“Why would I be sad? I’m surrounded by nothing but sun and music!”

Francis Jammes (1868-1938)
Writer

“When Francis Jammes left this earth which he so loved, on All Saints’ Day 1938, he was survived by a good number of his first readers — his first readers: we for whom From the Angelus at Dawn to the Angelus at Dusk had been a miraculous spring, a font for the blind whose water made the scales fall from our eyes. Villages, routes, trees and sky suddenly appeared before us, no longer deformed by the glorification of Romanticism, but such as they were, such as they will remain for us always. Jammes was our poet. There were surely better poets, we imagined, but not one who was as in tune as he was with the part of us so despised by the enthusiasts of Mallarmé… How can I define what it was? Something confident and pure, a child-like spirit like that in the Gospels, a spirit that doesn’t represent imbecility and foolishness, but rather a power to transfigure the things and the beings of our humble lives, our lives such as they were during the happy days of our school holidays… He has a place all to himself in the most secret part of our hearts. We are no longer so numerous as we were then. The hour approaches when this helpless poet will have to go on alone in a hard world, in a France that is unrecognizable, where the old villages die around their deserted churches, where he can no longer write: “The horses, swallowed by the night, return from the shadows to drink…,” because even the horses have disappeared before the coming of the tractors. (…)”

François Mauriac (1885-1970)
Writer