The Palace Burner: A Poem by Sarah Piatt
This brief meditation on Piatt’s poem (included at the bottom of this post) started as something between a footnote and an aside to some work I’m doing on the legacy of the Paris Commune as a resource for thinking about contemporary radical politics. Aside from its impact as a piece of verse, the poem struck me first because of its treatment of the Commune by a North American poet who at least as a persona in the poem, has no immediate access to the event, either as someone who was there or even as an immediate partisan. I think it’s one of the accounts of the Commune that has the most to say for how some of the questions it poses might be translated into other times and places.
The photograph the woman and the boy encounter in the poem is a picture of a petroleuse, one of the figures the Commune’s detractors most frequently used to demonize it. The petroleuses became, in the Commune’s aftermath, the center of heavily gendered, largely embellished accounts of arson which centered on “unruly” women, driven mad by rage, lustily burning buildings down. The picture of the petroleuse, presumably accompanied by an account of the Commune’s end and aftermath, is “old, so old that everything is ashes here”; the Commune is thus dead and (two years) gone. It is this distancing from the Commune (and engagement with the most hyperbolic aspects of the anti-Communard propaganda) that I think makes Piatt’s poem uniquely useful for thinking about the Commune’s memorial politics (as well as a more general communist or Communard ethics of memory).
The poem consists of an explanation, by a woman (a mother?) to a boy (her child?) who has seen the picture and asks for an explanation. What follows is a progressive layering of motives–those of the woman in the photo, the narrator’s, the boy’s–as the affective weight of the picture strikes those who view it , changing their attitude toward the events. “She has been burning palaces”-why? the first response is implicitly the boys; “To see the sparks look pretty in the wind?” This response is both sinister and naively accurate. On the one hand, the question encapsulates all the worst stories about the petroleuses, their sheer delight in destroying buildings. Taken at face value, then, the response is a condemnation of the Commune, overblown propaganda. By the end of the poem, though, it is specifically this kind of response that, attributed to the woman in the picture, is calling the the narrator of the poem to account for her own ethics. The gleeful delight at the sparks plays across a face possessed of “lips to kiss away a baby’s cry/hands fit for flowers and eyes for tears and dreams”. These traits draw favorable comparison with the narrator’s fondness for “dainty”, “languid and worldly” things. The simply affective nature of the poem’s appeal, then, not only hijacks anti-Communard propaganda in the service of the Commune’s legacy, but does so in a way that inverts the whole gender dynamic of the petroleuse as a figure. The delight in fire, commonly held by male children, including the one in the poem, is not symptomatic of masculine aggression; just the reverse. It comes from hands built for nurturing, feminine, caring hands, and lips both fit to kiss babies and (as the narrator compares herself with the woman in the picture) to sing or speak cultured phrases. The boy’s incipient pyromania is articulated to conventional feminine virtue, demonstrating that, even if the propaganda about emotional excess on the part of the petroleuses was correct (it was not) that excess only exists on a continuum of human emotions which also includes caring, delicate sensuality, and the trappings of “high” culture. The fact that this all emanates from a boy further serves to show that the aggression attributed to the petroleuses as well as character traits more in line with a moral spectrum which was at the time gendered feminine can come from anyone at all, indeed (perhaps most likely) from the innocent mouths of babes.
The narrative thread set off by the boy’s response is contrasted with a second, located in the narrator’s rejoinder to the boy. She begins by admonishing that the boy should be mindful of the “Christian men” who “shot wicked little Communists like you” (as, indeed, the woman in the picture is implicitly about to be put to death). The boy’s visceral delight at the flames is extrapolated into a larger, more rational reason for burning the palace: “because you did not live in it yourself”. Beyond the danger involved in such ideas, the narrator maintains that she has taught the child to “respect the laws”–law and order, as well as personal safety. The boy’s questions continue, despite (or to give lie to) his knowledge of the narrator’s soul as “languid and worldly”, as the narrator begins to be affected in turn by the boy’s reaction to the picture
Rational and naively childish explanations, alike, for the figure in the picture’s power thus fail in the face of it. Why does the Communard woman in the picture exert such a pull, then? the answer is played out through the poem’s remaining lines, and converges on the quality of fascination exerted by the picture and the soul-searching the photograph’s impact induces in the woman. In the first place, after it is clear that her initial laugh at the boy’s desire for pretty sparks falls short of the picture’s power, the narrator turns to distraction (both attempts to distract the boy, and, implicitly, herself) from the picture’s power. The boy is asked to pick a different picture (a “newer” one, “then?”) and when he fails to do so, is implored to “go to” his “play” and leave the pictures behind, The pull exerted by the picture resists these attempts. Piatt discusses the specific qualities which pull on the picture’s viewers as features of the woman’s face. What is striking about the picture, is her expression: one (as already discussed) which mirrors the “languid” and “worldly” character of the woman’s soul–in which she can see herself–but which is also possessed of “utter life”, and “unappealing, beautiful despair”, though she is about to be put to death. “Charm” thus coexists with a willingness to sacrifice life for politics that “breathe[s] in damp, low places” hiding under the cultured veneer until time to strike. The reclamation of anti-Communard slander already discussed is thus brought full circle. On the one hand, a willingness to set fire to palaces is, while in apparent tension with “cultured” manners, not gendered in the way these manners would imply, and not mutually exclusive with them. On the other, culture itself can serve as one more mask. The moment of death makes both of these opposites stand out in tension, so that, while the apparently wild petroleuse is close enough to ordinary sensibilities that her spectators cannot avoid her effect on their own equilibrium, she is also enough removed from these sensibilities that she cannot be tamed within them.
