SOURCE: "Dernier vers, " in Jules Laforgue, The Athlone Press, 1977, pp. 57-74.

DERNIERS VERS

Having published the boldly inventive volume Les Complaintes in 1885 and the modish L'Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune in 1886, Laforgue remarkably went on, the next year, to fashion for himself an entirely new type of poem which appeared posthumously as Derniers Vers. Laforgue was the first poet to write free-verse in France. By this it is not meant that he was literally the first person to write unmetrical poems with lines of varying lengths, but that he was the first poet to do so successfully. The Derniers Vers can be seen either as a natural part of Laforgue's development, as the poems to which his experimental writing of the years in Germany was naturally leading, or they can be seen as neither superior nor inferior to Les Complaintes, but just very different both from a technical and a thematic point of view. In either case, they represent a considerable achievement and constitute a landmark in the history of French poetry, inasmuch as, from this point on, writers and readers were progressively less disturbed and alarmed by the idea of unmetrical verse.

During the spring of 1886, while still a member of the Empress Augusta's household, Laforgue once again wrote a great deal, perhaps with greater determination than in earlier years. A number of things occurred to give him confidence -or, if 'confidence' is too heavily a moral word for a decadent, to increase his interest in existence. The publication of his earlier poetry had helped: it did not in the least matter that the volumes did not sell. He was involved, from December 1885, in a new love affair-with Leah Lee, whom he was to marry within the twelve-month. He was more and more determined to leave Germany, where he knew he could only stagnate imaginatively, and to live in Paris where, with any luck, he would be able to make his way as a writer. Since he was not in the least a practical person and had spent his savings on the publication of his books, he did not have a coherent plan of action. He just had the increasingly strong feeling that a French poet ought to live in Paris. This feeling was reinforced by his strengthened friendship with Gustave Kahn and by Kahn's creation of the literary magazine La Vogue. The magazine, together with the two friends' talk about it, seems to have been the catalyst which stimulated Laforgue's imagination during a twelve-month period of work in which he produced the stories that came to be called Moralités légendaires … and the poems which were for a while called Des Fleurs de Bonne Volonté.

Des Fleurs de Bonne Volonté is the composite title for all the poems written during 1886. Various opinions are current about the status these poems, taken as a total group, enjoy. When Dujardin and Fénéon published Les Derniers Vers de Jules Laforgue in 1890, which was the first time the poems appeared in book form, they divided the volume into three sections: Des Fleurs de Bonne Volonté, Le Concile féerique, and Derniers Vers. They did this because the little dialogue called Le Concile féerique had already been extracted from the mass of poems written in 1886 and published separately as a chapbook by La Vogue and because they knew that Laforgue had prepared the twelve poems that now constitute Derniers Vers for publication as a book. In other words, Le Concile féerique and Derniers Vers are the volumes Laforgue himself made from all that he had written since the beginning of 1886. Unclear is the question of whether Laforgue would have published other poems from Des Fleurs de Bonne Volonté had he lived. The existence of a titlepage for such a volume in one of the surviving manuscripts has made some people think that Laforgue did intend such a publication. Thus Pia prints the poems as a volume in his Poésies complètes. It seems more likely, however, that this intention was abandoned when Laforgue began to write Derniers Vers during the summer of 1886. This view will be assumed to be the correct one in the account which follows; that is, that when Laforgue found himself writing vigorously in the early part of 1886 he at first had in mind a volume to be called Des Fleurs de Bonne Volonté but that this idea was abandoned when his previous thoughts about the writing of an entirely new kind of poem were suddenly realized in 'L'Hiver qui vient'. Once embarked upon Derniers Vers, he raided his own collection for material, as in the poems called 'Dimanches'. This means that the two sets of poems have a different status. What we now have as Des Fleurs de Bonne Volonté is no more than a writer's notebook, 'un répertoire pour de nouveaux poèmes'. This is emphasized because some critics have been incapable of distinguishing critically, or indeed in any way, between the poems which Laforgue wanted to have published and those which he suppressed.

