Guillaume Apollinaire
At L. de C.—C.
The sky is starry with the shells of the Boches
The marvelous forest where I live gives a ball
The machine gun plays a tune in thirty-second notes
But do you have the word
Eh! yes the fatal word
At the battlements At the battlements Leave the picks there
Like a lost star looking for its seasons
Heart shell burst you whistled your romance
And your thousand suns have emptied the caissons
That the gods of my eyes fill in silence
We love you oh life and we irritate you
The shells meowed a love to die
A love that dies is sweeter than the others
Your breath swims in the river where the blood will dry up
The shells meowed
Hear ours sing
Purple love greeted by those who will perish
Spring all wet the night light attacks it
It’s raining my soul it’s raining but it’s raining dead eyes
Ulysses how many days to return to Ithaca
Lie down on the straw and dream a beautiful remorse
Which pure effect of art is aphrodisiac
But
organs
to the straws of the straw where you sleep
The hymn of the future is heavenly
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Analysis (AI Assisted)
This war poem, *At L. de C.—C.*, evokes the bleak and surreal landscape of a soldier’s experience, using striking, fragmented imagery and a disjointed rhythm to illustrate the contrast between the horrors of war and the moments of fleeting beauty or nostalgia that emerge from it. The poem stands as a vivid reflection on the absurdity and pain of battle, as well as the complex relationships between love, violence, and memory.
The opening lines, “The sky is starry with the shells of the Boches,” immediately set a surreal, almost nightmarish scene. The contrast between the stars and the “shells of the Boches” introduces the paradox of destruction and beauty, common in war poetry. The phrase “the marvelous forest where I live gives a ball” further intensifies this paradox, suggesting an absurdity in the juxtaposition of life and death—how a place that might symbolize growth and renewal is simultaneously the site of violence and suffering.
As the poem continues, the soldier’s experience becomes increasingly disorienting. The “machine gun plays a tune in thirty-second notes,” a metaphor that illustrates the rhythm of violence, reducing the intense and violent sound of warfare to a mechanical, almost musical, regularity. This could represent how soldiers become desensitized to the noise and chaos around them. The repetitive refrain “The shells meowed” stands as an eerie image, fusing the aggression of war with an almost animalistic, unintelligible quality, as though war has stripped away any human meaning from the sound.
Love and death intertwine in the lines, “A love that dies is sweeter than the others,” presenting a deeply cynical view of love during wartime. The soldier seems to suggest that love in the context of war is not only transient and fragile but also inevitably connected to death. This pairing of death and romantic desire becomes more poignant as the poem explores the tension between human connection and the harshness of the environment.
“Ulysses how many days to return to Ithaca” places the soldier in the mythical context of Homer’s hero, Ulysses, who struggles with his long journey home. This comparison frames the soldier’s longing for escape or return, yet his journey feels equally endless, the “Ithaca” of peace and resolution appearing as distant as the soldier’s life before the war.
The closing lines, with their haunting imagery of “organs to the straws of the straw where you sleep” and “The hymn of the future is heavenly,” suggest an otherworldly conclusion, as though the soldier is caught between the physical world of the war and a spiritual or existential reckoning. The “hymn of the future” might symbolize a final, unattainable peace or idealism, a contrast to the brutal present that surrounds the soldier.
In sum, *At L. de C.—C.* portrays the disorienting and contradictory experiences of war, where violence, love, death, and memory blur together. Its striking imagery and shifting tone capture the emotional complexity of a soldier caught in the turbulence of combat, suggesting that in such a world, the only constant is change and loss. The poem uses surreal, dream-like imagery to give the reader a sense of how the horrors of war challenge both reality and identity, leaving the soldier to grapple with a fractured sense of self amidst the chaos.