René Char's poetry arises from pain, and exists because of it. His creativity confronts it, opposing to the pain of Chants de la Balandrane, which is often the thought of death, things that, if they cannot remove it, can harden it, and transform it into an energy. He takes a purchase on places around where he lives in southern France, like the farm of the title, situated on a wooded plateau "where the ruins of numerous abandoned wells still stand". He celebrates hard things in nature, especially the enduring earth, like certain naked winter fields that, in a typically dense cluster of metaphors, are seen as "daughters of the hoarfrost" and "stars" that "finish the crumbs of their nocturnal food on the table of the sun".

He also confronts pain with analogy, with the metaphors of the imagination that relate him to the processes of nature. In particular...