Circonspection

À Gaston Sénéchal

Donne ta main, retiens ton souffle, asseyons-nous
Sous cet arbre géant où vient mourir la brise
En soupirs inégaux sous la ramure grise
Que caresse le clair de lune blême et doux.

Immobiles, baissons nos yeux vers nos genoux.
Ne pensons pas, rêvons. Laissons faire à leur guise
Le bonheur qui s’enfuit et l’amour qui s’épuise,
Et nos cheveux frôlés par l’aile des hiboux.

Oublions d’espérer. Discrète et contenue,
Que l’âme de chacun de nous deux continue
Ce calme et cette mort sereine du soleil.

Restons silencieux parmi la paix nocturne:
Il n’est pas bon d’aller troubler dans son sommeil
La nature, ce dieu féroce et taciturne.

Circumspection

For Gaston Sénéchal

Give me your hand, hold still your breath, let’s sit
Beneath this great tree, where the dusk-gray air
Wafts sighing, dying in the boughs, and where
The pale leaves softly stir, caressed, moon-lit.

Motionless, let us bow our heads and quit
All thought. Let’s dream our dream, let’s leave to their
Devices joy and love—windswept—like hair
Breeze-blown, brushed by the owl’s wing grazing it.

Let us not even hope. In quiet peace
Let our two souls mirror the day’s surcease
And the sun’s death in night, tranquil and deep.

In silence let us rest, calm, resolute:
It is not right to trouble, in his sleep,
Nature, that fearsome god, ferocious, mute.

Langueur

À Georges Courteline

Je suis l’Empire à la fin de la décadence,
Qui regarde passer les grands Barbares blancs
En composant des acrostiches indolents
D’un style d’or où la langueur du soleil danse.

L’âme seulette a mal au cœur d’un ennui dense.
Là-bas on dit qu’il est de longs combats sanglants.
Ô n’y pouvoir, étant si faible aux vœux si lents,
Ô n’y vouloir fleurir un peu cette existence!

Ô n’y vouloir, ô n’y pouvoir mourir un peu!
Ah! tout est bu! Bathylle, as-tu fini de rire?
Ah! tout est bu, tout est mangé! Plus rien à dire!

Seul, un poème un peu niais qu’on jette au feu,
Seul, un esclave un peu coureur qui vous néglige,
Seul, un ennui d’on ne sait quoi qui vous afflige!

Languor

For Georges Courteline

I am the Empire as the decadence
Draws to a close: midst Vandals’ conquest, I
Compose my fey rhymes, my acrostics wry,
A-dance with languid, sun-gilt indolence.

A dense ennui sickens my soul, my sense.
I’m told that bloody battles rage hard by:
Why can I not—slow, flaccid-witted—why
Will I not flower, a bit, life’s impotence?

Why can I—will I—not die just a bit!
Ah! Nothing left to drink? You laugh, Bathyllus!
Nothing to say! No food, no drink to fill us!

Only a poem; into the fire with it!
Only a randy slave to let you languish;
Only a vague ennui’s dim, obscure anguish.

Prologue

Ce sont choses crépusculaires,
Des visions de fin de nuit.
Ô Vérité, tu les éclaires
Seulement d’une aube qui luit

Si pâle dans l’ombre abhorrée
Qu’on doute encore par instants
Si c’est la lune qui les crée
Sous l’horreur des rameaux flottants,

Ou si ces fantômes moroses
Vont tout à l’heure prendre corps
Et se mêler au chœur des choses
Dans les harmonieux décors

Du soleil et de la nature;
Doux à l’homme et proclamant Dieu
Pour l’extase de l’hymne pure
Jusqu’à la douceur du ciel bleu.

Prologue

Dim-lit, those visions born of night,
Of twilight moments just before
The Dawn: O Truth, your pallid light
Grays them in loathsome shades; the more

One looks, the more one wonders whether
It is the moonglow that endows
Those forms with life, coming together
Beneath the frightening, swaying boughs,

Or if those doleful specters will
Take shape in gentle brightenings
Of day, little by little, till
They mingle with that choir of things

That nature’s sunlit harmony—
Proclaiming God, delighting man—
Sings in pure hymns of ecstasy
Unto the heavens’ blue-arching span.

from Amour (1888)

Without the ambivalent but somewhat stabilizing influence of his mother, who died in 1886, Verlaine, his emotional distress compounded by a variety of incapacitating physical ills, was to spend his final years in and out of a number of Paris hospitals and increasingly tawdry rooming houses, attended by devoted doctors and supported by a growing coterie of charitable and generous admirers. One of the latter was the young artist F.-A. Cazals, object of Verlaine’s unrequited and more-than-platonic attentions, who, despite the poet’s unreasonable jealousies, would nonetheless remain a faithful friend, and who would frequently sketch him.

It was during one of his many stays at the Hôpital Broussais that Verlaine completed the collection Amour, many of whose poems had been written during the preceding decade under the same religious, almost mystical inspiration as those of Sagesse, to which it was originally intended as something of a sequel, along with an element of patriotic fervor and political sarcasm. The volume included in its pages a number of sonnets dedicated to friends and luminaries; among them, the venerable Victor Hugo, poet-theoretician Charles Morice, composer Emmanuel Chabrier, and, in an especially soulful recollection, his former brother-in-law Charles de Sivry. But it seems to have had as its real raison d’être the touching twenty-five-poem cycle devoted to Lucien Létinois, some dating from before his death, some from after, and all providing a poignant testimony to Verlaine’s affection.

Amour was published by Vanier in 1888. There is an irony, no doubt intentional, in the fact that the entire collection, so much and so important a part of which revolves about Verlaine’s “adopted” son—as one of the poems laments: “Puisque l’on m’avait volé mon fils réel” (Since they had stolen my real son from me)—was dedicated, as was its last pathetic poem, to his flesh-and-blood son, Georges, now himself an adolescent too, lost to him through estrangement as was the young Lucien through death.

[graphic]

“Ta voix grave et basse...”

Ta voix grave et basse
Pourtant était douce
Comme du velours,
Telle, en ton discours,
Sur de sombre mousse
De belle eau qui passe.

Ton rire éclatait
Sans gêne et sans art,
Franc, sonore et libre,
Tel, au bois qui vibre,
Un oiseau qui part
Trillant son motet.

Cette voix, ce rire
Font dans ma mémoire
Qui te voit souvent
Et mort et vivant,
Comme un bruit de gloire
Dans quelque martyre.