The Alchemy of Day

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The Alchemy of Day

Anne Hébert
1960

Anne Hébert's "The Alchemy of Day" was published in her poetry collection, Mystere de la Parole (Miracle of the Word) in Canada in 1960. Like most of her works, this poem received little critical attention, especially from English-speaking critics, since, even though much of Hébert's work was translated into English, Hébert was not well-known outside of Canada. Also, Hébert's best-known work, Kamouraska (1970), a novel that was adapted into a film, has overshadowed much of her other work. "The Alchemy of Day" is on its surface a nature poem, which seems to have spiritual significance as well. When one examines its historical context, however, as well as the author's preface to Mystere de la Parole, the poem takes on added meaning. When she wrote the poem, her native Quebec was undergoing a drastic change known as the Quiet Revolution. During this time period, many residents stressed the need for a unique Quebec culture, a sentiment that ultimately led to a movement that advocated separating from Canada. As Hébert notes in her preface to the book, she feels that Quebec can never have its own identity without a unique language. In her mind, the imprecise language that existed in Quebec in 1960 kept the province from achieving cultural autonomy. The poem, then, through its depiction of a difficult conversion—symbolized with nature imagery—becomes Hébert's attempt to ritually give birth to this language of Quebec. A current copy of the poem can be found in the reprint of A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now, edited by Aliki Barnstone and Willis Barnstone, which was published by Schocken Books in 1992.

Author Biography

Anne Hébert was born on August 1, 1916, in Sainte-Catherine-de-Fossambault, Quebec. Suffering from a childhood illness, she was schooled at home in her early years. She had the influence of several fine literary minds as she was growing up. Her father, Maurice-Lang Hébert, was a distinguished literary critic, and several of his friends were well-respected intellectuals in Quebec. Her cousin was the poet Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau, a man who remained in self-imposed isolation until his death. Hébert also attempted the renunciation of worldly pleasures, having been raised a strict Roman Catholic and seeing herself as having a spiritual and poetic obligation.

From this state of spiritual struggle, she produced her first two works. The first, Les Songes en equilibre (1942), or Dreams in Equilibrium, is the poetic account of a young woman growing from a happy childhood to a life of spiritual solitude and austerity. In her second work, Le Tombeau des rois (1953), or The Tomb of the Kings, Hébert reveals that this seclusion had negatively affected her work, and she emerged from her religious struggle and came to look at the written word as a spiritual practice. Hébert's works have recurring themes of solitude and the past, as do the works of many French-Canadian writers. She also creates a sense of melancholy and often features a child or adolescent as a main character in her writing.

As a poet and novelist, Hébert completed more than 30 works in her lifetime, including Mystere de la Parole (1960, Miracle of the Word), which contained the poem, "The Alchemy of Day." The poet earned several awards in her lifetime, among them the Prix de la Province de Quebec, the France Canada prize, and the Duvernay prize, all in 1958 for Les Chambres de bois, or The Silent Rooms. In 1982 she won the Prix Femina in 1982 for Les Fous de bassan. Hébert died of cancer on January 22, 2000.

Poem Summary

Stanzas 1–6

The first thing to note about "The Alchemy of Day" is that it is an English translation of a French original. Because of this, and because critics note that Hébert's poetry, like much of modern French poetry, is notably difficult to translate into English, one can best understand the poem by focusing on the conceptual meaning of the lines, as opposed to placing undue importance on single words, which may not be what the author intended.

The first line starts out with an address to an unnamed "you" character. The speaker in the poem tells this character: "Let no girl wait on you on that day when you bind your wild / wounds, bloody beast, to the black pine's low branches." Already, the poet has invoked the "day" from the title, but as of yet, one does not know what this day is. The "wild wounds" of the "bloody beast" invokes images of nature, as does the image of the tree, but it is still too early in the poem to know who the "you" character is, or whether this character is supposed to symbolize anything. The fact that the character is wounded and bloody immediately sets the mood for the poem. Whoever or whatever the "you" is referring to is obviously injured, so the poem begins on a sorrowful note. The second stanza introduces two sets of girls, one "around the rusty fire" and one "with violet hearts." At this point, it is safe to assume that Hébert is speaking symbolically, since normal, human girls do not have "violet hearts." Yet it is still too early to know who these girls are.

In the third stanza, the poet notes that "All seven of them will appear in your room carrying blue pities in / quiet amphorae hoisted on their hair." Seven is a very spiritual number, which is found in many religions. At this point, one could guess that the number seven might have some sort of spiritual importance in the poem, too. Indeed, these seven girls are "carrying blue pities" in "amphorae," a type of Grecian urn. Seven girls bringing flowers to the wounded "beast" invokes an image of compassion. But the description of the vases as "quiet" is curious. Generally speaking, when a poet uses an adjective such as "quiet" to describe an inanimate object such as a vase—which is not capable of making noise—it is a clue from the poet. Again, at this point, not enough is known to determine what the importance of this word might be. In the fourth stanza, the poet continues her description of the seven girls, who "slide along the thread of their mauve shadows" in a "quiet" procession that takes place "along the four winds of your walls." The image of sliding along a shadow implies something that is hidden, as does the reference to the "back" of flames that are "underwater." Again, the poet uses the word "quiet," which makes sense when examined along with the hidden imagery. Noise is not hidden, but silence implies that sound is hidden. The four winds reference finally identifies the bloody "beast," which is Nature, or Earth, itself.

