dc.description.abstract | Paul Valéry is one of the most important French poets and thinkers of the first half of the twentieth century. His well-known poem « Le Cimetière Marin » which contains 144 lines in 24 stanzas, is considered to be a lyric and philosophic poem. Through the first person point of view, the poet expresses his own sensations and contemplates on life and death. In this monologue, the poet chants his admiration for nature, exposes his contemplations, nostalgically remembers his ancestors and reveals his fear of death. At the end of the poem, the poet refutes the paradoxes of the Greek philosopher Zénon, and determines to take action and to jump into the fluctuation of life.
In the first chapter of this thesis, the three important periods of Paul Valéry’s literary career and his concepts about the prosody are introduced. Considered as the successor of Mallarmé - the great master of the French symbolism - Valéry follows the classic prosody as well. With both the classic and modern styles, the poet attaches great importance to the musical aspect and the beauty of the form of a poem. His ideal is to attain the « poésie pure ».
In the second chapter, the structure, the images, and the theme of the poem are analyzed. In the aspect of structure, the opinions of the three critics - Gustave Cohen, Paul Pieltain, James Lawler - are discussed in the first part. According to the development of themes and the change of tones, the critics divide the poem into three or four parts. This study not only compares their points of view, but also presents the thesis author’s idea about the structure and the interpretation of the poem. In the second part of this chapter, we gave out a list that classified the three principal images of the poem - the sun, the ocean and the death. The richness and the variety of the images are one of the characteristics in Paul Valéry’s poetry. The last part of this chapter deals with the theme. The reason why the poem « Le Cimetière Marin » is a lyric and philosophic poem, as well as the main theme and the contrast of the secondary themes are explained.
In the third chapter, the context, expression, rhetoric, and syntax are explored and examined. Through the systematic classification and analysis of this study, the refined and polished writing style of Valéry is grasped.
In the last chapter, the sounds and the prosody of the poem including rhymes, meters, rhythm, alliterations, assonances, concordance and discordance are analyzed. By citing lot of examples of the poem from the musical aspect proves how much Paul Valéry attaching the importance to the sound of a poem, and how much he works on the harmony between the “sound” and the “meaning”. | en_US |