Poetry

The Mysterious Barricades

François Couperin’s piece for harpsichord Les Barricades Mystérieuses has caught the imagination of many. In these pages I discuss the piece and its title and gather its echoes in music, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, the visual arts, film, and performance.

In 1937, the French Surrealist poet Maurice Blanchard (1890-1960) published a very short book of prose poems called Les Barricades Mystérieuses (Paris, GLM). Here is a translation of the entire work, as far as I know, the first in English. (Thanks to Marc Brudzinski for help; all inadequacies are entirely mine.) The poem starts with a reference to a mysterious barricade – bones blocking the road. The references to a battle in the first part of the poem suggest these bones are the corpses of fallen soldiers. In the third paragraph, the word “barrière” (both semantically and phonetically close to “barricades”) occurs five times. (It is unclear to me whether the passage entitled “Invincible Nature” is part of “The Mysterious Barricades” or a separate piece published with it.)

The image above is a frontispiece by the artist Lucien Coutaud for the original edition.

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There is an indirect reference in a poem by the Scottish poet Edwin Morgan (1920-2010). His poem The Cape of Good Hope (1955), published in a limited edition but subsequently reprinted in his Poems of Thirty Years (1982) and Collected Poems (1990), has a section entitled “A Dream at the Mysterious Barricades.” The section comprises a number of verses each devoted to an artist or thinker: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Newton, Beethoven, Melville and Myakovsky. In these verses, intense descriptions of some aspect of their work or life are sometimes followed by an exhortation in the mouth of the character. Here are a few lines from the Myakovsky section, in which there is the only reference in the poem to mysterious barricades:

Myakovsky, the revolver, the room
He stopped his caged pacing, he stood gazing
Desperate, proud, through the weakly barring
Window-glass that blocked him from the stirring
And sparrow-jaunty Moscow streets of spring
As the more mysterious barricades
Locked his desire from the vision of love.

In a personal communication (facilitated by Claudia Kraskiewicz, to whom many thanks), the poet has said that he was not aware of the Couperin piece at the time he wrote the poem. He picked up the phrase “mysterious barricades” from the collection of poems by that name by the French poet Olivier Larronde.

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As the epigraph to his novel The Mysterious Barricades (Douglas, Isle of Man: Times Press, 1964 – see the Fiction page on this site), Cedric Glover quotes some verse by Ursula Vaughan Williams (wife of composer Ralph Vaughan Williams) entitled  ‘Couperin’s “Les Barricades Mystérieuses”‘:

Chance word, chance music lead me to retrace
a way I travelled once and must again;
for what I was I search the world in vain.
Mysterious barricades lie dark between
all that I am and all that I have been.
Walled behind years of time my secret lies:
lost spirit or avenging ghost it cries
commanding me to meet it face to face.

The poem is unknown to the editor of The Complete Poems of Ursula Vaughan Williams (The Ralph Vaughan Williams Society, n.d.). According to Glover’s son, Myles Glover, it was written by Vaughan Williams at the request of the author.

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The Swiss francophone poet Philippe Jaccottet mentions Couperin’s piece a couple of times in his notebooks. In La Semaison (1971), one entry reads:

To keep things in their rightful place and not let death encroach on life in vain. Necessity, blessing of limitations (re-reading Henri Michaux, with unbroken admiration).

Let limitations be like the old walls of these forests, these fields: old, human, evoking less a stop, a closure, than a kind of justice and a putting in order, too, without pedantry, fertile. Mysterious barricades. Fruitful measure.

(Translated by Michael Hamburger in Seedtime, 1977, p. 48.)

In a more recent work, Ce peu de bruits (2008, p. 79), he writes:

Bernard Simeone: the ‘Mysterious Barricades’ that he loved to hear played on the harpsichord will not have protected him.

(Translated by John Taylor in And, Nonetheless: Selected Poetry and Prose, New York: Chelsea Editions, 2011. Many thanks to John Taylor for alerting me to this reference.) The reference is to the French writer and music critic Bernard Simeone whose own novella Cavatina mentions the work multiple times.

Jaccottet is the cousin of the harpsichordist Christiane Jaccottet.