The next stanza begins by telling Nature not to "warn the girls with green felt feet cut out of antique rugs / reserved for the slow unrolling of sacred sorrows." At this point, one can guess that, if the beast is Nature, then the girls must be agents of Nature, either mythological beings such nymphs or various aspects of nature. The reference to the "green felt feet" suggests the latter. The girls' feet are made of grass, which is used to unroll "sacred sorrows." Here, the poem reinforces the sorrowful mood from the first stanza, and goes on to include more grass references: "soft meadow / mowed by the sun, silent and thick grass without the cry's stark / space." Hébert again describes a non-speaking object, the grass, as "silent," which is contrasted in the same line with "the cry's stark / space." This is the first reference to a sound, which suggests that, since the poem has been silent up until now, the "alchemy," or transformation, mentioned in the title may have something to do with sound. Indeed, in the next stanza, the poet talks about "the hidden strong vibration of an underground love," which she compares to the "song" of a passionate sea. The hidden vibrations and song indicate that a transformation is starting to take place.

Stanzas 7–13

In the seventh stanza, the poem makes another shift in action. Up until now, the seven girls have been largely inanimate, having only the power to "appear" or "slide." But in this stanza, the action gets more direct. "The first girl alerted will gather her sisters one by one and tell / them softly about the wounded love moored in the leaves of your / open veins." This first girl suddenly is able to speak, although softly, and she tells her sisters about the "wounded love," a reference to Nature's wounds from the first stanza. In the eighth stanza, the poet says that "The darkest of those appointed sisters" will bring Nature "balsam," or a healing balm, which has "blossomed out of" various negative sources, including "bitter hearts" and "old desecrated cellars." These words invoke images of sorrow and despair, as does the phrase in the next stanza, where the slowest sister "will remake her face with burnt tears." But while this sounds negative, the second part of this stanza notes that these tears are "like a / lovely stone brought to light by patient and precise excavations." So, just as the balsam, a positive healing element, blossomed out of a negative image, the same is true here. In addition, the reference to bringing something to light refers back to the previous stanzas, where the sisters were hidden in shadow. Again, some sort of transformation is taking place.

The tenth stanza continues talking about the slowest sister, who has a "girl of salt" bring Nature baskets from the girl's harvest. At the same time, Nature's tears are weighed, another reference to sadness, especially when they are coupled with the image of "a sinking garden." In the next stanza, Hébert invokes an image of Veronica, the legendary woman who wiped Jesus' face on the way to Calvary, and whose cloth was said to contain Jesus' image. One may ask at this point if the poem is meant to be religious in nature. The direct reference seems to imply so, at least at first. But the poet continues with her nature imagery, even within this reference to Jesus, talking about "large pine sheets" and "water." Also, the poet does not linger on the image of Jesus so one can assume that the reference to Jesus' "tortured face," is merely an example to juxtapose next to the tortured body of Nature. In the next stanza, the poet introduces a "feverish girl" who is also in pain, "stuck with brass thorns," and who "hurries now that night, / risen to its full height, stirs its ripe palms like black sunflowers." As the next stanza notes, soon night will cover Nature "like a living / oyster where death meditates." At this point, if one reviews the poem, it is clear that up until this stanza, Hébert has been discussing the natural transformation of day to night.

Stanzas 14–22

At this point, however, in stanza fourteen, the poem changes, speeds up, as the poet gets more animated in her addresses to Nature, and gives two descriptions of Nature, both of which invoke the idea of Jesus again. When Nature's face is "hoisted on / the masts of the four seasons," the poet seems to reference Jesus on the cross. Likewise, when Nature is "grating with sand, annointed with pure oils," and "naked," it also invokes an image of Christ before his death on the cross. This powerful image of death, however, is balanced by the promise of resurrection or rebirth, as Jesus is resurrected. Beginning with the next stanza, stanza sixteen, the poet gives several warnings to nature: "Beware of the silent coming of chalk compassions with faces of / mixed clays." The reference to silence reinforces the other silent references in the poem, and the idea of "chalk compassions" implies a false compassion that is dry as chalk. In stanza seventeen, the poet tells Nature to "let the world rush out bound to the / world like an arrow to its arc." As with some of the previous passages, this stanza implies action, and in the case of the world being "bound to the / world," it implies a sense of order. In stanza eighteen, the poet talks about "the altered gift," whose "strange alchemy" is going to "ripen."

This seems confusing until one looks at stanza nineteen, which instructs Nature to "Utter wild things in the sun, name everything facing the tumult / of the great crumbling and irritated dead." Since Hébert states in the preface to Mystere de la Parole that she wanted to inspire other Quebec residents to define a new, more specific language for their culture, this makes sense. The process of naming things becomes one of identity, and also creation, an idea that is illustrated with the example of a natural daily cycle of life and death. The last few stanzas demonstrate the difference between the beginning of the poem, in which Nature is subdued and wounded, and the ending. In stanza twenty, "The walls of broken blue glass break like circles of water in the sea." The breaking image, again, implies action, and the fact that walls are breaking is a sign of freedom. In stanza twenty-one, the poet notes that the "heart's very center designs its own supple fence." In other words, in place of the blue glass walls of rigid language that have been restricting Hébert and other residents of Quebec, she instead advocates a "supple fence" that is born out of their passion, which is symbolized by the heart. The final stanza indicates that, when day rises again, it does so "in words like huge poppies / exploding on their stems." Hébert's intent is clear. She wishes to go from the cultural silence in the beginning of the poem, from the hidden culture that her people currently live with, to one that is designed by passion, and which explodes in vital, blossoming words.

