“_Et toujours, maternelle endormeuse des râles,
Même quand elle ment—._”
Here is the creature who could be both nurse and courtesan—concise and
convincing classification.
Then he continues relating how, as man as well as poet, he has vibrated
to the clear soprano of
“_Cette voix! Matinal
Appel, ou chant bien doux à vêpres, ou frais signal,
Ou beau sanglot qui va mourir au pli des châles! . . ._”
How he has dreamed over the tender sentiment of her twilight song, and
been melted and conquered by the still greater, more beautiful appeal
of the emotional soul for love and understanding,—“_beau sanglot_”
indeed!
Then comes the wonderful third stanza, and its denunciation of man’s
brutality and selfishness.
“_Hommes durs! Vie atroce et laide d’ici-bas!
Ah! que du moins, loins des baisers et des combats,
Quelque chose demeure un peu sur la montagne._”
Here is the appeal for sentiment, for the love of the spirit, choked in
the throats of dumb and suffering women.
“_Quelque chose du cœur_,” he repeats and persuades, “_enfantin et
subtil_.”
“_Bonté, respect! car qu’est-ce qui nous accompagne,
Et vraiment, quand la mort viendra, que reste-t-il?_”
From him, the convict poet, from this heart rotten with all the sins
of fancy and of deed, bursts this plea—as naive as it is earnest, for
the spiritual in love—for sentiment, the essence of the soul. Strange
anomaly—stranger still that it should be he who has understood.
Three lines more, from an early poem called “_Vœu_,” of such condensed
significance and biting truth as lacks a parallel.
“_O la femme à l’amour câlin et rechauffant,
Douce, pensive et brune, et jamais étonnée,
Et qui parfois vous baise au front, comme un enfant._”
What a portrait, typical and individual—“_jamais étonnée_,” my sisters,
what an accusation!
* * * * *
Verlaine is dead. The last shred of that ruined soul which has for
years been rotting away in chance Parisian brasseries, has loosened its
hold upon life and slipped into the unknown; but the poetry he has
left behind him, with its sighs and bitter sobbings, and its few gleams
of beauty and of joy, contains the essence of his strange nature.
Although repudiating the responsibility of the position, he was the
founder and leader of that school of poetic expression which has most
importantly distinguished the end of his century.
Half faun, half satyr, his nature was allied to baseness and brutal
animalism, but possessed a strange and childish naïveté which remained
with him to the last, and a spirit remotely intact in the chaos of his
wayward senses, whence issued songs of matchless purity and inimitable
music.