What is the effect of this tension? If forces a response in its viewers. While the boy, captivated by the picture is simply delighted, the narrator’s reaction is more complicated. the picture prompts in her a soul-searching. The innocent question: would I have burned the palace? mingles with the “utter life” on the woman’s face, such that the narrator is brought to question her own actions in a similar situation. Possessed of similar cultivated sensibilities as the petroleuse, she mus conclude that she comes up short. The woman in the picture, possessed of a “finer soul” than she, humbles her and brings her to a sense of her own inadequacy to pressing political circumstances.
What, then, can “The Palace-Burner” say about how history works, and what our attitude toward it should be? The progression of reactions, both the boy’s and the narrators, seems to me to provide one example of a kind of grammar of revolutionary motive. How are we to respond to events that we encounter, in pictures, history books, or elsewhere? on the one hand, there is value in visceral delight–childhood fantasies, especially juxtaposed to sober and conservative appeals to the rule of law, have utility, provided we locate them correctly (in tension with less visceral sensibilities). The narrator’s reaction, though, indicates a larger ethical use for such reactions. The insistence of the boy’s delight prompts reflection on her soul, the set of passions that make up her life, and especially upon the relation of those passions to mortality. Though she is a spectator rather than a partisan to the Commune, she is far from disinterested. Instead, her position of spectatorship functions as a focal point for re-orienting her own subjectivity so that, rather than merely identifying with the Commune, she takes the facial expressions, bitterness and beauty of a singular image and (with some knowledge of that image’s context) finds herself wanting. This want–a desire to think and act differently in the future–then becomes an impetus for action. Piatt’s poem both outlines a range of responses to the picture (and to the historical events it represents) and suggests a politics of relating to representations of past events in a way conducive to future ethical action.
The Palace-Burner (A Picture in a Paper)
by Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt (1836-1919)
1 She has been burning palaces. “To see
2 The sparks look pretty in the wind?” Well, yes,
3 And something more. But women brave as she
4 Leave much for cowards such as I to guess.
5 But this is old, so old that everything
6 Is ashes here, the woman and the rest.
7 Two years are oh! so long. Now you may bring
8 Some newer pictures. You like this one best?
9 You wish that you had lived in Paris then?
10 You would have loved to burn a palace, too?
11 But they had guns in France, and Christian men
12 Shot wicked little Communists, like you.
13 You would have burned the palace? Just because
14 You did not live in it yourself! Oh! Why?
15 Have I not taught you to respect the laws?
16 You would have burned the palace. Would not I?
17 Would I? Go to your play. Would I, indeed?
18 I? Does the boy not know my soul to be
19 Languid and worldly, with a dainty need
20 For light and music? Yet he questions me.
21 Can he have seen my soul more nearer than I?
22 Ah! in the dusk and distance sweet she seems,
23 With lips to kiss away a baby’s cry,
24 Hands fit for flowers, and eyes for tears and dreams.
25 Can he have seen my soul? And could she wear
26 Such utter life upon a dying face,
27 Such unappealing, beautiful despair,
28 Such garments, soon to be a shroud, with grace?
29 Has she a charm so calm that it could breathe
30 In damp, low places till some frightened hour;
31 Then start, like a fair, subtle snake, and wreathe
32 A stinging poison with a shadowy power?
33 Would I burn palaces? The child has seen
34 In this fierce creature of the Commune here,
35 So bright with bitterness and so serene,
36 A being finer than my soul, I fear.
