(no subject)

[mizraim.livejournal.com]

Freedom of Love

My wife with the hair of a wood fire
With the thoughts of heat lightning
With the waist of an hourglass
With the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger
My wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of stars of the last magnitude
With the teeth of tracks of white mice on the white earth
With the tongue of rubbed amber and glass
My wife with the tongue of a stabbed host
With the tongue of a doll that opens and closes its eyes
With the tongue of an unbelievable stone
My wife with the eyelashes of strokes of a child's writing
With brows of the edge of a swallow's nest
My wife with the brow of slates of a hothouse roof
And of steam on the panes
My wife with shoulders of champagne
And of a fountain with dolphin-heads beneath the ice
My wife with wrists of matches
My wife with fingers of luck and ace of hearts
With fingers of mown hay
My wife with armpits of marten and of beechnut
And of Midsummer Night
Of privet and of an angelfish nest
With arms of seafoam and of riverlocks
And of a mingling of the wheat and the mill
My wife with legs of flares
With the movements of clockwork and despair
My wife with calves of eldertree pith
My wife with feet of initials
With feet of rings of keys and Java sparrows drinking
My wife with a neck of unpearled barley
My wife with a throat of the valley of gold
Of a tryst in the very bed of the torrent
With breasts of night
My wife with breasts of a marine molehill
My wife with breasts of the ruby's crucible
With breasts of the rose's spectre beneath the dew
My wife with the belly of an unfolding of the fan of days
With the belly of a gigantic claw
My wife with the back of a bird fleeing vertically
With a back of quicksilver
With a back of light
With a nape of rolled stone and wet chalk
And of the drop of a glass where one has just been drinking
My wife with hips of a skiff
With hips of a chandelier and of arrow-feathers
And of shafts of white peacock plumes
Of an insensible pendulum
My wife with buttocks of sandstone and asbestos
My wife with buttocks of swans' backs
My wife with buttocks of spring
With the sex of an iris
My wife with the sex of a mining-placer and of a platypus
My wife with a sex of seaweed and ancient sweetmeat
My wife with a sex of mirror
My wife with eyes full of tears
With eyes of purple panoply and of a magnetic needle
My wife with savanna eyes
My wife with eyes of water to he drunk in prison
My wife with eyes of wood always under the axe
My wife with eyes of water-level of level of air earth and fire

- Andre Breton
tr. Edouard Rodti

Comments

[whos-on-1st.livejournal.com]

This is a beautiful poem. I like that you placed the author at the end. I didn't recognize the title. I read it at first as if it were a more modern/recent piece and then something blew me away, it was the lines

My wife with armpits of marten and of beechnut
And of Midsummer Night
Of privet and of an angelfish nest

Now, tell me if I'm wrong, but:
I am oddly aware that modern poets do not include armpits anymore and it was used a great deal in the 1940's...then the words marten and privet...oh my,oh my, privet what a great descriptive word and really dating the poem, don't you think?

So, when was this poem written?
Thanks for posting it, I loved reading it.

[mizraim.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you liked it!

It was actually written around roughly the 1920's, by Andre Breton, the "Pope of Surrealism." So, it is fairly modern.

[prettyoctopussy.livejournal.com]

I love the way it speaks to the dismemberment tradition I've seen all over the place in 16th and 17th century love poetry. Each part of the beloved adored seperately, but they always chose just one outrageous metaphor for each part, and usually didn't go through the whole body, which I find sort of creepy--what eyes and breasts and hands and ankles--but what about the nose and thighs and buttocks and ears and fingernails and eyelids? Hence dismemberment. This poems seems better at acknowledging the complexity and wholeness of the beloved...very neat.

"Dismemberment tradtion" is not, AFAIK, an actual academic term. I just made it up right now.

[gloompixie.livejournal.com]

I wonder if this was a stream-of-consciousness poem.

[mizraim.livejournal.com]

If I had to make a guess, I'd say it started off as that, but after writing it he went back and revised it. Several of Breton's poems are stream-of-consciousness. Consequently, several of Breton's poems are also garbage because he did little to no work for revision.

[mizraim.livejournal.com]

Can I actually add you to my friend's list?

Your journal is really interesting.

[gloompixie.livejournal.com]

Sure! I do not mind. :]