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The nest-house is never young.  Once could say, in a pedantic way, that it is the natural habitat of the function of inhabiting.  One returns to it, once dreams of returning to it like the bird returns to the nest, like the lamb returns to the fold.  This sign of return marks infinite reveries, for human returns occur in the grand rhythm of human life, a rhythm that transcends the years and that, by dreaming, battles with absence.  As the images of house and nest are drawn together, an intimate composition of fidelity takes hold.     

Everything happens, in this domain, in simple and delicate touches.  The soul is so sensitive to these simple images that it hears all of its resonances in a harmonic reading.  On a conceptual level, the reading would be insipid, cold, linear; it would ask us to understand the images one after another.  And in the domain of the image of the nest, the traits are so simple we are surprised that the poet could become enchanted by them.  But simplicity grants forgetfulness, and all at once we are grateful to the poet who finds, with a rare touch, the talent to reimagine it.  How could the phenomenologist not respond to this renewal of a simple image?  And so we read, with a full heart, the simple poem written by Jean Caubère entitled, Le nid tiède [The warm nest].  The poem seems even more meaningful when we consider that it appeared in an austere book written under the sign of the desert (Jean Caubère, Deserts):

The warm, calm nest
Whose bird sings

Recalls the songs, the charms
The pure threshold
Of the old house.

The threshold, here, is a welcoming threshold, a threshold whose majesty does not impose on us.  The two images, the calm nest and the old house, weave a thick web of intimacy on the loom of dreams.   They are completely simple images, with no concern for the picturesque.  The poet rightly sensed that, with the invocation of the nest, of birdsong, the charms that lead us back to the old house, the primary dwelling, a sort of musical chord would strike in the reader's soul.  But, in order to compare house and nest with such gentleness, mustn't we have forgotten the house that sheltered happiness?  There is an alas in this song of tenderness.  If we return to the old house as if to a nest, it is because memories are dreams, it is because the house of our past has become an image, a great image of lost intimacies.