You Are Always With Me – Fine Art Print

The words “I carry you within me like a wounded bird” come from the French poet Louis Aragon, taken from his timeless poem Il n’y a pas d’amour heureux. Written amid the uncertainty of the Second World War, it captures the contradictions of love: its beauty and its pain, its loyalty and its inevitable loss. Aragon’s verse reminds us that love never arrives untouched by the world — it carries both light and damage, strength and fragility. Years later, Georges Brassens set the poem to music, giving it a raw and human sound, and Françoise Hardy would later turn it into something almost whispered, tender and haunted. Each interpretation left a trace, keeping the poem alive in the collective memory of French culture. The line still feels alive, fluttering between melancholy and hope, never quite landing.

We wanted to take that sentence and give it another form — something visual, something you could live with. Some words don’t just pass through the mind; they settle under the skin. This one stayed. It carried a bird, fragile and symbolic, and we followed it. What would it look like if that image — of carrying something broken, something alive — existed outside the page? That was the starting point for this poster.

In the image, a woman holds the bird gently, as if it were both wound and cure. Her gesture is quiet, almost hesitant, as if she knows the act of holding might hurt but letting go would hurt more. The composition is stripped of noise: soft light, muted tones, a suggestion of movement. The colors are warm, yes, but measured — nothing screams for attention. Gold fades into rust, pale pink into shadow. The texture of the background feels like old paper, as if the image itself had been written rather than painted. Every element aims for restraint, because the sentence demands silence, not spectacle.

This piece isn’t about answers; it’s about echoes. About how a single line of poetry can outlive its moment and still find a pulse decades later. Love, in Aragon’s hands, wasn’t a simple feeling — it was a form of resistance. And maybe art still carries that same function: to hold something wounded, to keep it safe long enough for it to breathe again. We didn’t want to illustrate the poem. We wanted to listen to it, to give it a space on the wall where it could stay, quietly alive.

We like to think this print belongs to anyone who has ever loved without certainty, who knows that tenderness is also a kind of bravery. It’s an image for people who keep things — memories, names, moments — even when they fade. Hang it where you can see it when the light changes. Let it be what it was meant to be: a sentence, a bird, a wound, a reminder that love endures in its own broken way.