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Four issues of a poetry journal called The Mysterious Barricades were published in Spring 1972, Fall 1972, Spring 1973, and Winter 1976. The journal was edited by the poet Henry Weinfield. (Christine Berl, Allen Kimbrell, and Andre Kimbrell are also listed as editors in the fourth issue.) Weinfield took the name of the journal directly from Couperin’s piece. In addition, around that time, he wrote a sequence of four poems under the title Le Tombeau de Couperin, each of the four poems bearing the name of a piece by Couperin: “Passacaglia” [“Passacaille”], “The Soul in Pain” [“L’âme en peine”], “The Harlequin” [“L’Arlequine”], and “The Nightingale in Love” [“Le Rossignol en amour”]. (The poems are reprinted under the heading “The Tomb of Couperin” in Weinfield’s Without Mythologies (Dos Madress Press, 2008)).

In the fourth issue, Weinfield supplied the following preface in which he reflects on the significance of the title “The Mysterious Barricades”:

At least two alumni from the journal, the novelist Paul Auster (see Fiction page) and the poet Stanley Nelson (see below), continued to show an interest in Couperin’s Les Barricades Mystérieuses in later work.

Here are the covers of the four issues (posted with permission of the artists), the first three designed by Andrea Lilienthal and the last by Ward Davenny (click images to enlarge):

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Thanks to Henry Weinfield for information and permission to post text and pictures.

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The Greek poet Veroniki Dalakoura published her volume The Decline of Eros in 1976. It contains the short poem “Mysterious Barricades,” written in the previous year. Here is the poem, translated by Yannis Goumas (and posted with permission of the author):

O! Where are you
O! Why

How lightly François Villon
sleeps upon the harpsichord
in the forest of a god
who departed

The “departed” god and the reference to Villon, calling to mind his famous line “où sont les neiges d’antan”  (“where are the snows of yesteryear”) suggest the barricades of the title are barricades between the present and past, an interpretation suggested also by Ursula Vaughan Williams and Bengt Söderbergh.

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There is a use of the title of the piece in the poem “On a Seldom-Performed Entr’acte from Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty” by Sacheverell Sitwell (1897-1998), published in his 1982 volume An Indian Summer: 100 Recent Poems. (The volume includes poems written from 1964 to 1982; I have not been able to establish the date of this particular poem.) Here is a brief excerpt from the poem.

It is only sad and despairing
that Tchaikovsky wasted so much of his life
Upon his symphonies,
for the flowering of his lyrical genius,
His temperament and the high fever of his nostalgia
are in Eugène Onegin, and in this music we are hearing
Where he can involve himself
without too exact a statement of his involvement,
Made the more thrilling for him
because of the barricades mystérieuses of the footlights,
Over which he could project himself through his music
unequivocally into their midst,
Induce his own feelings into the singers or the dancers,
share their emotions with them,
And absorb them back again

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A series of thirty-two villanelles by the American poet Jared Carter were published as Les Barricades Mystérieuses (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, to whom many thanks for permission to reprint the two poems below) in 1999. The villanelle is a complex poetic form of five three-line stanzas followed by one four-line stanza. The rhyme scheme is ABA, ABA, ABA, ABA, ABA, ABAA. The first line of the poem is repeated as the final line of the second and fourth stanzas and as the penultimate line of the sixth. The third line is repeated as the final line of the third, fifth and sixth stanzas. Thus, using bold for the first line and underline for the third line, the poem looks like this: ABA, ABA, ABA, ABA, ABA, ABAA. The danger of repetitiveness is offset by the poet’s ability to repunctuate and recontextualize the recurring lines.

On the Music page of this site I quoted the comment made on Couperin’s piece by the composer Luca Francesconi, that the piece is “infinite, interminable, with neither head nor tail.” This was in connection to the appearance of the piece at the beginning of E.R. Eddison’s novel The Worm Ouroboros, the title of which alludes to the figure of a serpent eating its own tail (see the Fiction page). One will surely be struck by the fact that the villanelle form used by Carter for this poetic sequence seems, in its own way, to embody the idea of something with neither head nor tail.

The first and last poems of the sequence also have a thematic link to the piece. The first, called “Improvisation,” seems to be giving advice on how to improvise at a keyboard instrument (such as a harpsichord). Although the Couperin piece is not an improvisation, its harmonies do drift in a way that is evoked beautifully in the poem:

To improvise, first let your fingers stray
across the keys like travelers in the snow;
each time you start, expect to lose your way.

