The Cicada (from the French of Paul-Jean Toulet)

Declaring himself both Mauritian Creole and Béarnese, Paul-Jean Toulet (1867–1920) credited the place-fascination in his poems and novels to his two childhood homes — the picturesque Béarn region in the Pyrenees of southern France, and the tropical Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. Toulet invented the contrerime quatrain seen here, whose alternating verses of eight and six syllables (disregarding the final, unstressed syllables of feminine line-ends) are rhymed ABBA. In 1914, these and Toulet’s poems in other forms were gathered into the collection Les contrerimes, but production difficulties following World War I delayed publication until a few months after the poet’s death.

This poem’s reference to paths where the dust is rose-colored evokes le Sentier des Ocres (the Ocher Trail), a woodland hiking area that wends through former quarries for Provence’s pink terra cotta tile industry. While also conveying the tirelessly-singing cicada’s lack of sluggishness, the phrase “without lymph” in the French echoes the Hellenistic-period Greek Anacreontea 34’s description of the cicada as lacking blood; however, “not lymphatic” seemed a more literally meaningful English rendering. Note that the French word for cicada (cigale) is grammatically feminine, although the insect’s mating calls are made only by male cicadas.