To return to the spring of 1886, Laforgue as usual found that he had more time when the court moved to Baden-Baden. It may turn out to be the case that it was in Baden over the years that he did most of his work. During this period he corresponded with Kahn. In May he announced that he had thirty-five poems for a new book; by June the number had increased to sixty. Only part of what must have been an exceptionally interesting correspondence has survived, but that it existed is clear from the frequency of Laforgue's contributions to La Vogue. The first number of La Vogue had appeared on 11 April; Laforgue had received a copy from Kahn shortly afterwards; he had contributed four poems to the fourth issue, in May, and to the fifth a prose poem, 'L'Aquarium', which is in fact a few paragraphs from one of the nouvelles, -'Salomé'. The magazine lasted for less than a year, but between May and December 1886 Laforgue contributed to twenty of its thirty issues. It has already been seen that the publication of a few of the Complaintes had a considerable effect upon Laforgue: the importance to him of this continuous publication in La Vogue could hardly be overestimated. It covered the whole period between the spring of 1886 and the Christmas of the same year, the continuous activity of writing and publishing giving some point to his otherwise chaotic existence. The first number of La Vogue had included work by Verlaine, Mallarmé, Villiers de 1'Isle-Adam, and Rim-baud, as well as by the 'Hydropathes' themselves, Henry, Bourget and Kahn. This issue, even by itself, had an impact in that it immediately made Laforgue wish to join forces with this illustrious company. In fact, he may have visited Paris briefly in May to discuss the possibility of his contributing to the magazine.

Whether he went to Paris or not, the activity associated with La Vogue had three immediate consequences. The first was that he read and thought about Rimbaud, whose work he had scarcely known until then. Kahn probably showed him the manuscript of Les Illuminations. At all events, he realized that Rimbaud was a poet whose strong imagination brought together the disparate facts of experience in the creative act of the making of a poem and that the kaleidoscope of life, whose separate, fragmented effects Laforgue had celebrated in Les Complaintes, could also render a modern art which was not merely fragmented, but which expressed the modern sensibility in unique, newly-invented configurations of words and metaphors that established their own integrity. 'Ce Rim-baud fut bien un cas. C'est un des rares qui m'étonnent. Comme il est entier! presque sans rhétorique et sans attaches.' Secondly, Laforgue and Kahn in discussion made explicit the possibility of a free-verse poem. These discussions went unrecorded for the most part, though they were later recollected by Kahn who, of course, must share the honours of having 'invented' the new type of poem. When Laforgue came to write Derniers Vers it obviously made a difference that he knew in advance that Kahn would publish them. Few other editors would even have considered doing so. Thirdly, Kahn asked Laforgue to translate Whitman. In a letter which should be dated June, not July, 1886, Laforgue tells Kahn that he has translated at least one poem: 'Je t'envoie—au moins pour boucher des trous de Moncanys—un Whitman. Lis-le, c'est un des plus Whitman du volume. Je crois l'avoir très heureusement traduit.' The translations were published in two issues of La Vogue, those for 25 June-5 July and for 5-12 July 1886. While there is no record of what Laforgue thought about Whitman, nor even any evidence that he chose these poems for a particular reason, it seems fair to speculate that Laforgue's encounter with an American poet who had already written a type of free-verse reinforced his notion that the same could be done in French. (Incidentally, when these Whitman translations were published in book form for the first time in Walt Whitman Œuvres choisies, Paris, 1918, the editor silently tidied them up, correcting Laforgue's errors and making a few other changes that would perhaps be difficult to justify.)

For the first time in his life, then, Laforgue was in touch with literary Paris, at least a part of it. His correspondence with Kahn is full of references to other little magazines -La Revue politique et littéraire, La Nouvelle revue, La Revue moderne naturaliste, La Revue contemporaine, La Revue Wagnérienne, La Revue Indépendante and several others. The friends were excited by the real possibility of avant-garde publishing. Furthermore, Laforgue had already met at a concert in Berlin at the beginning of April two of his future editors, Dujardin and Wyzewa, both of whom were also editors of journals. Wyzewa already knew Kahn, having met him first at one of Mallarmé's Tuesday evenings in 1885. It made a difference to Laforgue that this enlarged circle of friends was already sensitive to the latest developments in art and literature and was sympathetic to innovation.

