Tout à l’heure déferlait
L’onde, roulée en volutes,
De cloches comme des flûtes
Dans le ciel comme du lait.

“The hedges billow like the sea’s...”

The hedges billow like the sea’s
Whitecaps of fleece, ocean unending,
On, on... Bright in the bright haze, blending
Mists with the scents of laurel trees.

Windmill and branch laze airily
Over the tender grasses where
Colts caper, frolic here and there,
Boundless in youthful energy.

Here in this Sunday morning full
Of dim obscurities, comes, too,
Many a robust, playful ewe,
Soft as the whiteness of her wool.

Just now there went unfurling, high
Above, swirling to heaven, the sound
Of bells, like flutes, all whirling round,
Up, up, into the milk-white sky.

“La ‘grande ville’! Un tas criard de pierres blanches...”

La “grande ville”! Un tas criard de pierres blanches
Où rage le soleil comme en pays conquis.
Tous les vices ont leurs tanières, les exquis
Et les hideux, dans ce désert de pierres blanches.

Des odeurs. Des bruits vains. Où que vague le cœur,
Toujours ce poudroiement vertigineux de sable,
Toujours ce remuement de la chose coupable
Dans cette solitude où s’écœure le cœur!

De près, de loin, le Sage aura sa Thébaïde
Parmi le fade ennui qui monte de ceci,
D’autant plus âpre et plus sanctifiante aussi
Que deux parts de son âme y pleurent, dans ce vide!

“ ‘The city!’ Gaudy cluster of white stones...”

“The city!” Gaudy cluster of white stones,
Where the sun seethes, as in a conquered land.
Each vice has its own lair—the fair, the bland,
The odious—in this desert of white stones.

Smells. Empty sounds. Wherever roams the heart,
Always that crumbling, dizzying sand, that sin
Whirring about its whirlwind guilt within
This solitude of the disheartened heart!

Near, far, the Sage yearns for his desert too
Among this emptiness and dour ennui,
All the more bleak, yet sacrosanct, for he
Harbors a soul, racked, weeping, rent in two.

from Jadis et naguère (1884)

Presenting somewhat the appearance of a miscellany, the works of “yesteryear” and “not long since” that comprise, respectively, the volume Jadis et naguère, unlike its predecessors, offer no unified theme other than that of their temporal disparity of composition. Including several poems first written for Cellulairement, and even a one-act Watteauesque verse comedy of Fêtes galantes inspiration, the collection, pulled together for reasons monetary as much as (if not more than) artistic, is admittedly uneven in quality as well as in content.

Returning to Paris in 1882 after almost ten years of sojourns outside the capital—his prison stay in Belgium, teaching posts in England and France, and even a doomed attempt at bucolic life and farming in the provinces—Verlaine sought, at first with only moderate success, to reinstate himself into the literary world that had begun to forget him. The death from typhoid of a student-protégé, Lucien Létinois, whom he had taken under his wing and for whom he tried to convince himself that he had only a paternal concern, was devastating to his fragile psyche. It was perhaps the catalyst, if one was really needed, for an unbridled lapse into the excesses of alcohol and indiscriminate sex: the former, leading eventually to another prison stay (two months in the town of Vouziers for several violent physical attacks against his mother); the latter, helping, along with assorted lawsuits, virtually to impoverish him thanks to the seamy relationships he engaged in with unscrupulous casual partners. His finances were strained further when Mathilde and her vindictive family took advantage of the new divorce law to end his marriage beyond hope of repair.

[graphic]

Jadis et naguère was brought out at the beginning of 1885, still at Verlaine’s own expense, by Léon Vanier, who would, however, eventually publish others of Verlaine’s collections without the customary subvention, whether out of friendship, pity, or artistic conviction. For all its flaws, it cannot be ignored. While the second part, aside from its almost Baudelairean prologue, is ponderous in the extreme, the first—comprising the twenty varied poems of Sonnets et autres vers (Sonnets and Other Verses), the comedy Les Uns et les autres (The Ones and the Others), the half-dozen often rhetorical works of Vers jeunes (Youthful Verses), and the nine, very stylized, of À la manière de plusieurs (In the Manner of Several Others)—contains a few “classic” pieces from the Verlaine repertoire. The poems “Art poétique” and “Langueur,” especially, had helped restore him to prominence among his contemporaries: established literati like the important Décadent novelist J.-K. Huysmans, as well as younger writers for whom he was becoming an artistically respected, almost legendary (if morally dubious) inspiration.

Pierrot

À Léon Valade

Ce n’est plus le rêveur lunaire du vieil air
Qui riait aux aïeux dans les dessus de porte;
Sa gaîté, comme sa chandelle, hélas! est morte,
Et son spectre aujourd’hui nous hante, mince et clair.

Et voici que parmi l’effroi d’un long éclair
Sa pâle blouse a l’air, au vent froid qui l’emporte,
D’un linceul, et sa bouche est béante, de sorte
Qu’il semble hurler sous les morsures du ver.

Avec le bruit d’un vol d’oiseaux de nuit qui passe,
Ses manches blanches font vaguement par l’espace
Des signes fous auxquels personne ne répond.

Ses yeux sont deux grands trous où rampe du phosphore
Et la farine rend plus effroyable encore
Sa face exsangue au nez pointu de moribond.

Pierrot

For Léon Valade

No more the old song’s moonlight dreamer he,
Leering from wood-carved portals overhead.
His joy, alas! is, like his candle, dead;
Today his ghost, translucent, haunts us. See,

There, in a frightful lightning flash, blown free,
His pale blouse, wind-swept, like a shroud outspread;
See, there, his mouth agape, his look of dread,
As if to howl his worm-gnawed agony.