Topics For Further Study

Hébert is one of many artists who initially believed that renunciation of pleasure was necessary for artistic purposes. Research another artist who has practiced this asceticism and write a short essay arguing how this influence showed in the artist's work.
The author uses many colors in her poem to set a mood. Choose three to five colors and conduct a small survey to discover people's associations with these colors. Record your results on a chart and write a brief summary of your findings.
The poem has a great deal of imagery, including some Christ-related imagery. Choose a symbolic image from a work of visual art and create your own collage to reflect this image.
Research other societies, from any era, that have tried to secede from a greater political body, as Quebec tried to do around the time Hébert wrote the poem. Compare this situation to the situation in Quebec.
In the collection that includes "The Alchemy of Day," Hébert makes a case for defining Quebec's language, which she thinks is indefinite and imprecise. Research the idea of language as it relates to a culture's identity. Write a report based on your findings, including your own opinions about how important you think language is to cultural identity.

Themes

Transformation

The poem's main theme is transformation. In the beginning, the poem talks about "that day," picking one day out of the multitude of days in the natural, daily cycle. This day, as the poem increasingly makes clear, is the day that precedes a new type of day, a day that explodes into being. This is a sharp contrast to the beginning of the poem, where Nature is depicted as a wounded beast, who submits to binding itself to a tree. The concept of binding is significant, because it implies that somebody is a prisoner, or at least does not have freedom of movement. This idea works well with the other concepts that Hébert develops in the poem, such as the use of sounds. In the beginning, all is silent. The Grecian urns placed on top of the sisters' heads are "quiet," as is their processional frieze, during which "They'll slide along the thread of their mauve shadows." At this early point in the poem, all is still silent, still hidden. In stanza five, however, there is a reference to the "cry's stark / space," and in stanza six, the "excessive passion of the sea" which causes it to break out into song. As the poem reaches its close, it has transformed from a silent work to one where Nature utters "wild things in the sun," naming "everything." From a lack of speech to an overabundance, the transformation is complete.

Language

As noted above, the transformation, while on the surface framed in natural terms, is really one of language. In the beginning, the language, like the symbolism, is sorrowful. Nature is wounded, the seven sisters do not have definite movements, merely appearing or sliding, and everything is described in dismal terms that underscore this idea of sorrow. This use of nonspecific language mimics the nonspecific language of Hébert's Quebec when she was writing the poem. The girls cannot move in any definite ways until the poet gives them the language to do so. Until that time, they will only be able to "slide along the thread of their" shadows. But in stanza seven, the language does begin to change, when the first girl is "alerted," a word that implies awareness. She springs into action, gathering "her sisters one by one." She will "tell / them softly about the wounded love moored in the leaves of your / open veins." The wounded love is the current, nonspecific Quebec language, which is moored in "open veins." Until the sisters begin to bring the "balsam," which has "just / blossomed out of bitter hearts" and "old desecrated cellars," which are themselves negative signs, Quebec residents are doomed to go on through the normal daily cycle. In these days, the poet is saying, the day is filled with negative images and silence, because Quebec culture is trapped within a language that is nonspecific. Yet, the end of the poem gives hope for a new Quebec language and culture: "Called for a second time, day rises in words like huge poppies / exploding on their stems."

Style

Symbolism

A symbol is a physical object, action, or gesture that also represents an abstract concept, without losing its original identity. Symbols appear in literature in one of two ways. They can be local symbols, meaning that their symbolism is only relevant within a specific literary work. They can also be universal symbols, meaning that their symbolism is based on traditional associations that are widely recognized, regardless of context. In Hébert's poem, she relies on universal symbols, such as birth, death, and the seasons. At the beginning of the poem, the day is born, and Nature starts out as a "bloody beast." While blood is used as the symbol for many different concepts, in this case, Hébert is depicting the painful birth of Nature at the beginning of the day. This contrasts with night, which is traditionally associated with death: "Soon she'll place her hands tightly over your eyes like a living / oyster where death meditates, centuries of perfect dreams, the / white blood of a hard pearl." A pearl is a universal symbol for beauty and perfection, which ties into the next stanza that discusses "the beauty of your face." This stanza also discusses the seasons: "Oh you trembling in the wind, the beauty of your face hoisted on / the mast of the four seasons." The invocation of the seasons also implies the idea of transformation, since the daily cycle (morning to night) and the annual cycle (spring to winter) are often equated, in a symbolic sense.

Historical Context

When Hébert wrote "The Alchemy of Day," a poem about transformation and new life, Canada was going through its own transformation, much of which centered around Hébert's home territory of Quebec. To understand the tension in 1960, however, it helps to examine Canada's history over the last two centuries. For much of the nineteenth century, during its frontier days, Canada was still referred to as British North America—a collection of colonial provinces that was under British sovereignty. It was not until the 1860s, and the Confederation movement, that Canada became one, united political region. In 1867, Britain, wishing to rid itself of its expensive colonies, passed the British North American Act, which officially severed the country's control of British North America and created the Dominion of Canada, a political entity that was only loosely affiliated with Britain.

Still, while Canada was united in theory, in practice it was a different story, especially in the newly named province of Quebec (formerly Canada East), which paid homage to both its English and French heritage. Quebec made both English and French its official languages, and, through the Canadian government, established a dual school system that included separate schools for English-speaking and French-speaking students. In the twentieth century, Quebec began to grow economically, in part due to a conversion from a mainly agrarian to an increasingly industrial society. The province experienced the greatest industrial growth during the second industrial revolution, which took place between 1920 and 1940. As with the United States and other countries in the late 1920s and 1930s that were affected by the Great Depression, Canada's economy declined. In Quebec, Maurice Duplessis came to power during the 1930s, and his government promoted a return to an agrarian society. Although the movement was unsuccessful, the government made agriculture and the rural life its economic focus.

