The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry

MARGUERITE YOURCENAR

The Horse

It is true that I believed in the immense privilege of living. Each step amplified
in me old but always mobile adorations. It was a tree, the night, whole forests of
roads, or the sky and its troubled life, certainly the sun.

One day I saw solitude. At the top of hill, a horse, alone, immobile, was
planted in an arrested universe. So my love, suspended in time, gathered to itself
in one instant its petrified memory. Life and death completed each other, all
doors open to possible prolongations. For once, without sharing in the meaning
of things, I saw. I isolated my vision, enlarging its borders infinitely. I left for later
the concern of seeing what one was to see. But who could maintain that the
promises had been kept?
—mary ann caws

Marguerite Yourcenar

(Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine

Cleenwerke de Crayencour) 1903–1987

brussels, belgium

A

poet, historian, and novelist, Yourcenar explored in her writings the

possibility of an idealized humanity that might correct wrongs, both

societal and ecological. Her mother died shortly after giving birth to

her; her French father, who was a friend, confidant, and teacher, helped arrange

the publication of her first work, written at the age of sixteen. When he died, he

left her independently wealthy, in addition to bequeathing the legacy of culture

and nonconformist beliefs to which he had exposed her. At the onset of World

War II, she moved to the United States to teach at Sarah Lawrence College and

Georgetown University. In 1980 she became the first woman elected to the Aca-

démie française. She lived for many years in Maine in an outspoken and greatly

respected lesbian lifestyle. Principal works: Mémoires d’Hadrien, 1951; L’Oeuvre

au noir, 1968; Feux, 1974; Les Charités d’Alcippe, 1984.