“Always For The First Time” is a poem by Andre Breton, a French writer and poet who was a prominent figure in the Surrealist movement. The poem explores the theme of love and the surreal nature of human emotions.
The poem is divided into two stanzas, each consisting of four lines. The first stanza sets the tone of the poem by describing the feeling of experiencing love as if it were the first time. The speaker says that love always feels new and fresh, even when it is familiar. The use of the word “always” emphasizes the idea that the feeling of love never gets old, and the phrase “for the first time” suggests that the experience of love is always new and exciting.
In the second stanza, the speaker explores the idea of the surreal nature of love. The speaker compares love to a landscape, saying that it is like a “landscape changing before our eyes,” which implies that love is always evolving and changing. The use of the phrase “with a gentle flame” adds to the surreal imagery of the poem, suggesting that love is both powerful and delicate at the same time.
Overall, “Always For The First Time” is a poem that captures the essence of the Surrealist movement, with its emphasis on the power of the unconscious mind and the surreal nature of human emotions. The poem is a celebration of love, but it is also a meditation on the complexities of human relationships and the ways in which love can transform and change over time.
Always For The First Time by Andre Breton
Always for the first time
Hardly do I know you by sight
You return at some hour of the night to a house at an angle to my window
A wholly imaginary house
It is there that from one second to the next
In the inviolate darkness
I anticipate once more the fascinating rift occurring
The one and only rift
In the facade and in my heart
The closer I come to you
In reality
The more the key sings at the door of the unknown room
Where you appear alone before me
At first you coalesce entirely with the brightness
The elusive angle of a curtain
It’s a field of jasmine I gazed upon at dawn on a road in the vicinity of Grasse
With the diagonal slant of its girls picking
Behind them the dark falling wing of the plants stripped bare
Before them a T-square of dazzling light
The curtain invisibly raised
In a frenzy all the flowers swarm back in
It is you at grips with that too long hour never dim enough until sleep
You as though you could be
The same except that I shall perhaps never meet you
You pretend not to know I am watching you
Marvelously I am no longer sure you know
You idleness brings tears to my eyes
A swarm of interpretations surrounds each of your gestures
It’s a honeydew hunt
There are rocking chairs on a deck there are branches that may well scratch you in the forest
There are in a shop window in the rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette
Two lovely crossed legs caught in long stockings
Flaring out in the center of a great white clover
There is a silken ladder rolled out over the ivy
There is
By my leaning over the precipice
Of your presence and your absence in hopeless fusion
My finding the secret
Of loving you
Always for the first time.
