Reading Order
Charmes (Valéry)Charmes Reading Order
Charmes (Charms, 1922) by Paul Valéry is the collection of twenty-one poems that contains 'Le Cimetière marin' (The Cemetery by the Sea) — the most celebrated French poem of the twentieth century — alongside 'L'Abeille,' 'Les Pas,' 'La Pythie,' 'Palme,' and the other major shorter poems. Where La Jeune Parque is a single sustained meditation on consciousness, Charmes is a collection of concentrated occasions — each poem is a distinct formal achievement, moving between lyric compression and philosophical density. The title 'Charmes' invokes the Latin carmen (song, incantation) — Valéry's claim that poetry is essentially an oral and musical art, a charm or spell that works through sound rather than through meaning in the conventional sense. Charmes contains Valéry at his most accessible and his most demanding: 'Les Pas' (Footsteps) is a love poem of extraordinary delicacy; 'La Pythie' is a visionary account of poetic inspiration as a kind of ecstatic seizure; 'Le Cimetière marin' is a philosophical meditation on death, time, and consciousness meditating from a cemetery overlooking the Mediterranean at Sète.
Where to start
Begin with 'Les Pas' (the most accessible and immediately beautiful poem in the collection), then 'L'Abeille' (the bee-sting as figure for creative inspiration), then 'Palme' (the palm tree as figure for patient creative work). Then attempt 'Le Cimetière marin' — begin by reading it straight through for the sound and the movement, before worrying about the meaning. The Zeno paradox at the center of the poem ('Achille immobile à grands pas!') is the key conceptual moment.
Complete Charmes (Valéry) Book List
- 1Buy
Charmes (1922)
Paul Valéry·1922·In the Pléiade Œuvres, vol. 1, edited by Jean Hytier; also available in the Gallimard Poetry series. In English: The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, vol. 1 (Princeton, 1971) includes David Paul's translations of Charmes with French text opposite. - 2Buy
La Jeune Parque (1917)
Paul Valéry·1917·The companion long poem — reading both together gives the full picture of Valéry's mature verse achievement. - 3Buy
Variété (5 vols., 1924-1944)
Paul Valéry·1924·Valéry's major essay collections — five volumes of critical prose including essays on Mallarmé, Leonardo, poetry and thought, and the pure intellect; the prose companion to Charmes. - 4Buy
Poésies (1899)
Stéphane Mallarmé·1899·The Mallarmé collected verse from which Valéry's poetic aesthetic descends — 'Le Cimetière marin' in particular can be read as the fulfillment of what Mallarmé was attempting in the sonnets of the Poésies. - 5Buy
Eupalinos ou l'Architecte (1923)
Paul Valéry·1923·The prose dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus about architecture and the relationship between art, building, and the body — published the year after Charmes, it provides the intellectual context for the aesthetic positions the poems embody.
Charmes (Valéry) — Frequently Asked Questions
What is 'Le Cimetière marin' about?
'Le Cimetière marin' (The Cemetery by the Sea) is a twenty-four-stanza poem (in six-line stanzas of ten-syllable verse) meditating from the cemetery at Sète, overlooking the Mediterranean, on the relationship between consciousness, mortality, and the temptation of eternal rest. The speaker begins in a state of contemplative intensity — noon, the sea blazing, the white sails and white tombs — and moves through meditations on the dead, on the Platonic ideal of an unchanging reality, on the Epicurean teaching that death is nothing, on the Zeno paradox (is motion real?), to a final affirmation of living consciousness against the seductions of death and eternity: 'Le vent se lève!... il faut tenter de vivre!' (The wind is rising!... We must try to live!).
What does 'Charmes' mean as a title?
Charmes invokes multiple meanings: the French word for 'charms' (magical spells, enchantments) and the Latin carmen (song, incantation — the root of the word). Valéry's claim is that poetry is fundamentally an incantatory art — its effect is a kind of magic that works through sound and rhythm rather than through meaning in the discursive sense. A 'charme' is something you feel before you understand it, and the poems in the collection are designed to produce their effect through their musical and sonic properties as much as through their intellectual content. The title is also a provocation — claiming that poetry is essentially irrational, a charm rather than an argument.
What is the Zeno paradox in 'Le Cimetière marin'?
In stanza 21, Valéry invokes Zeno of Elea's paradox of Achilles and the tortoise: if Achilles must first cover half the remaining distance to the tortoise before covering the rest, and then half of that, and so on, he can never reach it — motion is mathematically impossible. Valéry uses the paradox as a figure for the seduction of stasis and pure intellect: if you analyze motion into its mathematical structure, you can prove it doesn't exist, but meanwhile Achilles is running. The paradox is both a statement about the inadequacy of pure intellect (which can reason its way to the impossibility of motion while motion proceeds) and a figure for the poem's central tension between the temptation of eternal rest and the affirmation of living movement.
Why is 'Les Pas' (Footsteps) considered one of Valéry's best poems?
'Les Pas' is twelve lines about someone approaching across a room while the speaker waits — the poem delays, slows the approach, makes the footsteps themselves an object of almost unbearable anticipation. What makes it extraordinary is the formal control: the verse slows with the footsteps, the imagery (the 'personne pure,' the 'lents, les pas comptés') creates a quality of suspended expectation that is somehow more intense than arrival. Many critics consider it the most perfectly achieved of Valéry's shorter poems — the fullest realization of his ideal of maximum effect from minimum means.
What is Valéry's relationship to Mallarmé?
Valéry met Mallarmé in 1891 at twenty and was immediately overwhelmed — he became Mallarmé's most devoted disciple and wrote some of the most important critical essays on Mallarmé's work. But Charmes is not simply a continuation of Mallarmé: Valéry adds a more explicit philosophical content (the meditations on consciousness, death, and pure intellect), a more dramatic range of emotional register (from ecstasy to despondency), and a greater accessibility in the shorter poems. Where Mallarmé pursued pure suggestion toward hermeticism, Valéry pursued pure form toward philosophical poetry. 'Le Cimetière marin' is probably the poem Mallarmé's aesthetic was pointing toward without being able to arrive at.
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