You’ll find no staff to lean on, none to play
among the drifts the wind has left in rows.
To improvise, first let your fingers stray

beyond the path, Give up the need to say
which way is right, or what the dark stones show;
each time you start, expect to lose your way.

And what the stillness keeps, do not betray;
the one who listens is the one who knows.
To improvise, first let your fingers stray;

our over emptiness is where things weigh
the least. Go there, believe a current flows
each time you start: expect to lose your way.

Risk is the pilgrimage that cannot stay;
the keys grow silent in their smooth repose.
To improvise, first let your fingers stray.
Each time you start, expect to lose your way.

The final poem in the sequence is called “Comet”:

Somewhere not far beyond these barricades
mysterious, a single branch is burning.
To the dim light and the large circle of shade

I would return, and by the green leaves arrayed
with broken fire, regain a different learning,
somewhere not far beyond. These barricades

are all instruction now, these sounds evade
the measure, and the swarm’s impulsive churning.
To the dim light and the large circle of shade

I would be summoned–image shattered, made
again into a thousand shaped of yearning,
somewhere not far. Beyond these barricades

the scattered pieces come together, swayed
by spectral lines that draw the most discerning
to the dim light and the large circle of shade.

Along this path we cannot be conveyed
but move as particles or waves, returning–
somewhere not far, beyond these barricades–
to the dim light and the large circle of shade.

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Sylviane Dupuis, a Swiss poet, published Géométrie de l’illimité in 2000. It includes several poems connected to particular pieces of music. One of them, “Dessins dans l’air” (Patterns in the Air) is linked to Les Barricades Mystérieuses and provides a beautiful description of the music (posted with the poet’s permission):

Cette pluie de gouttes solidifiées, sous les doigts
véloces qui déroulent, dans l’invisible
arabesques et volutes

— striant l’air —

on ne sait si elle hésite au bord
de l’immobile silence
ou d’un chaos

Here is a translation by me:

This burst of frozen raindrops, under fingers
rapidly unfolding unseen
whorls and arabesques

—scoring the air—

does it waver on the verge
of unmoving silence
or of chaos?

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The Italian poet Silvia Brè entitles her 2001 collection of poems Le Barricate Misteriose. The note on the publisher’s website tells us that “the guiding thread of these poems is the distance that separates us from that which is unmoving and eternal.”

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There is a brief reference to the piece in Adrienne Rich‘s 2006, poem “Archaic,” published in the Virginia Quarterly Review. Here is the last stanza of the poem, in which the reference occurs:

You arrived starving at midnight
I gave you warmed-up food
poured tumblers of brandy
put on Les Barricades Mystérieuses
—the only jazz in the house
We talked for hours
of lesser and greater sorrows
ended up laughing in the thicksilver
birdstruck light

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The poet Stanley Nelson (who published work in the poetry journal The Mysterious Barricades, described above) published his Limbos for Amplified Harpsichord (Presa Press) in 2007. The work is in four sections, called, as Couperin’s harpsichord suites are, ordres. Each ordre has three parts, one centered around Couperin, one around a figure called Dutchman (a 17th century painter of still lives) and one around The Man. These characters wonder in and out of each other’s sections, along with a cast of other characters, MeLord and MeLady, the Winter King and Queen, Coquette and her Gigolo, and so on. The poem as a whole is a kind of ultra-sensuous, hallucinatory, mystical and philosophical fugue. There are four references to something referred to as The Mysterious Barricade. In the following transcriptions, from pp. 10, 15, 61 and 139 (the last spanning across two of the numbered subsections) I do my best to represent the placement of the text on the page, which is of great importance in the poem. I am not confident that I have begun and ended my excerpts in the best places to maximize understanding of them.

                                 Couperin

in chill dawn, loud

est

sunlight

writes

in his notebook:

How to unblock the chords of The Mysterious Barricade?

How to say the shape of Harpsichord, its light-beadlets?

How to sound the strings of many lutes in one Harpsichord?