Even in the later 1940s, after World War II, when Canada as a whole embraced urbanization, Duplessis's government continued to emphasize the rural life, and turned away from urbanization. In the 1950s, the tide began to turn, as farms were urbanized, and industries began to grow again. In 1959, Duplessis died, and the following year, 1960, when Hébert wrote her poem, Quebec entered a period of change referred to as the Quiet Revolution. This revolution witnessed enormous economic growth, as well as a call by the predominantly French-speaking residents of Quebec to define their culture. This focus on preserving cultural heritage, coupled with the strong economy, helped to fuel a separatist movement that sought to have Quebec secede from Canada and become its own, self-governing territory.

Compare & Contrast

1960s: Separatists groups who wish to form an independent Quebec gain attention for their efforts.
Today: Several Canadian laws passed in the late 1990s make it difficult for Quebec to secede from Canada. In addition, polls show that support for secession has dropped to below half of Quebec voters.
1960s: French and English are both the official languages of Quebec.
Today: As of 1974, French is the only official language of Quebec, and the majority of citizens speak French.
1960s: Although most of Canada operates solely under the provisions of the nation's 1867 constitution, Quebec observes special constitutional considerations designed to preserve its language and heritage.
Today: Although most of Canada operates solely under the provisions of the nation's 1982 constitution, Quebec has refused to sign the document, claiming that it does not address the province's specific cultural needs. Quebec retains several distinct aspects that are influenced by its French-speaking heritage, including a different civil code and separate schools for French-speaking and English-speaking students.

Critical Overview

Although she is widely regarded in Canada as one of her country's greatest twentieth-century writers, Hébert has received very little critical attention in the United States or elsewhere. There are many reasons for this. First, most of her poems were published in French. Even though some have been translated into English, they were not widely available until the late 1990s, when collections such as Day Has No Equal But Night: Poems were published. Also, as Lorraine Weir notes in her entry on Hébert for Dictionary of Literary Biography, Hébert's "refusal to be bound by the concerns of the moment," instead writing a collection of diverse, experimental works, "constitutes a challenge which has not yet been fully taken up by Quebec critics and a work hardly begun by those in English-speaking Canada."

Weir also notes that many English-speaking audiences had never heard of the poet until the film adaptation of one of her novels, Kamouraska. As Weir notes, this film "has, more than any of her other works, made Hébert known to an English-speaking audience." Readers who like the novel and decide to investigate Hébert's other works can be surprised, as Weir notes that "the isolation of this novel from the body of Hebert's work as a whole has perhaps cast it in a curious light for some readers."

Other critics, such as F. M. Macri, in his article on Hébert in Canadian Literature, note the poet's views on life, which suffuse her poetry: "From her earliest poems, we observe the author's nascent vision of life and existence as a closed space containing no time but the past." Macri also discusses the late period of the author's career, noting that her "late poetry is an affirmation of freedom and new life." This was also the period during which the author published "The Alchemy of Day" in a collection titled Mystere de la Parole (Miracle of the Word), a work that Macri says turns away from the themes of isolation and solitude that had characterized the author's earlier works. Instead, Macri notes that "All the closed spaces of the Self are opened up by the destruction of the symbols of isolation and solitude." Macri is also one of the few critics who discuss "The Alchemy of Day," which he notes is one of many titles in the book that "convey the feeling of transformation."

Other critics have noted the transformational nature of Miracle of the Word. For example, in Jean-Cleo Godin's 1970 article in Yale French Studies, the critic notes that this volume was for Hébert "the sign of a completely renewed poetics, based essentially on a restoration of the poetic word as the poet consciously accepts a mission of redemption." This mission, which Godin discusses, and which Hébert addresses in her preface to Miracle of the Word is to define and specify the language of her native Quebec. As Godin notes, the indefinite, imprecise quality of this language "prevents the people of Quebec from asserting itself and possessing its own land."

In her 1999 essay in Traditionalism, Nationalism, and Feminism: Women Writers of Quebec, Susan L. Rosenstreich notes that in Hébert's collection she is following the path of other female poets, who "Rather than abjectly accept received ideas . . . actively seeks and makes audible a voice from the earth we consider mute." This quote seems to apply to poems such as "The Alchemy of Day," in which the earth is, ultimately, given a voice.

Reviewers of Hébert's 1994 collection, which included poems from Miracle of the Word, tended to focus more on the overall quality of the poems. As Sarah Lawall notes in her review of the book for World Literature Today, "one is struck again by the precision, clarity, and fine attention to emotional tone in Hébert's work." Likewise, the Publishers Weekly reviewer says that the poems are "expansive—rich in vocabulary, ecstatic and imperative in tone." So, even though Hébert has not found a wide audience outside of her native Canada, the response she has received has been overwhelmingly positive.

Criticism

Ryan D. Poquette

Poquette has a bachelor's degree in English and specializes in writing about literature. In the following essay, Poquette discusses Hébert's use of colors in the poem.

