Shepherdess, O Eiffel Tower, your flock of bridges is bleating this morning.

This line is from Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem “Zone,” the opening piece of his modernist collection *Alcools* (1913). Written in the years just before World War I, “Zone” moves through Paris in a rapid, collage-like sequence of images that mixes the sacred and the everyday, the ancient and the new. The Eiffel Tower—then a potent emblem of modern engineering—appears as part of Apollinaire’s effort to make contemporary urban life a fit subject for lyric poetry. The poem’s roaming perspective and abrupt transitions reflect the avant-garde atmosphere in which Apollinaire worked, alongside painters and writers experimenting with new forms.

Addressing the Eiffel Tower as a “shepherdess” turns a symbol of industrial modernity into a pastoral figure, while the “flock of bridges” recasts Paris’s infrastructure as living animals. The metaphor fuses cityscape and countryside, suggesting that modern Paris has its own organic rhythms and that technology can be absorbed into poetic tradition rather than opposed to it. The “bleating this morning” adds immediacy and sound, as if the city awakens like a herd being gathered. In “Zone,” such startling personifications help Apollinaire celebrate the new while also revealing a longing to find spiritual or emotional meaning within the modern metropolis.