Lepage's Joan of Arc
Helen Gray Cone's poem "Lepage's Joan of Arc" offers a lyrical meditation on the inner life of Joan of Arc as captured in Jules Bastien-Lepage's famous 1879 painting, exploring the spiritual transformation of a peasant girl into a visionary warrior-saint. The poem opens by evoking the simple pastoral world that once formed Joan's entire existence. The soft gray skies, the flocks of sheep, the familiar trees, the blossoms of spring, and the still brown waters of a stream in which a young girl might glimpse her own reflection all speak to a life of rural innocence and quiet contentment. These gentle pleasures, however, belong irrevocably to the past. They are rendered distant and almost dreamlike by the experiences that have since overtaken Joan and reshaped her entirely. In place of pastoral tranquility, Joan has encountered the brutal reality of war. She has witnessed the pale, fear-stricken faces of the wounded, men struck down by arrows and left broken in the chaos of battle. She has stooped in rough shelters to tend their dark wounds, ministering to the dying while death itself seemed to hover close around her. These encounters with suffering have marked her deeply, awakening within her a yearning that goes beyond ordinary human affection. Over the wounded men she tends, the mother she can never become has stirred within her heart, and the voice of love she will never receive in its ordinary human form has reached her instead as the calling of the saints themselves. This divine summons ignites something already latent within Joan. All the passion she carries is gathered and concentrated into a single burning purpose, described as an altar-flame that grows clearer and stronger with every passing hour. The imagery of sacred fire is central to the poem's understanding of Joan's nature. She is not simply a soldier or a patriot but a vessel in whom spiritual devotion and human longing have been transmuted into an almost otherworldly resolve. As a consequence of this inner transformation, Joan moves through the world in a state of perpetual visionary abstraction. She will often stop suddenly and stand motionless, her blue eyes unfocused and seeming to look beyond the visible world entirely. The familiar paths and landscapes of her daily life have become populated with visions. Physical labor goes unfelt. The warmth and abundance of summer register only as a vague green haze surrounding her. Her consciousness is entirely organized around a single overriding purpose: that the king shall be crowned and France shall be free. The poem's strength lies in its careful attention to the cost of Joan's calling. Cone does not present the heroine as simply triumphant or straightforwardly heroic. Instead, the poem is suffused with a quiet ache for all that Joan has surrendered or been denied. The simple pleasures of girlhood, the possibility of motherhood, the experience of being loved in the ordinary human sense, all of these have been displaced by the consuming flame of her mission. There is tenderness in the poem's treatment of these losses, and a recognition that Joan's greatness is inseparable from her sacrifice. The ekphrastic dimension of the poem, its engagement with Bastien-Lepage's painting, gives the work an additional layer of meaning. The painter's canvas famously depicts Joan standing in her garden, slightly dazed, her hands loosely extended, while ghostly figures of saints materialize in the branches behind her. Cone's poem essentially inhabits and expands that moment of visionary arrest, filling in the emotional and spiritual history that the painting renders visible in a single suspended instant. The poet gives language and interiority to what the painter rendered in stillness and light. Ultimately the poem presents Joan of Arc as a figure in whom the human and the divine, the personal and the national, the sacrificial and the ardent, are held together in a state of luminous tension. She is simultaneously a girl robbed of ordinary life and a saint blazing with sacred purpose, and it is precisely this coexistence of loss and consecration that gives her figure its enduring power in Cone's rendering.
By Helen Gray Cone · Genre: Historical Poetry, Religious Poetry, Biographical Poetry