Write a critical comparison of the poems ‘Le Pont Mirabeau’ by Guillaume Apollinaire and ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’ by W. B. Yeats.
Le Pont Mirabeau
Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine
Et nos amours
Faut-il qu’il m’en souvienne
La joie venait toujours après la peine
Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure
Les mains dans les mains restons face à face
Tandis que sous
Le pont de nos bras passe
Des éternels regards l’onde si lasse
Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure
L’amour s’en va comme cette eau courante
L’amour s’en va
Comme la vie est lente
Et comme l’Espérance est violente
Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure
Passent les jours et passent les semaines
Ni temps passé
Ni les amours reviennent
Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine
Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure
Guillaume Apollinaire
Down by the Salley Gardens
Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;
She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.
In a field by the river my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.
W. B. Yeats
Yeats’ ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’ and Apollinaire’s ‘Le Pont Mirabeau’ are closely related in subject and theme. Both poems express the nostalgia of a persona who has lost a loved one, and each poet goes about portraying this loss by using a range of poetic devices and stylistic techniques. By analysing these techniques, a reader can identify points of contrast and similarity between the two poems.
Both poems centre around the subject of the loss of love, and it is therefore not surprising that they also share several similar themes. Nature is present in both poems: in ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’, Yeats uses the image of ‘leaves [growing] on the tree’ to depict the way in which the female figure in the poem deems that love itself should ‘grow’. Similarly, the female bids the persona to ‘take life easy, as the grass grows’. The poem is set ‘by the salley gardens’, giving it a very strong link to nature. The definition of the word ’salley’ is slightly ambiguous, but the most likely meaning of the word is ‘willow tree’; in the Ogham, the word ’saille’ means willow, which can be anglicised to ’salley’. The willow is associated with melancholy and the leaves themselves traditionally symbolise unrequited or lost love, which befits Yeats’ poem. Nature is a less integral theme in ‘Le Pont Mirabeau’, but the motif of ‘la Seine’ is an important one throughout, as the flow of the river symbolises the passing of time and the way in which love has inevitably escaped the persona: ‘l’amour s’en va comme cette eau courante’.
The passing of time is a theme that exists in both Yeats’ and Apollinaire’s poems; in ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’ the use of the past tense throughout until we come to the final line in present tense highlights the contrast between the persona’s memories and the ‘tears’ he experiences in the present. The motifs of ‘leaves’ and ‘grass’ are used to symbolise time, as the female figure wishes the persona to ‘take love easy’, just as the ‘leaves’ and ‘grass’ grow slowly over time. Similarly, the nature image of ‘la Seine’ in Apollinaire’s poem symbolises the inevitability of time moving on. Much of the diction in the poem alludes to the passing of time, such as the repetition of ‘vienne la nuit’ and ‘les jours s’en vont’. The theme of remembrance and regret is linked to that of time, as in both poems the reader is constantly reminded that the ‘amour’/'love’ of the persona is in the past. In ‘Le Pont Mirabeau’, the word ‘amour’ is repeated four times, while the word ‘love’ is repeated three times in ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’, highlighting the personas’ regret for having lost their loves. Yeats also repeats the opening of the last two lines of each stanza: ’she bid me take love easy’ and ‘but I was young and foolish’, which again emphasises the persona’s ruefulness.
In terms of structure, the two poems are fairly different from one another. Apollinaire’s poem is obviously much longer that Yeats’, and uses a combination of quatrains and couplets in its structure. The quatrains appear almost as if they are stanzas of three decasyllabic lines, in which the central line has been split into a tétrasyllabe and a hexasyllabe. This frequent and steady change in line length, accompanied by the heptasyllabe of the regular couplet refrains, mimics the flow of ‘la Seine’ and thus contributes to the concept of the steady movement of time in the poem. Yeats also makes use of quatrains in his poem, although the structure is on the whole much more simple than that of ‘Le Pont Mirabeau’. The poem is hexasyllabic and uses a simple couplet rhyming scheme within the two quatrains, placing emphasis on the rhymed words at the end of each line. For example, the importance of the ’snow-white feet’ and ’snow-white hands’ symbolising the purity of the persona’s loved one is highlighted by the fact that these rhymes come at the end of the line, where the reader naturally pauses for reflection. The rhyme scheme in Apollinaire’s poem is somewhat more complicated: for each quatrain and couplet pairing, the poet uses an abaa, cc rhyme. Evidently, the rhyme of the refrain stays constant throughout while the rhymes in the quatrains develop from abaa to dedd, and so on. Most of these rhymes are perfect rhymes, although in the final quatrain, the rhyme of ‘les semaines’ with ‘reviennent’ and ‘la Seine’ is a pararhyme, which creates pathos and a tone of uneasiness as we learn that ‘ni temps passé / Ni les amours reviennent’.
The tone of these poems is affected by the diction applied by the poets; both allude to the couple to create a nostalgic mood, such as Apollinaire’s line ‘les mains dans les mains restons face à face’, which is similar to the line, ‘And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand’ in ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’. Apollinaire’s use of the homonyms ‘lente’ and ‘violente’ in the third quatrain further accentuates the mixed tone of nostalgia and regret. In the same stanza, the word ‘l’Espérance’ is capitalised, emphasising the importance of hope to the persona, and the coupling of ‘l’Espérance’ with ‘violente’ serves to create a strong feeling of futility. Yeats uses punctuation and caesurae to highlight certain words such as ‘foolish’, which is followed by a comma in each stanza, causing the reader to pause and reflect on the word. Apollinaire, on the other hand, does not use punctuation at all in ‘Le Pont Mirabeau’. The reader must therefore rely on the rhythm of the piece and the position of the words in each stanza and line to identify key aspects of diction; ‘l’amour s’en va’, for example, is placed in a line on its own, giving emphasis to the central subject of the poem, the loss of love.
‘Down by the Salley Gardens’ and ‘Le Pont Mirabeau’ share many similarities in terms of the subject of the loss of love and the themes that are explored by the poets in relation to this subject. Both Yeats and Apollinaire allude to nature, time and the sobriety of memories. While the poets differ in terms of the stylistic techniques they have chosen to use, the same nostalgic and regretful mood can be found in each of the two poems.
