SOURCE: "Francis Jammes, Primitive," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. XXVIII, No. 2, April, 1920, pp. 172-85.

In the following essay, Beach and Van Roosbroeck discuss Jammes's use of pastoral imagery.

Francis Jammes is the poet of Orthez, as closely associated with that little village in the mountains as Wordsworth with Grasmere or Robert Frost with his "North-of-Boston". He has always in his view the cold peaks of the Pyrenees, yellow and threatening on the approach of winter, and in the rainy spring showing their blue veins, which make them more luminous than glass. Every year, in the season of love, he may witness the departure of "the great severe shepherds" for their cabins by the lakes of Barèges, where they shall see the jonquils, the prairies,—"where the water silvers, froths, and leaps, and laughs." Along the slopes are the woods where he hunts the wild duck; lower down...