One of the most noticeable aspects of Hébert's poem, "The Alchemy of Day," is its vivid imagery. The poet utilizes a number of image systems, including nature imagery, images of death, and images of Jesus. One of the most striking image systems that Hébert employs is that of color. Colors, in general, are very symbolic, and much has been written about the psychological effect of various colors on humans. Some belief systems, such as feng shui, for example, place immense importance on specific colors. For Hébert, colors are also important in the poem because they serve as a tool to help her achieve the goal that she notes in the preface to Mystere de la parole, and which critics such as Jean-Cleo Godin refer to. In his 1970 article in Yale French Studies, Godin notes that Hébert "begins by criticizing language (langue) which has been as humiliated as the people who speak it, for without this, there can be no language (langage) of true meaning." In this environment of meaningless language, Hébert's deliberate use of colors underscores the need for change in Quebec.

"The Alchemy of Day" is a poem saturated with color. But Hébert does not just include colors to make the poem more vibrant. In fact, she uses color in three distinct ways in the poem. First of all, she uses colors that mimic the natural daily cycle in the poem, from day to night. She does not do this in an overt fashion, however, such as depicting the sky changing colors. Instead, in each of the first four stanzas, she emulates this passing of day by including increasingly bright colors. The poem starts out with the "bloody beast," which the poet notes is going to be bound "to the black pine's low branches." Hébert did not have to specify that the pine is a black pine. She could have chosen any other tree she wanted, but her choice of this particular tree is telling. At the beginning of the daily cycle, when day is first created, it is born out of the darkness, or blackness, of night. In the second stanza, the poet says not to "warn the girls / with violet hearts." On a color scale, going from dark colors to light colors, violet is lighter than black. Again, this suggests the type of lightening that happens when night begins to turn into day. The sky does not become light all at once. Instead, it slowly shifts through the color scale as the sun rises and brightens the landscape.

From violet, Hébert next discusses the girls with "blue pities in / quiet amphorae hoisted on their hair." Again, the pattern holds true. Blue is lighter than violet. Finally, the "mauve shadows" in stanza four are lighter than the "blue" from stanza three. In the next stanza, though, the poet deviates from her pattern, by discussing "the girls with green felt feet." On a normal spectrum, green is darker than mauve. But green is not one of the colors commonly associated with the sky, so it would make no sense for Hébert to include it in her four-stanza montage of lightening colors. Also, the stanza in which the color green shows up indicates that day has already risen, by the mention of the "sun," which mows the "soft meadow." Through the first four stanzas, the day is going through its morning cycle, with darker colors yielding to lighter ones, until the sun is up and shining down on the green grass. From this point on in the poem, Hébert does not mention color until night "risen to its full height, stirs its ripe palms like black sunflowers."

This is an interesting juxtaposition of images. Normally, as stated above, black is associated with night, or darkness, so it seems odd that the poet includes "sunflowers," especially black ones, since sunflowers are usually yellow. This leads to the second way in which Hébert uses color in the poem—as symbols. Every color has symbolic meaning, and when poets and other writers use color in their works, they often tap into these universal meanings. For example, in addition to night, black is also commonly associated with death, since the dark hours of the day—and the dark months of the year—become a kind of symbolic natural death. So when Hébert talks about night having "ripe palms like black sunflowers," she is reversing the traditional symbolism. Ripe is a word that implies fertility, and night is not usually associated with fertility. Also, black is a symbol of death, while flowers are a symbol of life. Hébert is saying that, in the daily cycle, black night is fertile, because it gives birth to day.

In fact, the description in the next stanza that describes how night is going to cover Nature is written in positive terms: "Soon she'll place her hands tightly over your eyes like a living / oyster where death meditates, centuries of perfect dreams, the / white blood of a hard pearl." Death as meditation is not a scary image, and neither is having centuries of perfect dreams. The white pearl also has symbolic meaning. Both white and pearls are associated with purity, so Hébert is again highlighting the daily cycle, which begins fresh and pure each day. In stanza fifteen, the poet makes a commentary on color itself, talking about the "miracles of agile color." As noted above, the colors in the beginning half of the poem are agile. They shift from dark to light and back to dark again, ending with the pure image of a white pearl.

In stanza sixteen, Hébert begins using color in a third way, to underscore the importance of naming things. In her 1999 essay "Counter-Traditions: The Marginal Poetics of Anne Hebert" in Traditionalism, Nationalism, and Feminism: Women Writers of Quebec, Susan L. Rosenstreich notes the following: "In Hébert's poetic mystery, naming each object simultaneously attaches it to all other objects, assigns it a place in relationship to, and in context with, all other objects." In stanza sixteen, Hébert offers a warning about "the silent coming of chalk compassions with faces of / mixed clays." This dreary image, which invokes the silence from the beginning of the poem, warns the poet's readers not to forget the importance of having their own, vibrant language, where they can name things themselves. As Godin notes, "Thus poetic speech, in the work of Anne Hébert, serves to clarify the thought of her countrymen, but by awakening it and provoking it; this is why her words are 'creative.' "

Indeed, in stanza seventeen, Hébert seems to try to empower her Quebec readers, telling them to "Poise the green against the blue, and, possessor of power, don't be / afraid of ochre and purple." Through the use of an obscure, specific color like "ochre," the poet is communicating the message that Quebec needs its own language that can be this specific. And once her countrymen have absorbed this message and created this new, specific language, Hébert notes that day will rise "in words like huge poppies / exploding on their stems."

Source: Ryan D. Poquette, Critical Essay on "The Alchemy of Day," in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2004.

Susan L. Rosenstreich

In the following essay, Rosenstreich examines Hebert's focus on "the outer limits of meaning, on the signifying edge of words" in her poetry.

