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Paul Verlaine
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Paul Verlaine
French poet
born March 30, 1844, Metz, France
died January 8, 1896, Paris
Main
French lyric poet first associated with the Parnassians and later known
as a leader of the Symbolists. With Stéphane Mallarmé and Charles
Baudelaire he formed the so-called Decadents.
Life.
Verlaine was the only child of an army officer in comfortable
circumstances. He was undoubtedly spoiled by his mother. At the Lycée
Bonaparte (now Condorcet) in Paris, he showed both ability and indolence
and at 14 sent his first extant poem (“La Mort”) to the “master” poet
Victor Hugo. Obtaining the baccalauréat in 1862, with distinction in
translation from Latin, he became a clerk in an insurance company, then
in the Paris city hall. All the while he was writing verse and
frequenting literary cafés and drawing rooms, where he met the leading
poets of the Parnassian group and other talented contemporaries, among
them Mallarmé, Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, and Anatole France. His poems
began to appear in their literary reviews; the first, “Monsieur
Prudhomme,” in 1863. Three years later the first series of Le Parnasse
contemporain, a collection of pieces by contemporary poets (hence the
term Parnassian), contained eight contributions by Verlaine.
The same year, his first volume of poetry appeared. Besides virtuoso
imitations of Baudelaire and Leconte de Lisle, Poèmes saturniens
included poignant expressions of love and melancholy supposedly centred
on his cousin Élisa, who married another and died in 1867 (she had paid
for this book to be published). In Fêtes galantes personal sentiment is
masked by delicately clever evocations of scenes and characters from the
Italian commedia dell’arte and from the sophisticated pastorals of
18th-century painters, such as Watteau and Nicolas Lancret, and perhaps
also from the contemporary mood-evoking paintings of Adolphe Monticelli.
In June 1869 Verlaine fell in love with Mathilde Mauté, aged 16, and
they married in August 1870. In the delicious poems written during their
engagement (La Bonne Chanson), he fervently sees her as his long
hoped-for saviour from erring ways. When insurrectionists seized power
and set up the Paris Commune, Verlaine served as press officer under
their council. His fear of resultant reprisals from the Third Republic
was one factor in his later bohemianism. Incompatibility in his marriage
was soon aggravated by his infatuation for the younger poet Arthur
Rimbaud, who came to stay with the Verlaines in September 1871.
Verlaine abandoned his wife and infant son, Georges, in July 1872, to
wander with Rimbaud in northern France and Belgium and write
“impressionist” sketches for his next collection, Romances sans paroles
(“Songs Without Words”). The pair reached London in September and found,
besides exiled Communard friends, plenty of interest and amusement and
also inspiration: Verlaine completed the Romances, whose opening pages,
especially, attain a pure musicality rarely surpassed in French
literature and embody some of his most advanced prosodic experiments;
the subjects are mostly landscape or regret or vituperation of his
estranged wife. The collection was published in 1874 by his friend
Edmond Lepelletier; the author himself was then serving a two-year
sentence at Mons for wounding Rimbaud with a revolver during an
emotional storm in Brussels on July 10, 1873.
Contrition, prison abstinence, and pious reading (some in English,
along with admiring study of Shakespeare and Dickens) seem to have
produced a sincere return to Roman Catholicism in the summer of 1874,
after his wife had obtained a separation. Leaving prison in January
1875, he tried a Trappist retreat, then hurried to Stuttgart to meet
Rimbaud, who apparently repulsed him with violence. He took refuge in
England and, for over a year, taught French and drawing at Stickney and
Boston in Lincolnshire, then at Bournemouth, Hampshire, impressing all
by his dignity and piety and gaining an appreciation of English authors
as diverse as Tennyson, Swinburne, and the Anglican hymn writers. In
1877 he returned to France.
From this period (1873–78) date most of the poems in Sagesse
(“Wisdom”), which was published in October 1880 at the author’s expense
(as were his previous books). They include outstanding poetical
expressions of simple Catholic Christianity as well as of his emotional
odyssey. Literary recognition now began. In 1882 his famous “Art
poétique” (probably composed in prison eight years earlier) was
enthusiastically adopted by the young Symbolists. He later disavowed the
Symbolists, however, chiefly because they went further than he in
abandoning traditional forms: rhyme, for example, seemed to him an
unavoidable necessity in French verse.
In 1880 Verlaine made an unsuccessful essay at farming with his
favourite pupil, Lucien Létinois, and the boy’s parents. Lucien’s death
in April 1883, as well as that of the poet’s mother (to whom he was
tenderly attached) in January 1886, and the failure of all attempts at
reconciliation with his wife broke down whatever will to
“respectability” remained, and he relapsed into drink and debauchery.
Now both famous and notorious, he was still writing in an attempt to
earn a living but seldom with the old inspiration.
