. Even the opening scene—the walk in the gray March landscape, the distant sound of a monastery bell—is paradigmatic. The “pure, light, fragile, and yet clear ink” represents that experience of clarity which Jaccottet sought throughout his life: not religious in the strict sense, but a kind of poetic revelation that reveals itself precisely in the poverty and inconspicuousness of the moment.

Jaccottet describes this scene with the utmost caution of a skeptic: he avoids any definitive interpretation, searching for a comparison that immediately eludes him. Was the sound a voice, an apparition, a memory? It remains “comme une espèce de source suspendue en l'air”—an image that simultaneously names and evaporates the experience. This poetic method, this oscillation between naming and concealment, forms the heart of Jaccottet's poetics: language should approach the mystery without appropriating it; it should sense clarity, not possess it.

From this point, a self-examination unfolds, encompassing the entire work retrospectively. Jaccottet recalls his early... Requiem (1946) and already recognizes in it the theme that would accompany him until the end: the relationship between sound and transcendence. Back then, the mountain was a symbol of distance and unattainability; now it becomes an inner place, the childhood of listening. The bell of the "Clarté Notre-Dame" is no longer a religious voice, but the echo of his own poem – a poem that remains aware of its own inadequacy.

Later, "light" itself emerges as a touchstone of language. Jaccottet questions whether it is still permissible to utter the word "clarté," burdened by centuries of religious and metaphysical tradition. Yet he clings to it because it remains the only word that is simultaneously sensual and spiritual. This "clair" is not a metaphysical light, but an experience of the in-between space, of resonance. Therein lies the ultimate ethic of his poetry: the insistence on a delicate, precarious perception that binds humanity to the living without resorting to solace.

Towards the end of the first part, the view opens onto a disturbing counter-world: the memory of the horror, of the Syrian prisons, of the journalist who heard the screams of the tortured. This scene feels like an intrusion of reality into the poet's contemplative world. It shatters the fragile harmony, calling into question the very right to speak. Jaccottet confesses that the beauty that surrounds him—the clear sky, the silent trees—is an "enclave protégée," an undeserved refuge. From this tension arises perhaps the most shattering moment of his late work: the awareness that no poem, no "rideau de mots," can truly halt the world's pain.

Yet even here he remains true to the law of his poetry: he does not flee into silence, but continues to write, as "poèmes de sauvetage," as words that "diffèrent l'effondrement." Writing becomes a gesture of resistance, not against death, but against silence. Language, however uncertain it has become, retains its function as a tentative, human means of sustaining life.

The late work as a continuum

In the later chapters of La Clarté Notre-Dame Meditation, memory, and quotation intertwine. Jaccottet invokes the voices of his intellectual forebears—Hölderlin, Dante, Leopardi, Rilke, Claudel, Ungaretti—to once again circle around his own position. They form the intellectual horizon within which his own poetics, in his old age, is reaffirmed. Each of these figures represents a different way of conceiving the sacred in poetry—and it is precisely in comparison to them that Jaccottet defines his place: no longer as a seer, but as one who, tentatively, almost ashamed, continues to listen to the echoes of these great voices. The text is permeated with quotations and translations that function not as authorities, but as spaces for resonance. They reveal how deeply his language remains grounded in reading—in a silent, humble dialogue with tradition.

Jaccottet most clearly adopts Hölderlin's idea of ​​the "dangerous" as a place of salvation. When he quotes the line "But where danger is, there also grows / That which saves," he does so not as an article of faith, but as a fragile hope. For him, danger—aging, death, the world's silencing—is omnipresent; that which saves reveals itself only in fleeting moments of listening, for example, in the "pure tint" of the monastery bell. Hölderlin gives him the language to circle the unspeakable without naming it: the repeated plea for "innocent water" and "wings" becomes a symbol of a final, almost childlike trust in the light that is still possible. Jaccottet no longer believes in redemption, but he clings to the possibility that even in the threat—the proximity of death—a spark of meaning might still flicker.

Dante and Leopardi represent the other side of this movement: the path through darkness that nevertheless aims for the light. When Jaccottet turns to the end of the Comedy Recalling Dante's and Virgil's ascent "vers les étoiles," he recognizes a parallel to his own late-life journey—no longer as a pilgrim of salvation, but as a wanderer who reads a trace of transcendence in nature. Leopardi, whom he quotes in "Al chiaror delle nevi," evokes the experience of a cool, almost abstract brightness: the light of memory that no longer gives warmth and yet remains indispensable. In these Italian voices, Jaccottet hears the echo of his youth, but also the awareness that all light can only be experienced against the backdrop of extinction.

Rilke, Claudel, and Ungaretti ultimately mark the boundaries of his own writing: Rilke as a poet of transitions, Claudel as a singer of faith, Ungaretti as a witness to pain. Jaccottet remains suspended between them. In retrospect, Rilke's charm and Claudel's pathos seem too certain, too artful; he admires their language without emulating it. From Ungaretti, however, he adopts the simplicity, the reduction, the almost prayerful sobriety of the latter's poems. Thus, from this polyphonic backdrop emerges not a catalog of quotations, but a self-portrait: Jaccottet as the last in a chain of poets who question the light once more—not to possess it, but to lend it, in the face of darkness, a quiet, human voice.