It is discomfiting to read the poetry of Anne Hebert. Though the reading of poetry is not guaranteed to be a reassuring experience, it is nonetheless difficult to set oneself the task of reading the poems of a quebecois writer who dismantles the plausible myths making natural storms, man-made wars, loving procreation, and humiliating genocide understandable to us. Yet, estrangement from the kinds of experiences we have come to accept as common brings certain rewards. Hebert may destroy traditional notions of order, but, in exchange, her poetry expands the range of experience over which we are to impose a greater order.

The assertion that Hebert is concerned with reforming our vision contradicts common critical wisdom, which has weighed Hebert's commitment to the real world and found it inadequate. When Le Tombeau des rois was published in 1953, Roger Duhamel wrote that this second volume of Hebert's poetry employed a language of "arid peaks," exquisite, but remote. Sensitive to the same transcendent quality of language in the collection, Andre Rousseaux referred to Hebert's poetry as "music."

The verbal distance between the poet and her readers has been interpreted by later critics as a withdrawal from the outside world into a private, defensive one. In his exhaustive study of the relationship between oneirism and Hebert's poetic themes, Guy Robert observed that the poet "being first and foremost a poet, her works cannot be dissociated from her most secret, most real personality." This seclusion is seen as an escape from real problems in the analysis of Jean Ethier-Blais, who called Hebert's work "waiting literature . . . a literature which adheres to the reality of a people hesitant to define themselves as a nation."

The assumption behind these assessments of Hebert's poetry—that literature has to do with reality only when it deals with contemporary situations—translates Hebert's use of prehistoric myths, events in the past, or traditions transplanted in Quebec from metropolitan France, into expressions of nostalgia, fear of reality, and a reluctance to face the future. Hebert is forced into a position much like the one in which Sartre placed Etienne Lero in his essay "Orphee noir," which serves as an introduction to Leopold Sedar Senghor's Anthologie de la nouvelle poesie negre et malgache de langue francaise. Lero's abstract realism does little service to black culture, argues Sartre. Black culture exists only insofar as it rebels against white culture. Citing Aime Cesaire's impassioned poetry of Negritude as an example of this rebellion, Sartre observes: "What Cesaire destroys is not all culture, but white culture; what he lays bare is not the desire for everything, but the revolutionary aspirations of the oppressed Black's specially concrete and determined form of humanity." In Sartre's view, Negritude poetry is useful in that it is political, and can censor and determine the conditions of black culture.

Contrary to Sartre's theory that political power is the source of cultural strength, Michel Benamou's theory of ethnopoetics holds that cultural strength promotes political health. Ethnopoetics, as Benamou defines it, is an "attempt to abolish the divisive thinking about literature that casts it into the categories of central or marginal according to its power base."

The contradiction between the two theories of culture is an important factor in the accurate reading of poets who, like Hebert, emerge from politically volatile cultures. Theories like Negritude and ethnopoetics force us to make a clear distinction between minority writers, who are participants in a political struggle between old and new powers, and marginal writers, who are engaged in a literary struggle between old and new perceptions. Benamou's definition of ethnopoetics favors marginalism precisely because it elevates the struggle for political power to the level of a debate over humanism, over changing perceptions of the human experience. The challenge for the marginal poet is not to prove the existence of differences, for which the evidence is all too ample, but to create resemblances. We can therefore expect marginal poets to transcend the limits of representational art, and to exploit the ability of language to transform our limited, quotidian view of the present into an expanded, extraordinary vision of the future.

Hebert's achievements in facilitating this transformation are not unlike those of Leon-Gontran Damas. One of the first Negritude poets, Damas proceeded in the precise direction Sartre contraindicates for Negritude poets. Damas thus provides an example of francophone marginalism from which to launch a discussion of Hebert's poetry.

In "Nuit blanche," Damas demonstrates how the marginal poet expands the reader's vision beyond political struggles in a culture. From the title's pun, at once a suggestion of a waking dream and a reference to the myth of Caucasian racial superiority, to the comic absurdity of the toothless Aryan at the end of the poem, Damas disarms the reader with his sense of humor and playfulness. Mocking the notion of racial superiority, the poet observes the blue Danube pass through a range of colors from pink to white, and finally, to the "Danube bleu blanc rouge vert rose / au choix," as he whirls in a dizzy nocturnal waltz with Gobineau, the French racist, and Hitler, Gobineau's disciple. Racial superiority is reduced to the senile ruminations of some "bon aryen / qui machonne sa vieillesse sur quelque banc de square." Instead of arousing the reader to anger, the poet elicits compassion for that poor, misled "bon aryen." Bigotry, as Damas depicts it, is weakness and helplessness. Dividing groups into blacks and whites, Aryans and non-Aryans, right and wrong, is not a mark of political strength so much as it is a symptom of moral lassitude and blindness to reality which is not composed of convenient dualisms.

If Hebert's poetry lacks the humor and irony characteristic of Damas's work, her language imposes itself on us just as aggressively. True, the lyric tone of her first anthology, Les Songes en equilibre, seems to counter this statement. Published in 1942, this collection is remarkable for its tone of desolate lyricism and invites comparison between Hebert and Verlaine. Yet there is more to this early poetry than tone.

