The Living Dead

Honouring our poetic ancestors

Always for the First Time

By André Breton (1896-1966)

Always for the first time

Hardly do I know you by sight

You return at some hour of the night to a house at an angle to my window

A wholly imaginary house

It is there that from one second to the next

In the inviolate darkness

I anticipate once more the fascinating rift occurring

The one and only rift

In the facade and in my heart

The closer I come to you

In reality

The more the key sings at the door of the unknown room

Where you appear alone before me

At first you coalesce entirely with the brightness

The elusive angle of a curtain

It's a field of jasmine I gazed upon at dawn on a road in the vicinity of Grasse

With the diagonal slant of its girls picking

Behind them the dark falling wing of the plants stripped bare

Before them a T-square of dazzling light

The curtain invisibly raised

In a frenzy all the flowers swarm back in

It is you at grips with that too long hour never dim enough until sleep

You as though you could be

The same except that I shall perhaps never meet you

You pretend not to know I am watching you

Marvelously I am no longer sure you know

Your idleness brings tears to my eyes

A swarm of interpretations surrounds each of your gestures

It's a honeydew hunt

There are rocking chairs on a deck there are branches that may well scratch you in the forest

There are in a shop window in the rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette

Two lovely crossed legs caught in long stockings

Flaring out in the center of a great white clover

There is a silken ladder rolled out over the ivy

There is

By my leaning over the precipice

Of your presence and your absence in hopeless fusion

My finding the secret

Of loving you
Always for the first time

André Breton has been called the founder of Surrealism. There are various definitions of Surrealism, as you'll find if you Google, saying much the same thing in slightly different ways. These two between them seem to cover it most comprehensively:

A movement in art and literature that flourished in the early twentieth century. Surrealism aimed at expressing imaginative dreams and visions free from conscious rational control.

A 20th-century avant-garde movement in art and literature which sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind, for example by the irrational juxtaposition of images.

Breton's own Surrealist Manifesto of 1924 calls it:

Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express — verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner — the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.

It grew out of symbolism and dada, and was influenced by Freudian psychology. A number of other French poets of that era also identified as Surrealists. (The most famous exponent was, of course, the Spanish painter, Salvador Dali.) 

I find some contemporary Surrealist writings a bit too weird, the dreaminess more like nightmare, so I've not been interested in trying it. But the early Surrealists were less extreme. This piece is delicate and lovely, and coherent enough to carry me along unresistingly, while still being more imaginative than rational. I might try it some time after all! Indeed, following the rise of 'confessional' poetry and our awareness of the subconscious, I suspect many of us are doing something like it from time to time, without the label.

As usual, the link on the poet's name, above, leads you to the Wikipedia article. If you'd like something a little more detailed and literary, the Poetry Foundation article might fit the bill.

There is also an Amazon author page, really four pages, including not only poetry but fiction and critical / philosophical essays.