Gaston Boissier, in crowning (touching custom) a fifty-year-old poet, congratulated him for never having innovated, for having expressed ordinary ideas in a facile style, for having scrupulously conformed to the traditional laws of French poetics.
Might not a history of our literature be written by neglecting the innovators? Ronsard would be replaced by Ponthus de Thyard, Corneille by his brother, Racine by Campistron, Lamartine by de Laprade, Victor Hugo by Ponsard, and Verlaine by Aicard; it would be more encouraging, more academic and perhaps more fashionable, for genius in France always seems slightly ridiculous.
Verlaine is a nature and as such undefinable. Like his life, the rhythms he loves are of broken or rolling lines; he ended by disjoining romantic verse, and having destroyed its form, having bored and ripped it so as to permit too many things to be introduced, all the effervescences that issued from his crazy skull, he unwittingly became one of the instigators of vers libre. Verlainian verse with its shoots, its incidences, its parentheses, naturally evolved into vers libre; in becoming "libre," it did no more than reflect a condition.
When the gift of expression forsakes him, and when at the same time the gift of tears is removed, he either becomes the blustering rough iambic writer ofInvectives, or the humble awkward elegist ofChansons pour Elle. Poet by these very gifts, consecrated to talk felicitously only of love, all loves; and he whose lips press as in a dream upon the stars of the purifactory robe, he who wrote theAmiescomposed those Canticles of the month of Mary. And from the same heart, the same hand, the same genius,—but who shall chant them, O hypocrites! if not those very white-veiled Friends.
To confess one's sins of action or dreams is not sinful; no public confession can bring disrepute to a man, for all men are equal and equally tempted; no one commits a crime his brother is not capable of. That is why the pious journals or the Academy vainly took upon themselves the shame of having abused Verlaine, still under the flowers; the kick of the sacristan and scoundrel broke on a pedestal already of granite, while in his marble beard, Verlaine was everlastingly smiling, with the look of a faun hearkening while the bells peal.
(Tr. 1)
Magnificent, but who without hopes delivers himself for not having praised the country in which to live when ennui has grown resplendent out of the sterile winter.
(Tr. 2)
His neck will shake off this white agony.
(Tr. 3)
As if he were fashioning the steel of souls, hammers with great full strokes, the immense plates of patience and silence.
(Tr. 4)
The savage wind of November, the wind, have you met it, the wind at the crossroads of three hundred paths...?
(Tr. 5)
Seated gigantically on the side of the night
(Tr. 6)
* * * * *
—O these crowds, these crowds, and the misery and distress that whips them like billows.
Monstrances, decorated with silk, towards the heaped up towns, in roofs of glass and crystal, from the height of the sacerdotal choir, stretch the cross of gothic ideas.
They obtrude themselves in the gold of clear Sundays—All Saints' day, Christmas, Easter, and white Pentecosts. They obtrude themselves in the gold and in the incense and in the fête of the great organ beating with the flight of its storms.
The red capitals and vermillion vaults are a soul, in sunlight, living in the old background and antique authoritarian mystery.
Yet, when the song and the naive, prismatic anthem ceases, a grief of incense evaporated stamps itself on the golden tripods and brazen altars.
And the stained glass windows, lofty with ages kneeling before Christ, with their immobile popes and martyrs and heroes, seem to tremble at the sound of a proud train passing through the town.
(Tr. 7)
Formerly—there was the errant, somnambulous life, across the mornings and fabulous evening, when the right hand of God towards the blue Canaans traced the golden road in the depth of the shadows.
Formerly—there was the enormous, exasperated life, fiercely hung on the manes of stallions, suddenly, with great sparks from their hoofs, and towards immense space immensely provoked.
Formerly—there was the ardent, evocative life; the white Cross of heaven, the red Cross of hell advanced, to the splendor of iron armors, each across blood, towards his victorious heaven.
Formerly—there was the foaming livid life, alive and dead, with strokes of crime and tocsins, battle between them, of proscribers and assassins, with splendid and mad death above them.
(Tr. 8)
The melancholy time has ornamented its hours like dead flowers; the passing year has yellowed its days like dry leaves. The pale dawn is seen by gloomy waters and the faces of evening have bled under the arrows of the laughing, bleeding, mysterious wind.
(Tr. 9)
I know sad waters in which die the evenings; flowers which nobody gathers fall there one by one.
(Tr. 10)
Yesterday the dawn was so pale over the peaceful meadows and shavegrass; in the clear morning came a child to gather plants, leaning on them his pure hands that gathered the asphodels.
