An Aspect of Desbordes-Valmore's Life in Her Poetry

The mother-daughter bond lends itself to fear of travel and anti-exoticism in the extreme in the poetry of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore. Autobiographical themes of losing her mother at an early age and losing two children as a mother are reflected in a search to alleviate separation anguish. Her water poetry displays a fluid motion comforting the troubled poet-persona particularly in "Un ruisseau de la scarpe" (Poésies inédites, 1860). In this poem a syntagmatic network of metonyms of place, childhood, and the mother synthesize the message of the poem which is that like the river the narrator must leave her source and wander through France. (WNG)