Yet, whatever Laforgue may have felt about his status as a writer, and whatever view he took, theoretically, of his development as a poet, in July 1886 he consciously began to write a new type of poem. He announced this fact to Kahn and sent him 'L'Hiver qui vient'. Eleven more poems, or what were to become eleven poems in the first edition (making a total of twelve), followed during the summer and autumn of 1886 and were published in La Vogue and, in the case of the last two, in La Revue Indépendante. Back in Paris, he revised the poems for book publication. The revised text consisted of a fair copy made by Laforgue during the winter of 1886-7 when he attempted to interest Léon Vanier, and perhaps other publishers, in the possibility of book publication -this time not at the author's expense. When Vanier failed to respond positively, Laforgue sent his fair copy, by that time with both additional autograph corrections and an accretion of doodle, to Dujardin, who used it as the basis for his edition of 1890. Clearly this corrected autograph MS, now in the Jacques Doucet Library, should have replaced the magazine version for all subsequent editions of the Derniers Vers. Laforgue thoroughly revised the poems (so that the first edition is significantly different from that of La Vogue), clearly divided the poems into the twelve poems of the Derniers Vers as we now have them, and altered the epigraph. With this revision in mind and the physical evidence still available for inspection, some readers have decided that the twelve poems of the Derniers Vers are separate or, at least, separable from each other and that Laforgue rather emphasized this by the way he marked the work copy for Dujardin. On the basis of the same evidence, other readers feel that the poems have a thematic and metaphorical consistency which allows or even requires them to be regarded as a single work. There is no way to settle this question. The strongest of the poems can be read out of context and indeed they are the anthology poems of nineteenth-century free-verse. On the other hand, even the strongest poems must gain in imaginative coherence by being seen in context. It seems worth considering this possibility first.

One can think of the Derniers Vers as a whole by considering the way in which the author's own thoughts and preoccupations are gradually introduced into the complex of visual impression and mood. The first poem, 'L'Hiver qui vient', is almost entirely evocative. So is the second, 'Le Mystère des trois cors'. In these two poems, Nature is imagined as a compelling but automatic system (random fertilization, a meaningless life, death) and the cause of all this, the sun, is now itself dead, having been hunted to death across the autumn landscape, its previous splendour nothing but a mockery. After the sound of the hunting horns, there is winter, the poet's season. In the third poem, 'Dimanches', the personal element becomes more strong. The poet, though he wishes to believe in love, sees himself as a 'pauvre, pâle et piètre individu' who cannot even believe in himself. He engages perhaps in the fantasy that real engagements and real marriages are possible, but what he actually sees are the symbols of an alien world, Sundays, pianos, genteel dresses, and the young girl returning home after church whose body, one observes, knows 'qu'il appartient / A un tout autre passé que le mien!' He also fears lust, for marriage would lead him to: 'adorer d'incurables organes'. Because of the hopelessness of this, the girl should not accommodate herself to life; there should be the same rupture as between Hamlet and Ophelia; and the poet should go for a little walk to get rid of his spleen. In the next poem, also called 'Dimanches', the balance is redressed. He plays ironically with a view of the same symbol, the convent girl. He himself he imagines as a Polar Bear, a remote Arctic creature uninvolved apparently in the comings and goings of ordinary existence.

Les Jeunes Filles inviolables et frêles
Descendent vers la petite chapelle
Dont les chimériques cloches
Du joli joli dimanche
Hygiéniquement et élégamment les appellent.

…

Je suis venu par ces banquises
Plus pures que les communiantes en blanc …
Moi, je ne vais pas à l'église,
Moi, je suis le Grand Chancelier de l'Analyse,
Qu'on se le dise.

The fifth poem, 'Pétition', sustains the same balance. The absolute, pure love for which the poet has been craving is unobtainable. The imaginative location of the poem is an empty square, without a fountain in it, from which, at the ends of the streets which lead away in different directions, the life that other people lead is seen and heard distantly. 'Mais, à tous les bouts, d'étourdissantes fêtes foraines.' There are no absolutes, only compromise. 'Tout est pas plus, tout est permis.' That is to say, in the old determinist impasse, only what is permitted is permitted, and the individual can conceive of no life for himself outside the rigid scheme of things he sees more and more clearly the more he thinks. Despite this knowledge, however, there is still a desire for a genuine existence and this is the subject of the sixth poem, 'Simple Agonie'. The sensibility which makes the poet a pariah and sets him away from the world also inclines him to 'les sympathies de mai', the seductive allurement of rebirth, the provocative pleasures of a springtime almost irresistible to a Nihilist, so that his poems are ambiguous, insubstantial things, like the life of an insect. Laforgue in these poems is, in other words, that very modern figure who lets the weaknesses of his own personality be the lens through which a faithful, credible view is given definition. In moral art, where there is an emphasis upon the possibility of things being better than they are observed to be, limitations of personality are thought to weaken the impact of the work; in art which is taking care not to be moral but has a different ambition, in this case impressionistic, a character who is sensitive even in an anaemic way is taken to be a greater guarantee of authenticity than his more heroic predecessors.