In "Eve" the poet alludes to Genesis, the theory of evolution, bucolic tradition, and modern technology, layering the poem with meanings addressing our reason as well as our senses. The poem opens on a note of reference to biblical mythology: "Commencement du monde." Fragments from myths concerning the emergence of the planet, the first signs of life, and the origin of individual consciousness weave Darwin and Genesis into an exuberant textual background, against which we see dramatized a conflict between an Acadian-like past and modern technology. Hebert's Eve faces a choice between the pure life of the past and the corrupt life of modern times, recalling Longfellow's Evangeline, loyal to an ideal but plunged into the self-indulgent morality of cities in the New World. The conflict for Hebert's Eve, unlike Evangeline, is more complicated, its history originating with life itself. Torn between meeting expectations of selfless devotion and satisfying more selfish urges, Eve (as a triple female poetic voice) bears in her "coeur eternel" a conflict poorly disguised by the apparent order of the modern city, "range / Et rectiligne."

"Eve" attributes the malaise of modern times to the inability of contemporary urban order to mask a conflict surviving from our collective moral past. Hebert's exploration of the roots of that malaise reveals a complex relationship between the present and the past, a relationship the significance of which cannot be simplified despite modern techniques of regimentation and reduction. Hebert has even suggested that attempting to suppress memories of the past increases the susceptibility of contemporary civilization to moral decay and passivity. Two novels by Hebert, Kamouraska and Heloise, both with their female protagonists, adopt this theme, but a more analytical examination of the relationship between the past and the present appears in Hebert's second volume of poetry, Le Tombeau des rois, published in 1953. Two temporal frames are superimposed in this collection to produce a complicated vision of modern life. Written in language which interprets the female poet's personal experience as a universal experience, Le Tombeau des rois reveals and challenges the subtle control the past exercises over the destinies of cultures.

The title poem of the collection conforms poorly to the pattern of "a one-day oneiric cycle from birth to death," which Pierre Page ascribes to the volume as a whole. "Le Tombeau des rois" projects an aura of dreaminess, it is true, and in that sense, seeming remote from the everyday world, the poem possesses an oneiric quality. But on close reading, the estrangement from quotidian experience in the poem is a reflection of the poem's elaborated reality. The poem, surging toward surrealism in the first line, "J'ai mon coeur au poing comme un faucon aveugle," is immediately brought down to a realistic scale by the use of the simile. Rather than creating an oneiric state of unreality, the initial image alerts us, excites our tension and anxiety, and imbues the text with poignant realism.

What Do I Read Next?

In "The Alchemy of Day," Hébert talks of a Quebec culture that has been repressed. In The Handmaid's Tale (1985), bestselling Canadian author Margaret Atwood depicts a future American society where religious fundamentalism holds sway and women live repressed lives and are subservient to men.
In the poem, Hébert changes from the style of her earlier poems, which glorified solitude, and advocates speaking out, which she does through a nature analogy. In Wendell Barry's A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979–1997 (1999), the poet focuses on the theme of solitude, detailing pastoral images of country life.
While "The Alchemy of Day" explores the renewal of life through language, Hébert's 1980 novel Héloïse explores the undead through the use of a protagonist who is a vampire.
Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), the first book of popular Canadian author Alice Munro includes many stories about coming of age in a small Canadian town. Several of the female narrators possess characteristics that keep them isolated from others in their communities.
In The Practice of the Wild: Essays (1990), Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Gary Snyder offers essays that discuss his interests in language, his spiritual beliefs, and his respect for nature.

The female narrator implies that a clue has lured her into the royal vault: "Quel fil d'Ariane me mene / Au long des dedales sourds?" Yet another voice, speaking of the female narrator in the third person, disclaims her freedom to reason. Lines 13–15 ("En quel songe / Cette enfant fut-elle liee par la cheville / Pareille a une esclave fascinee?") tell us that the female narrator was drawn into the poem, if not involuntarily, at least instinctively. In contrast, the entombed pharaohs, though dead, display aggressive willpower, exercising imperious control over the narrator, luring her towards self-immolation in the hope of revitalizing themselves. But they find nothing when they reach for the narrator's heart "pour le rompre." Having broken herself into fragments before she entered the tomb, the narrator has protected her heart from the kings of the past, and resists their attempts to dominate her. The pharaohs are no longer a threat; the female narrator's fear of them is exorcised. Yet the dead kings have a certain value for the female narrator/poetic voice. Their chestplates, decorated with "quelques tragedies patiemment travaillees," are offered "sans larmes ni regrets" for the narrator's dispassionate consideration, reminding her that the deeds of the past were governed by the conditions of the past. They require the narrator's understanding, but not her adulation. Her complicity with the dead would emprison her in the tightly circumscribed limits of rituals and gestures inherited from the past. But the female narrator/poetic voice prepared herself to explore unfamiliar territory before she entered the tomb, and successfully resisted the power of the past to determine the present.

Having broken the incapacitating spell of the past over those living in the present, the female narrator opens the tomb to let in dawn and the future, the "reflet d'aube" and "le matin." The past, with its pharaohs in fancy raiment, loses its awesome mystery, and the future, instead, becomes a source of the mysterious unknown as the poem ends with a question: "D'ou vient donc que cet oiseau fremit / Et tourne vers le matin / Ses prunelles crevees?" The female narrator/poetic voice has demystified the past and leads us to a new mystery, taking us from the known to the unknown, moving against the constraints of tradition into ever widening circles of knowledge. To be among the living in "Le Tombeau des rois" is to be counter-traditional.

