1 h 13 minAudiobook8 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What happens when a poem makes thought as vivid as the sea, a serpent, or footsteps in a quiet room?
In Charms, Paul Valéry brings sound and thought into close conversation. This collection of lyrical poems explores beauty, silence, and the inner life through exact forms. Its French title, Charmes, means both spells and songs: a fitting invitation to poetry that asks you to feel and think at once.
The Graveyard by the Sea places you above the Mediterranean, where the sea, a cemetery, and the will to live meet. Dawn follows a mind gathering its first thoughts. Sketch of a Serpent lets the proud, clever snake of Eden speak, while The Footsteps draws feeling into a small, quiet scene of love.
What you’ll discover
- A mind at dawn Follow consciousness as it wakes from darkness and senses its energy before the day begins.
- The sea and life Enter a hilltop cemetery above the Mediterranean, where thought meets the will to live.
- A serpent speaks Meet Eden’s proud, clever snake, bored with the perfection of the sun and garden.
- Love in small scenes Discover how quiet footsteps give a short love poem its intimate focus.
- Sound with exact shape Savour regular lines, patterned rhymes, and balanced stanzas that reward slow, repeated reading.
Who will love it
For readers who love poems that think, music in language, and the workings of the mind, or anyone seeking a way into French poetry between Mallarmé and the modern age.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- A poet returns after twenty years of silence
- The sea, the graveyard and the will to live
- Poems that stage a mind at work
- Myth, serpent and priestess
- Small scenes of love, feeling and nature
- Sound, form and how to read the poems aloud
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Charms
by Paul Valéry · 1922
Above the Mediterranean, a voice in a seaside graveyard weighs time, death and the need for the living to act.
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In short
Charms is a book of poems by the French poet Paul Valéry, published in 1922 under the French title Charmes. The word means both spells and songs, and Valéry plays on both.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
A poet returns after twenty years of silence
Paul Valéry was born in the Mediterranean port of Sète in 1871. As a young man he wrote verse and admired the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who taught him that a poem should be a work of exact craft. In 1892, after a night of crisis, he decided to give up literature and turn to the study of how the mind works.
For the next two decades he rose before dawn and filled notebooks with thoughts on mathematics, language, dreams and attention. These notebooks, called the Cahiers, run to thousands of pages. He did not stop writing altogether, but he published almost no poems. His friends, including the writer André Gide, urged him to gather his early verse into a book.
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What is Charms by Paul Valéry about?
It is a book of lyric poems on the workings of the mind, the pull between stillness and action, and the pleasures of form. Its poems range from a seaside graveyard to myth, love and small natural things.
What does the title Charmes mean?
The French word comes from the Latin carmen and means both magic spells and songs. Valéry uses the double sense to suggest that a poem is a kind of enchantment made out of sound and rhythm.
What is The Graveyard by the Sea about?
It is a long poem set in a cemetery above the Mediterranean at Sète. The speaker looks at the sea and thinks about time, death, stillness and the need for the living to act.
The author
Paul Valéry
1871–1945 · French poet and essayist
Paul Valéry was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. He was born in Sète, France, in 1871 and moved to Paris in 1894. He published the poem La Jeune Parque in 1917 and the poetry collection Charmes in 1922. He also wrote Monsieur Teste. He died in Paris in 1945.
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