Méditations poétiques Reading Order

What is Le Lac by Lamartine about?

'Le Lac' (The Lake, 1820) is a meditation on the experience of returning to a place where a love affair was experienced in the previous year, to find that the beloved woman is dead and the place unchanged. Lamartine's speaker returns to the lake at Bourget in Savoy where he and Julie Charles spent time in the summer of 1816; Julie has died in December of that year; the speaker apostrophizes the lake — addresses it directly — and asks it to remember them, to preserve in its permanent natural existence the moment of human happiness that cannot be preserved otherwise. The poem's philosophical core is the contrast between natural time (the lake, the rocks, the forest — permanent and cyclical) and human time (individual life — brief, linear, unrepeatable); the speaker's request that the lake 'remember' is both an act of mourning and an argument that natural memory is the only form of immortality available to the secular Romantic. The poem established several images that became permanent in French Romantic poetry: the lake as witness to human feeling, the absent beloved recalled by the natural setting, the apostrophe to inanimate nature as a form of prayer. 'Le Lac' is one of the most set-to-music poems in French literary history — Gounod, Liszt, and dozens of composers have made songs of it — and its phrases ('Ô temps, suspends ton vol' — O time, suspend your flight) are among the most quoted lines in the French poetic canon.