The recurring motifs of water and birds (“Give us an innocent water, O feathered friend, give us wings”) combine to form a final poetic symbolic system: water and flight as metaphors of transition, of the “voyageur” between earth and sky, life and death. At the end of the text is the image of two parallel boats—the poet and his companion—gliding “au fil du temps.” This allegory of tenderness and decay forms the quiet conclusion of a poetics that always aimed at relationship: relationship between beings, between humanity and the world, between language and silence.

The last pages of La Clarté Notre-Dame They function like a self-commentary on the madrigals. Everything that was evoked there in the abundance of images, colors, and sounds reappears here in a mode of reflection. The sound of the bell, the light, the lark, the river—they all become inner signs, “signes qui aident le ciel.” In this phrase, which Jaccottet adopts from Hölderlin, lies the poet’s true self-understanding: not a herald, not a prophet, but someone who “helps” the world toward a higher meaning through small, almost imperceptible signs.

Jaccottet knows better than anyone that this help is limited, perhaps even futile. The latest entries of the Postscript (2020) read like a quiet summary: In the memory of an ancient temple, a small chapel, a blossoming orchard, the aging poet repeatedly recognizes the trace of the "sacré"—not as a religious revelation, but as "construction ouverte, qui contiendrait l'infini." This paradox—openness that contains the infinite—encapsulates Jaccottet's poetological ethos: poetry as the site of a fragile but necessary transcendence.

Poetological consequences

Reading reveals how closely Le dernier livre de Madrigaux and La Clarté Notre-Dame The two pieces are interrelated: the first shows the song in its final, purest form – the attempt to sing once more, even though the sound is already surrounded by silence; the second depicts the transformation of this song into prose, reflection, and stillness. The collection as a whole forms an arc from listening to thinking, from voice to memory.

Poetically speaking, Jaccottet here experiments with a radical reduction. His language, always characterized by great clarity and musicality, now approaches silence without becoming sentimental. The renunciation of metaphors, the searching speech, the interjections of self-correction ("je ne sais comment ni pourquoi," "à vrai dire") are not signs of weakness, but rather expressions of an ethic of precision. In this self-restraint lies Jaccottet's late greatness: he asserts the possibility of a "poésie pauvre" that proclaims nothing, but honors life in its vulnerability.

Thematically, this unfolds into a twofold legacy: firstly, the continuity of his early themes – light, landscape, seasons, the relationship between earth and sky – and secondly, their radical reinterpretation. Light is no longer an image of solace, but a touchstone of faith; the landscape no longer a place of harmony, but the stage for a final, fragile perception. Clarity is not a state, but a transition, a moment of trembling between knowledge and uncertainty.

Mortal, transient

When one considers the two books as a whole, they form a double fugue of sound and silence, memory and insight. Le dernier livre de Madrigaux is the last song of the younger man, who exposes himself once more to beauty; La Clarté Notre-Dame This is the diary of the old man who recognizes the boundary within the same beauty. Between the two lies not a break, but a transformation: the light of one merges into the silence of the other. He concludes that even the most admirable poetry or the purest song cannot form an effective shield against death. At the end of his journey, he wavers between the two undeniable aspects of his experience: the collection of signs and the growing horror at the cries from hell. The repeated use of the same metaphors loses its persuasive power and reveals that he is not truly convinced.

Jaccottet's legacy lies in this transitional movement. He freed modern poetry from the temptation of darkness without relapsing into naive light. His later work shows that language itself can be a form of prayer, even if it is no longer addressed to any god. “Je rêve que cette note froide me guide aussi loin que possible dans mon cœur” – this sentence from La Clarté Notre-Dame It could be the overarching theme of the entire work.

For Jaccottet, poetry ultimately remains not knowledge, but attitude: a quiet, unwavering listening to what remains when everything else is gone. Between the delicate music of the madrigals and the crystalline prose of the Clarity An ethic of seeing and hearing emerges, one that does not banish the invisible, but humbly acknowledges it. Thus, the circle closes of a work that has never ceased to celebrate the world – in the only way that is appropriate to it: as fleeting light.

This positive interpretation is brutally undermined by the reality of human suffering. Hearing the screams of tortured prisoners in Syria, as reported by a released journalist, is a brutally simple scene he cannot banish from his mind. This scene threatens to destroy everything he has built "for the glory of this earthly light." He wonders if he should be ashamed of his book about the enchanted Palmyra, since torture chambers may have been hidden beneath the ruins.

Come me down and arrive at the penser, in extremis,
que tout ce que j'ai contemplé de plus admirable au monde
recouvrait, sous sa surface lumineuse, des caves ténébreuses
où s'affaireraient des êtres démoniaques…
Comment, après cela, croire encore aux enchantements ?
(Aus La Clarté Notre-Dame, II)

As if I had to finally, at the very last moment, arrive at the thought,
that everything I have ever seen that I consider most admirable in the world,
Beneath its luminous surface, it concealed dark vaults,
in which demonic beings might stir…
How could anyone still believe in enchantments after all that?