Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Andre Breton's "Sunflower" serves as an ethereal tapestry that reflects the enigmatic energies of a city, a season, and the profound experience of human connection. Written in 1896, the poem captures a moment in the heart of Paris, offering a window into an alternate reality constructed from rich symbolism, vivid imagery, and an esoteric aesthetic.

The poem opens with a traveler crossing "Les Halles at summer's end," introducing us immediately to a transitional period both of time and space. The woman "tiptoes" as she walks, implying that there's a need for caution or reverence, while "despair stirred in the sky its great lilies so lovely." This juxtaposition of despair and loveliness echoes the Surrealist's fascination with the harmony of opposites, drawing attention to the eternal struggle between beauty and melancholy.

The young woman carries in her purse "my dream that bottle of salts / That only God's godmother had breathed." The bottle of salts, usually used for reviving the faint, signifies a rescue or a catalyst, invoking the mysterious and the divine. It introduces the fantastical element that is about to seep into the poem's reality.

The enigmatic nature of the young woman is expressed through questions and uncertain identifications: "Was I dealing with the Ambassadress of saltpeter / Or of the white curve on a black background that we call thought?" She stands on the fringes of comprehension, a muse that evokes questions about her real identity and the nature of her thought-represented by the abstract image of a "white curve on a black background." She exists in a realm that borders the conscious and the unconscious, much like the essence of Surrealist thought itself.

As the poem moves forward, Breton presents an urban landscape transformed: "A farm was prospering in the heart of Paris / And its windows looked out on the Milky Way." This incongruous vision serves as a tribute to the fertile imagination that can conceive of pastoral life amid the metropolitan frenzy. More profoundly, it extends the sense of boundless possibilities, where the ordinary laws of time and space are suspended.

Then comes the description of the "guests that are more faithful one knows than ghosts / Those like that woman seem to be swimming / And there is in love some of their substance." These guests could be taken as thoughts, memories, or spirits that inhabit one's inner world-haunting yet somehow grounding, lingering on the edge of the material and the immaterial.

Toward the end, the poem closes on a note of individual revelation and transformative wisdom. The cricket that "chirped in the locks of cinders" near a statue acknowledges the poet by name, granting him permission to pass. The cricket, a humble creature often linked with good fortune and wisdom in folklore, becomes the gatekeeper to some ineffable understanding, and the poet's name is invoked as if he has crossed a threshold into a new state of being.

"Sunflower" thus serves as an intricate symphony of layered meanings, cultural touchstones, and transformative moments. Breton manages to capture the ineffable-love, despair, change, mystery-in a tableau that remains hauntingly beautiful and endlessly enigmatic. The poem itself becomes a microcosm of the Surrealist endeavor: to explore the surreal within the real, to touch the untouchable, and to name the unnameable.

Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!

Other Poems of Interest...