The next poem, 'Solo de Lune', which is discussed in greater detail below, is the recapitulation, as in music. In 'Légende', the seventh of the twelve poems, it is the woman who argues with the man to make him or let him feel that there is something more than exile, at least 'the sweetness of legend'. The ninth and tenth poems were published together in La Vogue as 'Les Amours'. In the first, there is another masculine-feminine dramatic situation, again from the point of view of the woman who, as sure of love as 'du vide insensé de mon cœur', might come, 'évadée, demi-morte, / Se rouler sur le paillasson que j'ai mis à cet effet devant ma porte'. Once again there is the ambivalent male detachment of the poet who desires yet desires not to desire the craving for affection confused with a haughty disdain for it, in a formulation in which disdain expresses love and love is the expression of disdain. In the next poem, more or less a continuation emotionally, the poet laments the fact that his life has been spent on the quayside of existence from which he never departs on a journey of any significance. No Odysseys for him.

J'aurai passé ma vie le long des quais
A faillir m'embarquer
Dans de bien funestes histoires.

Finally, the twelfth of the Derniers Vers has as epigraph Hamlet's speech to Ophelia beginning with the words: 'Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?' In this context the poet recalls his home town:

Un couvent dans ma ville natale
Douce de vingt mille âmes à peine,
Entre le lycée et la préfecture
Et vis à vis la cathédrale …

and, rather than consign his lover to such a fate, prefers to be 'two in the chimney corner', resigned to the 'fatalistic hymn' of existence and still seeing it, existence, as 'a deafening fairground'. So it must always be, if it depends upon men and women: 'Frailty thy name is woman: everything's routine.' The poem then ends with lines which, despite the reference to Baudelaire, would be hollow indeed without the substance of twelve poems behind them:

O Nature, donne-moi la force et le courage
De me croire en âge,
O Nature, relève-moi le front!
Puisque, tôt ou tard, nous mourrons …

Theoretically, then, the poems are a single, well sustained, tone poem in which the fin-de-siècle atmosphere of pessimism and disbelief is the world also of psychological tension, of psychological disaccord, of tension between man and woman, of desires that are never fulfilled, and of fears and anxieties which are never completely understood but are expressible only in negatives. The predicaments, situations, insights of the poems, as well as their half-statements and ambivalences are metaphors for existence itself, psychological metaphors which predicate the fractured world of misunderstanding and personal alienation. In this sense, the poems are not about a situation, anecdotally; rather they are the situation -the world of disillusion now given an artistic not a doctrinaire treatment. Thematically, the poems protect each other, as it were, from over particular exegesis and by their unity of language and metaphor insist upon the qualities of the tone poem, like something in Whistler or Debussy.

Quite clearly, Laforgue had achieved something a good deal more substantial than the previous 'kaleidoscope' poems. He has given the twelve poems an imaginative unity and turned away from, and left behind, the naïveté of plain statement.

Even the reader who is impressed by the symphonic variation of the Derniers Vers as a whole will be necessarily affected also by the exceptional originality of individual poems. Laforgue's innovation was to write a longer poem than any in Des Fleurs de Bonne Volonté—a poem whose length was not predetermined by logic of thought or metaphor. If Valéry's 'Le Cimetière Marin' is at one end of the scale of tight, poetic discipline and organization, poems like 'L'Hiver qui vient' are at the other. There is a kind of poem where the pattern of thought or metaphor takes the reader naturally to a 'conclusion' which satisfies because of the feeling that the imaginative implications of the poem have been thoroughly worked out and 'realized'. This is the opposite of what Laforgue does in Derniers Vers. In fact, the reader is denied the satisfactions of form and logical consistency. These are replaced by a psychological consistency which is expressed in sets of complementary and conflicting image patterns. By psychological consistency one means that the images and metaphors of a particular poem taken together constituted the worid of the poem's fictive poet, whose view may be arbitrary, perverse, sentimental, without being invalid for that reason, since nothing of a general nature is being asserted. The philosophical attitudinizing of Le Sanglot de la Terre has been overcome. Lofty or grandly pessimistic ideas about humanity are not proposed. Nothing is proposed. Rather, an interwoven pattern of poetic ideas is made to represent the inner world of an imagined poet who is not Laforgue. The best way to demonstrate this is to discuss a poem in some detail, and since the author of the present book has already written about the Derniers Vers in two other places and since space is limited, a examination of a single poem, 'Solo de Lune', must suffice.