Noon was heavy with storm and dismal with sunlight in the garden dead of pride in its lethargic sleep of flowers and trees; the water was hard to the eye like marble, the marble warm and clear like water, and the child that came was comely, clad in purple and golden-hair, and long one saw the peonies, one by one, draw their blood from the petals at the passage of the fair child.
The child that came that evening was naked. He gathered roses in the dusk, he sobbed at having come, he retreated before his shadow. It is like him, naked, that my destiny has recognized itself.
(Tr. 11)
Goat's leaf grows under my May forest. The sun drops in gold through the heavy gloom. A roe-buck stirs in the leaves he gathers. The breeze in the frieze of birches passes from leaf to leaf.
The grasses are silvered in my May field. There the sun gleams like a play of swords. A bee vibrates to the lilies of the valley in the lane of tall grouped flowers, towards the bed of the stream. The breeze sings in the frieze of the ash-trees.
(Tr. 12)
Where is the Marguerite, O gué, o gué, where is the Marguerite? She is in her château, weary and tired at heart, She is in her hamlet, gay and childish at heart. She is in her grave, let us gather there the lily-of-the-valley, O gué, the Marguerite.
(Tr. 13)
Where are our beloved ones? They are in the grave; they are happier in a fairer sojourn.
(Tr. 14)
Of what use is beauty? Its use is to go in earth, to be eaten by worms, to be eaten by worms....
(Tr. 15)
Do you not feel in you the opulence of being only for yourself beautiful, O Sea, and of being yourself?
(Tr. 16)
Through me the way that runs among the Lost.
(Tr. 17)
Nature is a temple where living pillars sometimes let confused words issue; man passes there through forests of symbols watching him with friendly gaze.
Like long echoes blended in distance to deep, dim unity, vast as night and clear as day, the perfumes, colors and sounds answer each other.
(Tr. 18)
The flesh is sad, alas! and I have read all the books.To fly yonder! I feel that the birds are drunkAt being among the unknown foam and the heavens....An autumn strewn with stains of redness....And you were the sobbing whiteness of lilies....I bring you the child of an Idumean night....His neck will shake off this white agony....
(Tr. 19)
The dream, in a heliotrope robe, and her thought on her fingers, with loosened girdle, passes, lightly grazing souls with her cloud train, to the extinct rhythm of a music of other times.
(Tr. 20)
In the lingering fragrance of an evening of the last days.
(Tr. 21)
The roses of the west shed their leaves on the stream; and, in the pale emotion of the falling evening, is evoked an autumnal park where, on a bench, dreams my youth, already sober as a widow.
(Tr. 22)
Chastely you walked in the robe of your soul, which desire followed like a tamed faun; I breathed through the evening, O purity, my dream enveloped in your womanly veils.
(Tr. 23)
Fair verses where the fluid sense is loosened like the hair of Ophelia under the water. Silent verses, without rhythm or trammels, where noiselessly the rhyme slips like an oar. Verses of an old thin stuff, impalpable as sound or cloud. Verses of autumnal evenings bewitching the hours with the feminine rite of minor syllables. Verses of evenings of loves enervated with verbena, where, exquisitely, the soul hardly feels a caress.
(Tr. 24)
In the splendor of violet moonlights.
(Tr. 25)
Then from the depths and holy night, as a young sun springs from abysms of the sea, white, letting stream from shoulders to back her hair where pale hyacinths swim, a woman rises.
(Tr. 26)
If you clasp only chimerae, if you drink the intoxication of delusive wine, what matter! The sun dies, the imaginary crowd is dead, but the world subsists in your own soul: See! the days are faded like brief roses, but your word has created the mirage in which you live.
(Tr. 27)
I have known all the gods of earth and heaven.
(Tr. 28)
Eternal flowers, flowers equal to the gods I
(Tr. 29)
The fair, the white, the lovely lady of lilies.
(Tr. 30)
The autumn roses wither, the flowers that bedecked the graves; slowly the corollae are scattered and the cold ground is strewn with falling petals.
(Tr. 31)
There are houses whose fronts weep, there are knells that toll in the belfry, where faint bells ring. Towards what streams of death have the virgins marched, the virgins with fair rings on their fingers?
(Tr. 32)
Lady of amourous, swooning lilies,Lady of languishing, faded lilies,Sad with eyes of belladonna.Lady of dreams of royal roses,Lady of sombre, nuptial roses,Frail as a madonna—Lady of heaven and rapture,Lady of ecstacy and renouncement,Chaste far-off star.Lady of hell, thy sullen smile,Lady of the devil, a kiss of thy mouth,Is the fire of evil fountains,And I burn if I touch thee.
