Apollinaire et le «talisman | Mort et plus subtil que la vie» (“Les Collines”)

Abstract

The main purpose of this article is to shed light on the particularly obscure 17th strophe of “Les Collines”, the important poem by Apollinaire which was originally published in Calligrammes (1918). How should the meaning of «…un talisman | Mort et plus subtil que la vie» be interpreted? The hypothesis of an allusion to Christian religion has been proposed (Schleifenbaum, 1972). While such conjecture cannot be completely excluded, other probative arguments based on the specific context of the poem and, more generally, on Apollinaire’s aesthetics suggest that the allusion rather concerns the rhymeless strophic form adopted for “Les Collines” mainly as a “calligrammatic” image: it is the strophic form imitating the quintil d’octosyllabes which is so relevant in the poet’s work. This is further demonstrated and confirmed by the fact that Apollinaire calls “talisman” a quatrain sent to him in 1915 by his “marraine”.