Even Laforgue's friend, Bourget, refused to comment on 'Solo de Lune' and the other poems in the volume because they were 'si peu traditionnels'. Part of the effect of the poem is obviously its deliberate 'anti-literature' character; for that period it was extremely unusual, almost aggressively different, iconoclastic, provocative. Even when the poem is made familiar by re-reading, its fragmented, poetic world still has this disturbing effect, at least on the surface.

The superficial qualities of the poem that contributed to its initial impact were its apparent incoherence, its rather sensational phrasing, and the negative attitudes to life that it seemed to imply. The poem lacks logical structure or development: there are time shifts, shifts of tense, without explanation. The occasion of the poem and its imaginative direction must be deduced, if they can be grasped at all, from incomplete dialogue, ellipses, and statements made out of context. At first it seems an occasional poem whose occasion is almost completely concealed. Secondly, the language of the poem is aggressive and startling. The man and woman of the poem, who desired but failed to achieve love and understanding, are 'maniaques de bonheur' because happiness is not to be expected in the world, a sentiment not everyone was prepared to accept in 1886. The juxtaposition of 'marriage' and 'bonheur' seems forced, merely for effect. At first reading the poem seems frustratingly evasive when it might have been explicit and overly explicit when it might have been discreet. With the unexpressed love that eluded both man and woman the poet associates a bitter sexuality:

Oh! que de soirs je vais me rendre infâme
En ton honneur!

while in the same compulsively ironical vein, and almost immediately, he takes away from the seriousness of the poem with a brilliant image, which is also a pun, in which the moon is seen as a 'croissant' in the 'confiserie' of the cloudy night sky. In these two examples, one sees easily enough the 'decadence' of which early readers complained. Thirdly, the poem, though a type of love poem, seemed to deny the normally understood human verities in as much as the poet adopts a cynical, detached, nihilistic attitude to the possibility of a real relation between man and woman. Married or unmarried their life would lack meaning: 'On s'endurcira chacun pour soi'. What does it matter? the poem appears to say. 'Tout n'en va pas moins à la Mort'.

What seemed difficult in 1886 is easily accessible, in retrospect, since the poem is a period-piece but, though a period-piece, a modern poem. It is an example, an excellent one, of fin-de-siècle or Nihilist literary art, a 'solo' performance because the poet is solitary, knows no absolutes and has only his own unsatisfactory experiences to live by, and a 'solo de lune' because the sun, with implications of fecundity and meaning, is denied and because the poet's song asserts not the romantic feelings associated with moon-light but the opposite, the lack of love and fulfilment. Therefore: 'ô nulle musique'. Much of the phrasing derives from and belongs to the period, particularly lines like: 'Un spleen me tenait exilé', where 'spleen' is being used in its Baudelairian sense of disgust or nausea caused by the world from which the poet is alienated, and where 'exilé', denoting the individual intellect or 'déraciné' (that is, not a literal exile but one in which the individual is cut off imaginatively from the normal processes of life), would out of the poem be a mere cliché but here is not. In the next line: 'Et ce spleen me venait de tout', one sees the way in which the decadent poet replaced the social values and social absolutes in which he could not believe with equally vast, but negative generalities of his own. Every aspect of life engenders this nausea, a nausea which is associated, in this group of lines, with 'foolish' love and inarticulate parting.

To the extent that the poem is about a relationship between man and woman it is informed by the pessimism of the age. The lovers fail to communicate their desires: 'Pourquoi ne comprenez-vous pas?' Having failed, the poet is resigned to the loss: 'Accumulons l'irréparable!' Conscious of age-old sexual compulsions—'O vieillissante pécheresse'—he is not able to respond to her unspoken desire, although he imagines, ironically, 'un beau couple d'amants' who act out their love freely, that is 'hors la loi'. Fulfilment is denied or, rather, genuine, human love is denied: 'Je n'ai que l'amitié des chambres d'hôtel.' This overriding pessimism is a type of despair but one which is expressed with such persistent irony that the poem can assert itself at the very time the experience behind it is eluding the reader. He would have been a model husband. 'J'eusse été le modèle des époux!' but, such is the implication, only by accepting the charade of nature and sacrificing individuality for the sake of playing a rôle: 'Comme le frou-frou de ta robe est le modèle des frou-frou.' A brilliantly laconic conclusion.