(Tr. 33)
Methinks, my soul, thou art a garden.
(Tr. 34)
Of the lady that has passed away.
(Tr. 35)
HELEN
(Faust's laboratory at Wittenberg)
From the evolved ages I have reascended the stream and, with a heart intoxicated by sublime designs, deserted the Hades and holy shades where the soul is steeped in an ineffable calm.
Time has not bent the curve of my breasts. I am ever up and strong in trial, I, the eternal virgin and eternal widow, glory of Hellas, among war with its black tocsins.
O Faust! I come to you, abandoning the bosom of the Mothers! For you I have left, on wings of the chimerae, the pale shades where he buried the gods.
I bring for your love, from the depths of antique skies, my neck whose lilies time has not vanquished and my voice made supple with prophetic rhythms.
(Tr. 36)
Bourget, Maupassant and Loti are found in all the stations, offered with the roast. Choose these authors at the same time as the cigars. Bourget, Maupassant are found in all the stations.
(Tr. 37)
She is the victim and the little spouse.
(Tr. 38)
Truly, Monsieur Benoist approves of persons who have read Voltaire and are opposed to Jesuits. He muses. He is partial to long controversies, calmuniates priest and theriac.
He even was an orator at a Scotch lodge. Nevertheless—because his lawful child believes in God—his little daughter, in white veils and blue ribbon, received the sacrament. This required that several liters at sixteen sous be drunk at thebistro,among the filthy benches, where the billiard man was sleeping, the waiters sprawling, and where his little maid in floss-silk gloves was blushing.
Now, Benoist who colors at the sight of a churchman, shows some pleasure at having seen, that morning, the marriage of the only son and his young girl.
(Tr. 39)
The proud indolence of nights, perfumes and breasts.
(Tr. 40)
On Heaven's balconies in antiquated robes.
(Tr. 41)
NOCTURNAL PARIS
It is the sea;—calm sheet. And the great tide with distant rumbling has receded.... The wave returns, wallowing in its noise. Hearest thou the clawing of the night crabs.
It is the drained Styx: Diogenes, lantern in hand, unceremoniously arrives. Perverse poets angle along the black stream: their hollow skulls serve as boxes for worms.
It is the field: to glean impure lint falls the whirling flight of hideous harpies; the gutter rabbit, on the watch for rodents, flees the sons of Bondy, nocturnal vintagers.
It is death: the policeman lies dead. On high, love takes a siesta, sucking the meat with heavy hand where the extinguished kisses leave a red patch. Alone is the hour. Listen. Not a dream stirs.
It is life: listen, the lively spring sings the eternal song on the head of a sea-god drawing green naked limbs on the bed of the Morgue ... and the great open eyes.
DIURNAL PARIS
See gleaming in the skies the great disk of red copper, immense casserole where the good God cooks manna, the harlequin, eternalplat du jour. It is dipped in sweat and dipped in love.
The laridons wait in a circle near the oven; vaguely one hears the rustling of rancid flesh, and the tipplers, too, are there, holding out their jugs; the wretches shiver, waiting their turn.
Thinkest thou the sun then fries for everybody these fat stirring scraps of burnt meat which a flood of gold inundates? No, the dog-soup falls on us from the sky.
They are beneath the ray and we beneath the gutter. To us the black jug that grows cold without light. Our substance for ourselves is our bag of gall.
(Tr. 42)
With the assent of the tall sunflowers.
(Tr. 43)
And since, then, I have bathed me in the poem of the sea, steeped in stars and latescent, mastering the green azure where, flotation pale and ravished, a pensive drowned person sometimes descends; where, suddenly staining the nuances of blue, frenzied and slow rhythms beneath the glinting red of day, stronger than alcohol, vaster than your lyres, the bitter redness of love ferments.
(Tr. 44)
Who knows if genius is not one of your virtues.
(Tr. 45)
Torment of the garden of delightIn which everything flourishes...
(Tr. 46)
The sky rains without ending, though nothing agitates it; it rains, it rains, shepherdess! on the stream....
The stream has its dominical repose; not a barge up stream, downstream.
Vespers chime in the town; the banks are deserted, not an isle.
Passes a boarding-school group, o poor flesh! Several already have on their winter muffs.
One that has neither muff nor fur makes a quite sorry figure all in gray.
And see! She breaks from the ranks and runs; O God, what has seized her?
She goes and throws herself in the stream. Not a boatman, not a Newfoundland dog....
(Tr. 47)
Dismal north wind, screaming downpour and dark stream, and shut houses....
