“Entends comme brame…” The strategies and stakes of an enigmatic poem

This paper provides a detailed analysis of “Entends comme brame…” On the formal level, the poem exhibits a quite regular structure that involves, however, unexpected features like “mixed” rhyme and the recuperation of “feminine” syllables in verse-initial position. On the semantic-pragmatic level, one notices, in particular, that intensive use is made of connectives that are generally avoided in lyric discourse. In both cases, the results obtained confirm the intertextual dimension of the poem.