'Solo de Lune' only seems incoherent. Its organizing principle is not logic but it has an internal poetic integrity nonetheless. First the free-verse is used with complete control. As mentioned already, Laforgue was the first poet to master the 'form'. Though metre has been abandoned and though the poem is in not stanzas but 'paragraphs' made of lines of different length, it is held together by a firm, rhythmical movement, by rhyme (sometimes of a preposterous kind), by internal rhyme and assonance, and more generally by a tonal assurance that holds in place detail that, by itself, would be quite alarming. It is a tone-poem: a poem aspiring to musical not rational coherence. Reading it aloud reveals this perfectly well. Second, the poem reflects a new interest in the poetry of the unconscious. The poet is Ariel, detached from the workaday world. Sensations, presentiments, fleeting insights, ephemeral experiences, make up the fabric of life, not ordered thought or organized social habits. It is a stream of consciousness poem asserting the validity of personal experience however incoherent, as against the 'meanings' of normal life. Thus, to the poet lying on the roof of a diligence or coach, smoking, alone, reflecting on what might have been, longing for love and sympathy though not believing in either, and going over in his mind ('récapitulons') his feelings about a relationship which did not mature, everything that is perceived or thought takes a place in the total impression, which is entirely located in and indeed created by the poet's mind. He travels a 'route en grand rêve'. The physical and the metaphysical come together in momentary associations as the coach travels through the night. In the moment which is the poem ('O fugacité de cette heure') everything is recalled ('Dans ces inondations du fleuve du Léthé') and everything is lost.

Third, the poem is a sustained piece of poetic irony in a recognizably modern mode. It has a deliberately anti-romantic vein. A marriage will not take place. Indeed, Laforgue pokes fun at matrimonial expectations partly by making mock use of stilted, romantic language, as in

Mais nul n'a fait le premier pas
Pour tomber ensemble à genoux. Ah! …

partly by imagining a colourless wedding by moonlight, not a wedding in the light of the sun which would signify fecundity and a belief in life but rather a celebration of the poet's essential loneliness: 'Noce de feux de Bengale noyant mon infortune'. The irony is sustained and habitual, a style, a way of thought, something more deeply ingrained than a mere striving after effect. To take only one example, Laforgue is the type of poet who enjoys the play on words in lines like

Mais nul n'a fait le premier pas

where 'nul' is a key, tonal word in the poem, where 'pas' is a pun, where the pun is combined with an ancient resonant word (for lovers), i.e. 'tomber', but where, though they fall, they do not fall far enough, but only, like puppets, to their knees. Yet this sort of thing is in passing. It is a detail absorbed within the highly wrought fabric of the poem as a whole.

The new sounds, the new imaginative patterns of 'Solo de Lune' have for some readers proved as impenetrable or as unpalatable as the new effects of Wagner for Laforgue's contemporaries. English readers will have in mind perhaps the resistance of the old guard brought up on metre when the issue became crucial at the turn of the century: the way Bridges edited Hopkins so that he would be accessible to the reader accustomed to mid-Victorian metrical poems; or those chillingly conservative discussions by Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen about the state of English poetry just before the first world war, talk which showed only too well how they felt obliged to search for a modern poem within the traditional received forms; or the letters of Rupert Brooke, dating from the same period, which express his nostalgia for ancient forms and his dependence upon the correct English of the educated. As everyone knows, the break only happened in the second decade of the twentieth century with Pound and T. S. Eliot, which is a measure of the popular resistance to the unmetrical. In France, one might mention the comparable but bizarre reluctance of generations of readers to accept Saint-John Perse who was 'si peu traditionnel'. Even when he was at last recognized, in France, as a major poet there were still critics prepared to show us orthodox Racinian lines embedded in his verse paragraphs. No wonder that there were readers who literally could not hear a Laforgue poem. Laforgue's genius was clearly not of the traditional kind, or at least not in this sense. His world was that of Manet and Toulouse-Lautrec, of Huysmans and Proust, of Rimbaud and Apollinaire, of Debussy and Stravinsky. A poem like 'Solo de Lune' was a highly crafted tone poem whose quite daring internal modulations were analogous to their novel harmonies and dissonances. That Laforgue had achieved in poetry what others had achieved in painting and music is much easier to see now than then. 'Solo de lune', and the other strong poems in Derniers Vers, constituted an artistic breakthrough. After them it needed a poet of exceptional ability to resort to conventional metres and forms.