(Tr. 48)
A full silence of vibrant gold has descended near the springs which satyrs have troubled; a clear marvel enclosed in the heart of the valleys, if the little singing bird remains silent.
Oblivion of the flute, hours of fearless dreams, where thou hast known how to find for thy amorous blood the peacefulness of inhabiting a place odorous with roses, whose sylvan gods make thee arms.
There thou goest, composing beautiful books, a credit to the French language and the noble Athens.
(Tr. 49)
Of that Sophocles, credit to Ferté-Milon.
(Tr. 50)
Once while riding on a journey,Pensive along the route that displeased me,I found love in the middle of the roadIn a vagrant's scant attire.
(Tr. 51)
Brilliant star, Phoebe with outspread wings, O name of night that grows and wanes, favor my way through the gloomy forest where my errant soul takes its modest steps! In the grotto with hollow sounds, whose entrance is ivy-covered, on the rock topped with the familiar she-goat, on the lake, on the pond, on the tranquil waters, on the enamelled banks where reeds moan, she likes to see the trembling of thy melancholy fires.
Phoebe, O Cynthia, from the first season my soul was drunk with thy lovely light; observing thy diverse faces in their orb, beneath thy gentle influence, she composed verses. Above Nicias, Eryx, Siris and the sandy Iolchos, Timolus and the grand Epidorus, and Green Sidon, her piety reveres this rock of Latmos where thou loved.
(Tr. 52)
It is the autumn wind in the lane, sister, hearken, and the fall of willow and beach tree leaves on the water, and the hoar-frost in the valley.
And come, like those drooping great ladies, to him who is thinking of thee, in the silence when thy light spinning-wheel dies, O sister of the sweet marjoram.
Loose—'tis the hour—thy hair fairer than the hemp thou spinnest....
(Tr. 53)
Come with wreathes of primroses in thy hands, O young girls, who mourn the sister dead at dawn. Bells of the valley peal the end of a destiny, and spades are seen gleaming in the morning sun.
Come with baskets of violets, O young girls who slightly hesitate in the path of beeches, for fear of the priest's solemn words. Come, the sky is quite sonorous with invisible larks....
'Tis the festival of the dead, one would say Sunday, the bells ring so gently in the heart of the valley; boys have hidden in the lanes. Thou alone goest to pray at the foot of the white grave.
Some year, the boys, who today are hidden, will come to tell you the sweet pain of loving, and they will hear you all, around the maypole, sing songs of childhood to greet the night.
(Tr. 54)
Fish, crane, eagle, flower, bird-bent bamboo.Turtle, iris, peony, anemone, sparrows.
(Tr. 55)
I wish that this verse were a bauble of art,
(Tr. 56)
Learn from the child to pray to the blue waves, for 'tis the sky here below whose cloud is foam. The sun's reflection sparkling on the sea is sweeter to gaze on to our gloomy eyes.
Learn from the child to pray to the pure sky, 'tis the ocean above, whose void is cloud. The gloom of a cloud rich in wrecks to our hearts is less sad to follow in the azure.
Learn from the child to pray to all things: the bee of the spirit makes a honey of light on the livingavesof the rosary of roses, a chaplet of perfumes on the rosaries of love.
(Tr. 57)
O lovely April, glad and bright,What matters your blithe song,White lilacs, hawthorns, and the flowered goldOf sunlight streaming through the branches,If far-away my well-belovedIn the northern fogs stays.
(Tr. 58)
I had gone to the heart of the garden,When in the night some invisible hand,Stronger than me, struck me to earth,—'Tis for your joy, a voice did say.
(Tr. 59)
And the tiny venturous flowers along the hedges.
(Tr. 60)
Behold the rapture of autumnal souls,The town dissolves like near illusions;Behold the portals of the moonless nightVeiled in violet and orange-hues.Princess, what did'st thou with the jeweled tiara.
(Tr. 61)
O Jesus crowned with thorns, bleeding in every bruised heart.
(Tr. 62)
Gooday mynher, gooday myffrau.
(Tr. 63)
The hour of white cloud is cast o'er the plain,Like reflections of blood, or flocks of wool,O rose-colored sweet-heather, O blood-colored sky.The hour of gold cloud has paled o'er the plain,The long slow veils of white wool fall,O mauve-colored sweet-heather—O blood-colored sky.The hour of gold cloud has burst o'er the plain,Gently the reeds sang under angered winds,O red sweet-heather—O blood-colored sky.The hour of gold cloud has passed o'er the plainSo swiftly: its splendor has vanished.O gold sweet-heather—O blood-colored sky.