Jadis et naguère (“Yesteryear and Yesterday”) consists mostly of
pieces like “Art poétique,” written years before but not fitting into
previous carefully grouped collections. Similarly, Parallèlement
comprises bohemian and erotic pieces often contemporary with, and
technically equal to, his “respectable” ones. Verlaine frankly
acknowledged the parallel nature of both his makeup and his muse. In
Amour new poems still show the old magic, notably passages of his lament
for Lucien Létinois, no doubt intended to emulate Tennyson’s In
Memoriam, but lacking its depth. Prose works such as Les Poètes maudits,
short biographical studies of six poets, among them Mallarmé and
Rimbaud; Les Hommes d’aujourd’hui, brief biographies of contemporary
writers, most of which appeared in 1886; Mes Hôpitaux, accounts of
Verlaine’s stays in hospitals; Mes Prisons, accounts of his
incarcerations, including the story of his “conversion” in 1874; and
Confessions, notes autobiographiques helped attract notice to
ill-recognized contemporaries as well as to himself (he was instrumental
in publishing Rimbaud’s Illuminations in 1886 and making him famous).
There is little of lasting value, however, in the rest of the verse and
prose that Verlaine turned out in an unsuccessful effort to keep the
wolf from a door shared usually with aging prostitutes such as Philomène
Boudin and Eugénie Krantz, prominent among the muses of his decadence.
During frequent spells in hospitals, doctors gave him devoted care and
friendship. He was feted in London, Oxford, and Manchester by young
sympathizers, among them the critic Arthur Symons, who arranged a
lecture tour in England in November 1893. Frank Harris and Cranmer Byng
published articles and poems by Verlaine in The Fortnightly Review and
The Senate. Relief pensions from admirers (1894) and the state (1895)
were also recognition, however tardy or insufficient, of the esteem he
attracted as a poet and a friend. He died in Eugénie Krantz’s lodgings
in January 1896.
Assessment.
One of the most purely lyrical of French poets, Verlaine was an
initiator of modern word-music and marks a transition between the
Romantic poets and the Symbolists. His best poetry broke with the
sonorous rhetoric of most of his predecessors and showed that the French
language, everyday clichés included, could communicate new shades of
human feeling by suggestion and tremulous vagueness that capture the
reader by disarming his intellect; words could be used merely for their
sound to make a subtler music, an incantatory spell more potent than
their everyday meaning. Explicit intellectual or philosophical content
is absent from his best work. His discovery of the intimate musicality
of the French language was doubtless instinctive, but, during his most
creative years, he was a conscious artist constantly seeking to develop
his unique gift and “reform” his nation’s poetic expression.
Vernon Philip Underwood
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Poems
Translated by Gertrude Hall
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A La Promenade
The milky sky, the hazy, slender trees,
Seem smiling on the light costumes we wear,—
Our gauzy floating veils that have an air
Of wings, our satins fluttering in the breeze.
And in the marble bowl the ripples
gleam,
And through the lindens of the avenue
The sifted golden sun comes to us blue
And dying, like the sunshine of a dream.
Exquisite triflers and deceivers
rare,
Tender of heart, but little tied by vows,
Deliciously we dally ’neath the boughs,
And playfully the lovers plague the fair.
Receiving, should they overstep a
point,
A buffet from a hand absurdly small,
At which upon a gallant knee they fall
To kiss the little finger’s littlest joint.
And as this is a shocking liberty,
A frigid glance rewards the daring swain,—
Not quite o’erbalancing with its disdain
The red mouth’s reassuring clemency.
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Chanson D’Automne
Leaf-strewing gales
Utter low wails
Like violins,—
Till on my soul
Their creeping dole
Stealthily wins….
Days long gone by!
In such hour, I,
Choking and pale,
Call you to mind,—
Then like the wind
Weep I and wail.
And, as by wind
Harsh and unkind,
Driven by grief,
Go I, here, there,
Recking not where,
Like the dead leaf.
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Tis The Feast Of Corn
Tis the feast of corn, ’tis the feast of bread,
On the dear scene returned to, witnessed again!
So white is the light o’er the reapers shed
Their shadows fall pink on the level grain.
The stalked gold drops to the
whistling flight
Of the scythes, whose lightning dives deep, leaps clear;
The plain, labor-strewn to the confines of sight,
Changes face at each instant, gay and severe.
All pants, all is effort and toil
’neath the sun,
The stolid old sun, tranquil ripener of wheat,
Who works o’er our haste imperturbably on
To swell the green grape yon, turning it sweet.
Work on, faithful sun, for the bread
and the wine,
Feed man with the milk of the earth, and bestow
The frank glass wherein unconcern laughs divine,—
Ye harvesters, vintagers, work on, aglow!
For from the flour’s fairest, and
from the vine’s best,
Fruit of man’s strength spread to earth’s uttermost,
God gathers and reaps, to His purposes blest,
The Flesh and the Blood for the chalice and host!
