My life has been the awaiting you". Valéry does not want to be cheated out of the maximum pleasure of the rapture of anticipation.
In "Song of the Master-Idea" Valéry gives voice to his thoughts and discusses himself in the second person, as if being spoken to by the idea. This suggests that the idea is as powerful as the person who thinks it. The idea has complete control over Valéry and bids him to act on its behalf. "Feel yourself/ Wholly the instrument of this day that begins and the act/ That demands you." This is the poet's experience told from the perspective of the poem that is waiting to be written. It's as if the poem is something outside Valéry's control and yet they are slave to one another. "You are my chance, I am your ruin, unique and immortal I came to you in the agitation of your mind, haphazard, but other hazards and another face of things made you, as it were, for me." Valéry's life as a poet is tied to his ideas, neither can exist without the other. .
We get a sense of how powerfully Valéry is committed to this belief in the poem "Interior". Here, Valery is back in his own body but is again thinking about thinking. A maid is busy cleaning his room, a woman enters, but none can break his concentration on his preoccupied thoughts. I'm inclined to believe that the slave weighed down by subtle fetters that Valery writes about is a metaphor for his own mind, a supreme intellect bound by a body. Again, Valery is captive to his thoughts and ideas. William Butler Yeats is another poet who discusses the challenges of poetry. "A line will take us hours maybe;/ Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,/ Our stitching and unstitching has been naught." These lines, spoken among a group of friends in "Adam's Curse," make it clear that the act of writing poetry is much more difficult than people give it credit for.
