Poetry: The Graveyard by the Sea

Overview
Paul Valéry’s The Graveyard by the Sea (1920) unfolds as a concentrated meditation at noon in the maritime cemetery of Sète, the poet’s Mediterranean hometown. From the vantage of a hilltop cemetery overlooking a brilliant, seemingly motionless sea, the speaker weighs the claims of pure thought against the pressures of time, body, and change. The poem moves from blinding stillness and funerary perfection toward an awakening to movement and risk, crystallized in the famous imperative: “The wind rises! We must try to live!”

Setting and Opening Vision
Under the fierce noonday sun, marble slabs, white walls, and cypress shadows create an image of immaculate order. The cemetery, suspended above the glitter of water, seems outside time: an enclave of silence where the brightness is so pure it feels absolute. The sea below appears flat and fixed, a mirror to the cemetery’s calm. In this arrest of motion, the mind tastes an exalted, abstract serenity. The voice within cherishes the dream of a perfected, self-contained consciousness, intact and immune to decay, as if thought might dwell safely in the shelter of stone.

Meditation on Death and Knowledge
Among tombs that promise a definitive peace, the speaker parses what death does and does not grant. The graves enshrine forms; they end flux and shape a perfected outline, but only by extinguishing breath and blood. The cemetery’s beauty is a beauty of closure, of sealed surfaces and finished works. The mind, seduced by such purity, considers renouncing the uncertain commerce of the senses for a lofty clarity. Yet even as the skull-like enclosure of thought tempts him, the realities of finitude and the body insist: knowledge is not exempt from erosion, and purity may be a mask for sterility.

Sea as Paradox of Change and Permanence
The sea unsettles the cemetery’s lesson. Its noon surface looks immutable, but every glittering facet is the result of ceaseless, hidden movement. The sea is always beginning again, endlessly renewing its contours while presenting a continuous face. It models a paradox the mind cannot ignore: permanence achieved through change, identity through recurrence. Against the geometric stillness of tombs, the sea offers a living form, one that binds fate and transformation without denying either. This vision loosens the spell of funerary perfection and opens the speaker to the world’s dynamic law.

Turn of the Wind and Call to Life
A breeze stirs. The absolute noon ripens toward motion. The apparition of wind breaks the pact of immobility that held the cemetery and the gaze. With that breath comes a decision. The speaker refuses the deathlike fixity of pure form and the narcotic of closed thought. He embraces the sea’s law instead, choosing the risks of sensation, action, and time. The famous cry seals the pivot: “The wind rises! We must try to live!” To live is to entrust oneself to currents, to accept fragility and chance, to endure incompletion rather than seek refuge in sterile perfection.

Final Movement
As the poem concludes, sails, gulls, and the smell of salt displace the marble’s hush. The hillside graves remain, but they recede into a wider order in which form does not mean stasis. The mind consents to a discipline derived from the sea: vigilance within change, firmness without rigidity, lucidity tempered by the body’s pulse. Death is acknowledged, not enthroned. The poem’s arc thus runs from dazzled fixity to an ethic of poised motion, balancing contemplation and engagement. The cemetery gives the vantage; the sea gives the law; the wind gives the summons to step back into the mortal day and try to live.