Essential Poems and Writings of Robert Desnos Book

Desnos is a surrealist in the classic French sense. His themes are love, reality, life, death, uncertainty, and change.
His form is free with little punctuation. Line lengths contrast one another to emphasize and vary pace. Here are two lines of varying length from "Obsession:"
I bring a bit of seaweed, which was tangled with the sea foam and this comb.
But your hair is more neatly fixed than the clouds with the wind with celestial crimson glowing in them and are such that with quiverings of life and sobs twisting sometimes between my
hands they die with waves and the reefs of the strand so
abundantly that we shall not soon again despair of perfumes
and their flight at evening when this comb marks motionless the
stars buried in their rapid and silky flow traversed by my hands
seeking still at their root the humid caress of a sea more
dangerous than the one where this seaweed was gathered with
the froth scattered by a tempest.
A star dying is like your lips.
The extreme length of the second changes both the pace of the poem and emphasizes the simile of the third line.


Imagery is important and powerful too. He uses metaphor, but imagery is how he many times communicates his emotion and theme - much like Eliot uses images as "objective correlative." Late in the poem, to show the effect of death around the speaker he uses coldness and stillness and the image of "The mines make a muffled snoring / The roofs are strewn with anthracite." Ice and the darkness of the mine but with a muffled snoring conveys a stillness and lack of energy.
Tone, pace, scope, setting, and time all shift between and within the poem. Desnos loves reversals and inversions. He changes the time and setting with the lines "An instant passes with a mine's profundity", "How cold it is in the impasse where I knew you", and "Before too long I'll find you again near these china-asters." The poem takes the reader seemingly from the sea to the morgue to the afterlife. The tone of the poem goes from romantic to somber when realizing the setting is a morgue rather than the sea and switches again to a tentative hopefulness when the speaker confidently predicts a reunion in the afterlife, but the reader knows that may be wishful. Like the changes of tone, pace, and line length are used for amplification, Desnos changes scope for the same effect: "The earth crumbles and stars screeching like iron across mother-of-pearl / But your neatly fixed hair has the shape of a hand." The change of scope and the juxtaposition between the two lines once again changes the tone and pushes the theme of the speaker's love and adoration for the person. Contrast also amplifies the themes of death, loss, and love. Throughout the poem there runs a contrast between the raging, flowing, lively sea versus the complete deathly cold stillness and the darkness and mystery of the mine.
Desnos is a master of other subtle slight of hand techniques, almost trickery, but it all still manages to convey meaning and push theme. Although there are no clear examples in "Obsession," Desnos uses inversion in many of his poems. For instance from "For a dream of day" there's the line "The murder was splendid." The same poem holds an example of a unique touch that Desnos calls metamorphing. In fact the line reads, "...here's a poem of metamorphoses. The swan becoming a matchbox and phosphorous disguised as a tie." "Reversals are also a favorite of Desnos: "Will the schist brighten the white night of cork?" asks the opening line of "At daybreak." Inversions, reversals, and metamorphing add to the tension, energy and amplification of Desnos poems. As does another technique he employs tastefully - repetition. In "The voice of Robert Desnos," the speaker pleads, demands, and begs all at once as seen in the repetition: "I summon flesh / I summon the one I love / I summon the one I love / I summon the one I love." The repetition changes the declaration to desperation.
Desnos poems are dynamic. The tone changes, the shifts in pace, the imaginative images, juxtapositions, contrasts, changes in setting, shifting of the timeline, and metamorphing create poems full of vitality and energy. The reader's imagination is turned on to the fullest and the faculty of interpretation has to be ignited or the reader will be left stranded. Desnos holds no readers hands through the poem, but he gives enough information and context to allow for readers to understand in general what is happening in the lines. Therefore his poems engage the reader. It is powerful.