Reading time: 2 minutes
Read and listen to Marguerite Yourcenar's poetry: Life is more than poetry
Summary
Let's read this poem full of pathos and transport together, to relax and think about the most precious and eternal good: life.
Marguerite Yourcenar, pseudonym of Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour (Brussels, 8 June 1903 – Mount Desert, 17 December 1987), wasa French writer and poet.She was the first woman elected to the Académie française; The themes in her works are frequent…View more
Let's read together:
Life is much more complex than all possible definitions;
every simplified image always risks being vulgar.
Life is more than poetry;
it's more than physiology
and even morality,
that I believed in for a long time.
It is all this and much more: it is life.
It is our only good and our only curse.
We live;
each of us has our own particular life,
unique, determined by the whole past,
over which we have no power,
and which will in turn determine,
however little it may be, the whole future.
Our life.
The life that belongs to us alone,
which will not be repeated a second time
and which we are not sure we fully understand.
And what I'm saying about whole life
I could say that about every moment of a life.
Others see our presence,
our gestures,
and how words form on our lips;
alone, we see our life.
This is strange:
we see it;
we're surprised that it's like this,
and we can't change it.
Even when the let's judge,
we still belong to her;
our approval
or our blame are part of it;
it is always she who reflects herself.
For there is nothing else;
the world, for each of us,
does not exist if not
as it borders
with ours life.