Le Livre Est Sur La Table - Analysis

Beauty as a product of lack

The poem opens by insisting that beauty isn’t a self-sufficient glow but something that depends on missingness: All beauty, resonance, integrity Exist by deprivation or by the cold compensations of logic. That claim sets the emotional weather for everything that follows. The speaker seems to argue that meaning doesn’t arise from a stable object we can hold; it arises from a strange angle, a strange position, where the mind has to supply what the world withholds. So when the poem turns toward a woman, it’s not offering a portrait so much as a test case for that theory: what happens when the imagination tries to complete what it cannot truly know?

The tone here is both declarative and unsettled. The speaker sounds confident, almost philosophical, yet the confidence keeps slipping into embarrassment and alarm—like someone realizing that the urge to explain is also the urge to possess.

The woman as an imagined “world” and a known body

The poem’s first section builds a deliberate contradiction. On one hand, the speaker says We can only imagine a world in which a woman knows / All that she does not know—a paradox that makes her less a person than a limit-point of consciousness, the place where knowing collapses into not-knowing. On the other hand, the poem abruptly claims certainty about her physicality: Yet we know / What her breasts are. That blunt line exposes a tension between metaphysical humility and bodily presumption: the mind admits it can’t reach a person’s interior life, then immediately grabs at what seems graspable.

Even the generosity that follows—we give fullness / To the dream—feels morally complicated. Fullness here is not her fullness; it’s the dream’s, the imagination swelling to compensate for ignorance. The woman becomes a screen for projection, and the poem makes us feel how quickly admiration can become appropriation.

Table, book, plume: a fragile “support system” for dreaming

After the bodily certainty comes a small still life: The table supports the book, The plume leaps in the hand. These objects look orderly, like the basic classroom sentence of the title—book on table—yet they also read as a model for how the poem thinks meaning works. The table is a support, the book a container of sense, and the plume a lively instrument that seems to write by itself, leaps rather than moves. But the moment the poem sets up this neat triangle of support, record, and expression, it breaks into panic: But what / Dismal scene is this?

That But what is a hinge: the poem catches itself manufacturing a coherent dream and suddenly sees the cost. The scene that appears—the old man pouting / At a black cloud, the woman gone / Into the house, followed by wailing—suggests that the domestic interior (the house) is where the unassimilable sound begins. The dream may be full, but it is also thin: it can stage a woman walking and hair and breasts, yet when she withdraws into her own space, the poem can only represent her as absence plus noise.

The shoreline of Section II: leaving objects behind

Section II restarts with a young man performing a quiet, almost ritual act: he places a bird-house / Against the blue sea, then walks away, and the bird-house remains. The emphasis on what remains—an object positioned at the edge of the immense—echoes the earlier table-and-book arrangement, but now the setting is exposed, impersonal, and tidal. Other men arrive, yet they live in boxes; the poem repeats the image of containment, as though human life keeps shrinking itself into manageable frames even when faced with the sea’s scale.

The sea itself is given a strange agency: The sea protects them like a wall, and later it appears as a kind of endless inscription: the sea’s shadow is where the gods worship a line-drawing / Of a woman, and that shadow is also a sea Which goes on writing. The woman has become not a presence but a sketch revered by gods, a simplified outline held up against an unceasing, unreadable text. It’s a sharper version of Section I’s tension: the world keeps producing immense, ongoing meaning (the sea writing), while humans cling to reducible forms (line-drawing, boxes, bird-house).

If the woman leaves, do secrets evaporate—or just become illegible?

The ending turns into a set of anxious questions: Are there / Collisions, communications on the shore or did all secrets vanish when The woman left? The poem doesn’t simply mourn her; it wonders whether meaning itself depends on her presence—or on the desire projected onto her. The last question is especially telling: Is the bird mentioned / In the waves’ minutes, or did the land advance? The bird-house was placed for a bird, but now the poem can’t even be sure the bird exists within the sea’s record. What’s left is an uncertainty about what counts as an event: is it registered in the world’s vast ongoing writing, or overwritten by larger shifts, like the land quietly moving its boundary?

A sharper thought the poem forces

When the speaker says Yet we know her breasts, the poem practically dares us to notice how knowledge gets defined downward—toward what can be named without permission. In Section II, the line-drawing / Of a woman suggests the same reduction at a cosmic scale: even gods accept an outline. The poem’s bleakest possibility is that deprivation doesn’t just enable beauty; it also trains us to settle for substitutes and call them truth.

What the poem finally insists on

By moving from the tabletop scene to the shoreline, the poem widens its argument: our supports (tables, boxes, bird-houses, drawings) are necessary, but they can also become the very mechanisms that keep us from meeting what’s real—another person, a secret, even the world’s own “minutes.” The tone ends not with revelation but with suspended inquiry, as if the most honest response to deprivation is not to fill the dream, but to admit how much of the wailing comes from the limits of our imagination.