My new favourite French poet: Francis Jammes.
Francis Jammes is my new favourite poet. I came across his poem “Café Table” and it felt like “my poem.”
“Café Table”
I asked for wine, but sipped the sun —
A sparrow landed near the bun.
No prophet came, no trumpet blew —
Just light and bread. And maybe you.
Francis Jammes (1868-1938) is a lesser-known French poet born in the small town of Tournay in the mountains of the French Pyrenees. He did not do well at school, failing his baccalaureat with a zero in French! He grew up in provincial life among fields, animals, and rivers.
He briefly went to Paris in his youth, in 1905, where he was influenced by poets André Gide and Paul Claudel. Thirteen of his poems from his collection “Sorrows” were set to music in 1914 by composer Lili Boulanger. His works were received among a small audience but never became truly fashionable because he was deemed to be a “solitary provincial poet.”
Francis Jammes preferred the countryside to the boulevards of Paris, and his poetry reflects a devotion to the humble life, such as poems about gardens, flowers, worn wooden tables, and donkeys. His eventual retreat to Orthez in southwestern France marked his independence from the poets of Paris and his gradual disappearance from its cultural memory.
He believed in the poetry of “ordinary life.” His work often carried a spiritual undercurrent after his conversion to Catholicism in 1905, although mostly his poetry became infused with a Franciscan love for nature and the “divine in the everyday.” His style was more like going for a walk along a country road, pointing out the evening swallows or the smell of bread from a village bakery.
In our era of digital over-stimulation, the poetry of Francis Jammes feels strangely modern again. His poetry reminds us that beauty is in a chipped café saucer and a slow life.