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A Une Femme
To you these lines for the consoling grace
Of your great eyes wherein a soft dream shines,
For your pure soul, all-kind!—to you these lines
From the black deeps of mine unmatched distress.
’Tis that the hideous dream that
doth oppress
My soul, alas! its sad prey ne’er resigns,
But like a pack of wolves down mad inclines
Goes gathering heat upon my reddened trace!
I suffer, oh, I suffer cruelly!
So that the first man’s cry at Eden lost
Was but an eclogue surely to my cry!
And that the sorrows, Dear, that may
have crossed
Your life, are but as swallows light that fly
—Dear!—in a golden warm September sky.
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Apres Trois Ans
When I had pushed the narrow garden-door,
Once more I stood within the green retreat;
Softly the morning sunshine lighted it,
And every flow’r a humid spangle wore.
Nothing is changed. I see it all
once more:
The vine-clad arbor with its rustic seat. . . .
The waterjet still plashes silver sweet,
The ancient aspen rustles as of yore.
The roses throb as in a bygone day,
As they were wont, the tall proud lilies sway.
Each bird that lights and twitters is a friend.
I even found the Flora standing yet,
Whose plaster crumbles at the alley’s end,
—Slim, ’mid the foolish scent of mignonette.
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Birds In The Night
I
You were not over-patient with me, dear;
This want of patience one must rightly rate:
You are so young! Youth ever was severe
And variable and inconsiderate!
You had not all the needful
kindness, no;
Nor should one be amazed, unhappily:
You’re very young, cold sister mine, and so
’Tis natural you should unfeeling be!
Behold me therefore ready to
forgive;
Not gay, of course! but doing what I can
To bear up bravely,—deeply though I grieve
To be, through you, the most unhappy man.
II
But you will own that I was in the right
When in my downcast moods I used to say
That your sweet eyes, my hope, once, and delight!
Were come to look like eyes that will betray.
It was an evil lie, you used to
swear,
And your glance, which was lying, dear, would flame,—
Poor fire, near out, one stirs to make it flare!—
And in your soft voice you would say, “Je t’aime!”
Alas! that one should clutch at
happiness
In sense’s, season’s, everything’s despite!—
But ’twas an hour of gleeful bitterness
When I became convinced that I was right!
III
And wherefore should I lay my heart-wounds bare?
You love me not,—an end there, lady mine;
And as I do not choose that one shall dare
To pity,—I must suffer without sign.
Yes, suffer! For I loved you well,
did I,—
But like a loyal soldier will I stand
Till, hurt to death, he staggers off to die,
Still filled with love for an ungrateful land.
O you that were my Beauty and my
Own,
Although from you derive all my mischance,
Are not you still my Home, then, you alone,
As young and mad and beautiful as France?
IV
Now I do not intend—what were the gain?—
To dwell with streaming eyes upon the past;
But yet my love which you may think lies slain,
Perhaps is only wide awake at last.
My love, perhaps,—which now is
memory!—
Although beneath your blows it cringe and cry
And bleed to will, and must, as I foresee,
Still suffer long and much before it die,—
Judges you justly when it seems
aware
Of some not all banal compunction,
And of your memory in its despair
Reproaching you, “Ah, fi! it was ill done!”
V
I see you still. I softly pushed the door—
As one o’erwhelmed with weariness you lay;
But O light body love should soon restore,
You bounded up, tearful at once and gay.
O what embraces, kisses sweet and
wild!
Myself, from brimming eyes I laughed to you
Those moments, among all, O lovely child,
Shall be my saddest, but my sweetest, too.
I will remember your smile, your
caress,
Your eyes, so kind that day,—exquisite snare!—
Yourself, in fine, whom else I might not bless,
Only as they appeared, not as they were.
VI
I see you still! Dressed in a summer dress,
Yellow and white, bestrewn with curtain-flowers;
But you had lost the glistening laughingness
Of our delirious former loving hours.
The eldest daughter and the little
wife
Spoke plainly in your bearing’s least detail,—
Already ’twas, alas! our altered life
That stared me from behind your dotted veil.
Forgiven be! And with no little
pride
I treasure up,—and you, no doubt, see why,—
Remembrance of the lightning to one side
That used to flash from your indignant eye!
VII
Some moments, I’m the tempest-driven bark
That runs dismasted mid the hissing spray,
And seeing not Our Lady through the dark
Makes ready to be drowned, and kneels to pray.
Some moments, I’m the sinner at his
end,
That knows his doom if he unshriven go,
And losing hope of any ghostly friend,
Sees Hell already gape, and feels it glow.
Oh, but! Some moments, I’ve the
spirit stout
Of early Christians in the lion’s care,
That smile to Jesus witnessing, without
A nerve’s revolt, the turning of a hair!
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