Paul Éluard, "Liberty" (1943)
Quote
On my notebooks from school
On my desk and the trees
On the sand on the snow
I write your name
On every page read
On all the white sheets
Stone blood paper or ash
I write your name
On the golden images
On the soldier's weapons
On the crowns of kings
I write your name
On the jungle the desert
The nests and the bushes
On the echo of childhood
I write your name
[…]
On my ravaged refuges
On my fallen lighthouses
On the walls of my boredom
I write your name
On passionless absence
On naked solitude
On the marches of death
I write your name
On health that's regained
On danger that's past
On hope without memories
I write your name
By the power of the word
I regain my life
I was born to know you
And to name you
LIBERTY
Basic Set-Up:
These are stanzas from the poem "Liberty," by Paul Éluard.
Thematic Analysis
Liberty is at the heart of revolution. The French Revolution of 1789, for example, was about the liberation of the French people from monarchy and autocracy. And—newsflash!—Éluard's poem "Liberty" focuses on liberty. The speaker of the poem is obsessed with the word. He scrawls it everywhere: on his school notebooks, on trees, on desks, heck, even on nests and bushes.
By focusing on this word, Éluard's poem suggests how important the concept of liberty—and by extension, revolution—is. Surrealists like Éluard believed that revolution was important because only through revolution could we achieve complete liberty.
And they weren't just talking about political liberty, the kind we normally associate with revolutions. They were talking about personal and artistic liberty, too—the kind that only avant-garde art forms like Surrealism could bring about.
Stylistic Analysis
This poem is based on repetition. A lot of the lines begin with the word "On," which refers to all the different places that the speaker is going to scribble the word "liberty" on. The repetition serves to emphasize to us readers just how important this word is to the speaker: he wants liberty "on" (and "of") everything.
The final lines of the poem, "By the power of the word/ I regain my life/ I was born to know you/ And name you/ LIBERTY," also allude to the power of language. Language makes things happen. Words like "liberty" are powerful. And having total liberty with words is the most powerful thing of all.