Postcard from Picasso to Apollinaire, 1918* |
Post
Card
I
write to you beneath this tent
A Star Shell, CW Nevinson |
While
summer day becomes a shade
And
startling magnificent
Flowers
of the cannonade
Stud
the pale blue firmament
And
before existing fade.
Translated
from the French by Oliver Bernard
Everything
in the poem is fleeting: blink and you might miss the moment when twilight turns
to night and the summer day becomes a "shade,"
a punning play on the two meanings of the word, evoking both evening shadows
and ghosts.
Like
fireworks, artillery shells light the sky, startling in their unexpected
flashes and in the magnificence of the air-born explosions. Many soldiers wrote home and described the haunting
beauty of the deadly shells; Apollinaire condenses the thought into a single
image, comparing the cannonade to flowers in bloom.
The brief
poem doesn't march to a conclusion, but rather gently dies out: the
illumination fades before it ever really existed. Only two rhymes are used in the poem, and the
poet is sparing even in his use of syllables:
the first three-lines contain eight syllables each, while the last three
lines subside to only seven syllables. It
is as if the scene of the poem appears for only a second in the light of a
candle before it is snuffed out. Life in
wartime is ephemeral, and ironically, the postcards written during the First
World War have become collectible ephemera.
Apollinaire mailed the poem "Post Card" to his friend Andre Rouveyre on August 20th, 1915. Wounded by shrapnel in March of 1916, Apollinaire never fully recovered, and he died of the Spanish flu on November 9th, 1918, just two days before the war ended.
Apollinaire, wounded 1916 |
*An actual postcard sent from Picasso to Apollinaire in 1918 was sold in June of 2015 for the record amount of $188,000. Ironically, Apollinaire never received the postcard, and it was marked "return to sender."
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