arise from this same desire to recapture the sense of violence and
immediate life.
It is interesting to compare the violence and energy of Verhaeren with
the violence of an earlier poet—Rimbaud, the marvellous boy, if ever
there was one. Rimbaud cut the stuff of life into flags, but into flags
that never fluttered on this earth. His violence penetrated, in some
sort, beyond the bounds of ordinary life. In some of his poems Rimbaud
seems actually to have reached the nameless goal towards which he was
striving, to have arrived at that world of unheard-of spiritual vigour
and beauty whose nature he can only describe in an exclamatory metaphor:
Millions d’oiseaux d’or, ô future vigueur!
But the vigour of Verhaeren is never anything so fine and spiritual as
this “million of golden birds.” It is merely the vigour and violence of
ordinary life speeded up to cinema intensity.
It is a noticeable fact that Verhaeren was generally at his best when he
took a holiday from the making and waving of flags. His Flemish bucolics
and the love poems of _Les Heures_, written for the most part in
traditional form, and for the most part shorter and more concentrated
than his poems of violence and energy, remain the most moving portion of
his work. Very interesting, too, are the poems belonging to that early
phase of doubt and depression which saw the publication of _Les
Débâcles_ and _Les Flambeaux Noirs_. The energy and life of the later
books is there, but in some sort concentrated, preserved and
intensified, because turned inwards upon itself. Of many of the later
poems one feels that they were written much too easily. These must have
been brought very painfully and laboriously to the birth.