MeLord

of the manorhouse has been awake in his study

long hours before the Reapers Song

Scything

                                Metaphysics – –

his white flame-candle

merging with a predawn

                                                 the color of winter

                                                  wheatfield

                                                  (broken-texture)

                                                   The Mysterious Barricade

Chariot

of the Winter Kind and Queen

Ascending and descending

from the Bridal Chamber

(train of her trailing gown)                                                        Spreading

Peacock Fan

                                                                                                           Cincturing

Lute-Tablature – –

                                                                                                           Cross

ing

                Armature of the Spheres, The

                                                                                      Mysterious Barricade

(broken

20

texture)                                                                                                          The

Mysterious Barricade:  O

Ever-

Existent Light light or essence of the Great

Light

In an interview with JoSelle Vanderhooft, for The Pedestal Magazine, Nelson has spoken of the significance of Couperin’s music in general, and of Les Barricades Mystérieuses in particular, for Limbos for Amplified Harpsichord:

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In John Ashbery’s 2009 collection Planisphere, the title poem begins:

Mysterious barricades, a headrest (of sorts)
boarded the train at Shinjuku junction
to the palpable consternation of
certain other rubberneckers already installed
in the observation car of their dreams.

Given this reference and the poet’s known fondness for Couperin’s music, it is perhaps not far-fetched to see a further reference to Les Barricades Mystérieuses in the title of another poem in the same volume: “B—-‘s Mysterious Greeting.”

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LaWanda Walters‘ poem “The Barricade” was published in The Georgia Review (Summer 2009) and reprinted on the Poetry Daily website (July 18th, 2009). The poem responds to the sense of energy and motion in restraint that Luke Arnason conjectures is the meaning of the title of Couperin’s piece. The poem is reprinted here with the permission of the poet:

François Couperin must have loved some girl
and known how to argue, how to twine fingers
in a dance—how one idea will break onto another
like waves that rear and kneel, how the sea’s curls must rise
in time to the moon, how a girl can kiss back.

This is what you hear in music that turns
with the steadiness of a merry-go-round,
the ornate horses ready to burst from their glass
bodies and race each other across a hill
in their real shapes—they are that excited,
ready to bolt except for this composition
the composer called a “musical barricade,”
this maze with turnings through a trimmed
suspense: the coy vistas of old boxwood,
this fond and winding argument designed to hold
a loved one fast and keep those horses,
those good horses, from galloping away.

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The poet and art historian David Shapiro published “The Mysterious Barricades” in the Spring 2010 issue of The Cimarron Review. Shapiro was himself a violinist of some note in his youth and comes from a family of musicians. He writes that “at different times, as an ex-violinist with a family string quartet, I have sought an analogy between a piece of music and a poem” (personal communication). Here is the poem, reprinted with the poet’s permission:

as Milena remembers the stones of Prague

I always loved the mountains in New York

two seconds ago he loved you more than snow about an hour ago

how does Couperin matter if they are playing on the wrong instrument

Two seconds ago even the raindrops were snow

I never believed a person who said I used to be a poet
then they tell stories and later they make money

He was boring because no music was “on” two seconds ago
the bumblebee waltz period perpetual

Two seconds ago I was a poet now blank and black on a mountain in NY

Yeah you have an octet and an octave but do you have friends on television

he devoted two seconds to each line if a sestet or sextet it was like
New Orleans without beads (or beads in the trees)

Two seconds ago I forgot the melodramatic ways she destroyed my life

All the time I should have been asking You are a poet yes but are you anything else?

everything always slightly ruined because of the child behind the door

he said quite intelligently that he was nothing compared to NOT keeping his work

except for two seconds goodbye You won the prize but two seconds ago
they
took it away
triple negative
split infinity

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The poet Pavel Chichikov has a poem, “Until Invited,” from June 29, 2012. It appears in his collection A House Rejoicing and it reprinted here with the kind permission of the poet.

Mortal chaos, mysterious barricades
Let us climb the facing, footholds
How far, how high must we go?

I see them in the moonlight, gray and silver
But who has built them, why?
They are so great, so high

Have they always stood here?
If forever, what is there to fear?
And is what lies beyond them near?

Once, before the Infant Child of Prague
I glimpsed what lies beyond the wall
But those who see it cannot say at all

What they have seen, what has been answered
Not do they dare to climb until invited

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