The title was chosen late in the poem's gestation; it refers to the youngest of the three "Parcae" (the minor Roman deities also called "The Fates"), though for some readers the connection with that mythological figure is tenuous and problematic. The poem is written in the first person, and is the soliloquy of a young woman contemplating life and death, engagement and withdrawal, love and estrangement, in a setting dominated by the sea, the sky, stars, rocky cliffs, and the rising sun. However, it is also possible to read the poem as an allegory on the way fate moves human affairs or as an attempt to comprehend the horrific violence in Europe at the time of the poem's composition. The poem is not about World War I, but it does try to address the relationships between destruction and beauty, and, in this sense, it resonates with ancient Greek meditations on these matters, especially in the plays of Sophocles and Aeschylus. There are, therefore, evident links with "le Cimetière marin", which is also a seaside meditation on comparably large themes. Before "la Jeune Parque", Valéry's only publications of note were dialogues, articles, some poems, and a study of Leonardo da Vinci. In 1920 and 1922, he published two slim collections of verses. The first, "Album des vers anciens" (Album of old verses), was a revision of early but beautifully wrought smaller poems, some of which had been published individually before 1900. The second, "Charmes" (from the Latin "carmina", meaning "songs" and also "incantations"), further confirmed his reputation as a major French poet. The collection includes "le Cimetière marin", and many smaller poems with diverse structures. 'Le Cimetière marin' is mentioned or indirectly implied or referred to in at least four of Iris Murdoch's novels, The Unicorn, The Time of the Angels, The Nice and the Good and The Sea, The Sea. Valéry's technique is quite orthodox in its essentials. His verse rhymes and scans in conventional ways, and it has much in common with the work of Mallarmé. His poem, "Palme", inspired James Merrill's celebrated 1974 poem "Lost in Translation", and his cerebral lyricism also influenced the American poet, Edgar Bowers. His far more ample prose writings, peppered with many aphorisms and "bons mots", reveal a skeptical outlook on human nature, verging on the cynical.