Countering tradition is central to Hebert's conception of poetry as she describes it in "Mystere de la parole," a collection in the 1960 anthology of her Poemes. In her foreword to the collection, Hebert writes that the poet struggles with "la terre muette et il apprend la resistance de son propre coeur tranquille et muet, n'ayant de cesse qu'il n'ait trouve une voix juste et belle pour chanter les noces de l'homme avec la terre." Rather than abjectly accept received ideas, the female poet actively seeks and makes audible a voice from the earth we consider mute. The mystery of words is the transformation of the known and familiar into the unknown and new.

Hebert reviews this process of transformation in the title poem of the collection. Our world at first seems naked and silent to us: "Dans un pays tranquille nous avons recu la passion / du monde epee nue sur nos deux mains posee . . ." That silence is broken and the world is filled with life when we train our senses upon it:

Des fleches d'odeur nous atteignirent, nous liant a la

terre comme des blessures en des noces excessives.

O saisons, riviere, aulnes et fougeres, feuilles, fleurs,

bois mouille, herbes bleues, tout notre avoir saigne

son parfum, bete odorante a notre flanc.

But naming the objects of our world is not sufficient to make them familiar to us. Word and world are still alienated from each other, and objects confuse us: "Les couleurs et les sons nous visiterent en masse et par / petits groupes foudroyants, tandis que le songe doublait notre enchantement. . ." When we accept the world as contingent to us, when our sense of it becomes that of a "jeune accouchee," and the world becomes "le printemps delivre," then word and world do merge in our minds. We see a proliferation of objects as a whole, nonsense becomes sense, and ". . . la parole se fonde, / souleve notre coeur, saisit le monde en un seul geste / d'orage, nous colle a son aurore comme l'ecorce a / son fruit." Hebert's words are not names; they are the significance of objects.

In Hebert's poetic mystery, naming each object simultaneously attaches it to all other objects, assigns it a place in relationship to, and in context with, all other objects. The poet addresses her poem to the many listeners she hopes to unify, "freres les plus noirs, toutes fetes gravees en / secret . . .," all those who present themselves "Fronts boucles ou croupit le silence en toisons mus-/quees, toutes grimaces, vieilles tetes, joues d'enfant, / amours, rides, joies, deuils, creatures, creatures . . ." The poet's function is to extract from these superficial differences a profound harmony: "Que celui qui a recu fonction de la parole vous prenne / en charge comme un coeur tenebreux de surcroit, et / n'ait de cesse que soient justifies les vivants et les morts / en un seul chant parmi l'aube et les herbes."

As represented in the three poems we have discussed, Hebert's version of objective reality consists of an apparent mode and a concealed mode. There is the turbulence of inner conflicts beneath the impassive exterior of urban life in "Eve"; alongside the present in "Le Tombeau des rois" lies the powerful past; and within the silence and calm of the world in "Mystere de la parole," objects pulse with vitality. The revelation of this hidden world with its powerful forces is initially alarming to the reader. But the woman poet familiarizes us with this new level of reality, and relates it to our well-known surroundings so that we accept the coexistence of the two levels.

The poet's purpose is not merely one of revelation. She aligns the forces of the two realities to erase the conflicts which dull our perception of the common world. Hebert wants us to reject the world as we have been taught to see it, identifying objects and segregating them into familiar and alien camps. Poetry should reconcile us with that which is alien; otherwise, we remain prisoners of the past, afraid to explore reality beyond the distinctions separating objects. When we overcome our fear of reality, when we reject ideas received from the past, we use that past to enhance our perception of reality.

The use of the past in the interest of the best possible future is the basis for Hebert's counter-traditions. But if her counter-traditions serve a protective and conservative function, they also perform the task of revolution. Hebert's mystery of words is a theory of deep change, for words operate like traditions, constantly expanding their significance, broadening our apprehension and experience of objective reality. Hebert's words change our world.

The female poet who exerts pressure on words to alter their significance and our perception advances on the outer limits of meaning, on the signifying edge of words. This edge separates sense from nonsense, that which is already known from that which is yet to be understood. This is the margin on which Hebert writes. But her acute awareness of reality and her drive to see beyond superficial distinctions do not permit her to err on the side of universalism, where those distinctions are denied. Hebert does not assume that objects share some universal, essential bond. She creates that bond through her poetry.

Source: Susan L. Rosenstreich, "Counter-Traditions: The Marginal Poetics of Anne Hebert," in Traditionalism, Nationalism, and Feminism: Women Writers of Quebec, edited by Paula Gilbert Lewis, Greenwood Press, 1985, pp. 63–70.

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

Sources

Godin, Jean-Cleo, "Anne Hébert: Rebirth in the Word," in Yale French Studies, Vol. 45, 1970, pp. 137–53.

Hébert, Anne, "The Alchemy of Day," in A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now, edited by Aliki Barnstone and Willis Barnstone, 1992, pp. 235–37.

Lawall, Sarah, Review of Day Has No Equal But Night, in World Literature Today, Vol. 68, No. 4, Autumn 1994, p. 781.

Macri, F. M., "Ann Hébert: Story and Poem," in Canadian Literature, No. 58, Autumn 1973, pp. 9–18.

Review of Day Has No Equal But Night: Poems by Anne Hebert, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 241, No. 13, March 28, 1994, p. 91.

Rosenstreich, Susan L., "Counter-Traditions: The Marginal Poetics of Anne Hébert," in Traditionalism, Nationalism, and Feminism: Women Writers of Quebec, edited by Paula Gilbert Lewis, Greenwood Press, 1985, pp. 63–70.

Weir, Lorraine, "Anne Hebert," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 68: Canadian Writers, 1920–1959, First Series, edited by W. H. New, Gale Research, 1988, pp. 166–73.