Evidence of conscious care and craftsmanship can also be seen in the third of the Derniers Vers, 'Dimanches', though in a different way. This is one of those with ancestors in earlier collections and in particular in Des Fleurs de Bonne Volonté. Poems with thematic or tonal relations to the Derniers Vers poem include 'Le vrai de la chose', 'Célibat, Célibat, tout n'est que Célibat', 'Gare au bord de le mer', and poems xxvIII and xxx in Des Fleurs de Bonne Volonté, which are also called 'Dimanches'. A reader new to Laforgue may well wish to check for himself the relationship between the published poems and the rejected ones. By comparison with the finished poem, these earlier poems are more like improvisations on a theme played by some artist whose imagination is stalking the form by which his sustained but vague sense of a subject may be realized. Not only are these thematic preoccupations seen to have greater significance when they are absorbed into the substance of the longer poem, but the play of words is also no longer there for the sake of the exercise, but now contributes in an artistically consistent way to the counterpoint of the tone-poem. Though it is not possible here to compare these poems in detail, an example will show the kind of change that Laforgue makes.

The 'Dimanches' in the Derniers Vers begins with the lines:

Bref, j'allais me donner d'un 'Je vous aime'
Quand je m'avisai non sans peine
Que d' aboard je ne me possédais pas bien moimême.

(Mon Moi, c'est Galathée aveuglant Pygmalion!
Impossible de modifier cette situation.)

The 'I' of the poem sees himself as the equivalent of the Pygmalion of Moreau, or the pre-Raphaelite Pygmalion who spurns the world, disregards the women of his home town, dreams of an ideal love, is inspired to create the ideal form in art, and is rewarded by a statue so perfect that it comes to life, so that he is after all confronted by a real Galatea. The irony of this would be very congenial to Laforgue. Since, at more or less the same time, Laforgue (in his letter to Kahn of June 1886) was considering an article on Ruskin, and since there are many references to English painters like Burne-Jones and Madox-Brown, both in the letters and in Mélanges posthumes, it is tempting to suppose that Laforgue's interest had increased since his meeting with Leah Lee, and that he in fact knew of Burne-Jones' four paintings on the theme of Pygmalion and Galatea. Though there are other pre-Raphaelite passages in the Derniers Vers which substantiate his general interest, the precise point is of course hypothetical. The reference to Pygmalion has the same effect as the reference to Watteau in 'L'Hiver qui vient': very economically it throws the first lines into a new perspective. It does this in the same way as in a painting a tension is produced by the juxtaposition of objects not immediately expected together. It is also a more than usually oblique way of speaking about himself, the self-knowledge implied here being at least more forceful than the open confessions of the earlier poems.

The 'Dimanches' xxx of Des Fleurs de Bonne Volonté is at any rate a much cruder piece of work. In it the poet plays with a conceit. Marriage is a dancing, colourful life-buoy; he a morose Corsair, who knows he has been shipwrecked for ever. Immediately after this, the last lines of the poem:

Un soir, je crus en Moi! J'en faillis me fiancer!
Est-ce possible … Où donc tout ça est-il passé! …

Chez moi, c'est Galathée aveuglant Pygmalion!
Ah! faudrait modifier cette situation …

In the Derniers Vers version a good part of the bathos of this has been omitted, the essential metaphor retained. Laforgue was aware of the weakness of his distinction between the Ideal and the Real, though for him it was 'impossible to alter this situation'. 'Dimanches' xxvIII in Des Fleurs de Bonne Volonté also makes it clear that this same distinction is behind his interest in Hamlet, since the epigraph of the poem is Hamlet's conversation with Ophelia in the play scene. The poem in the Derniers Vers is the expression of the dilemma of the fatalist. Either he chooses to compromise himself by accepting the world on terms he knows to be unsatisfactory or, alternatively, he remains aloof without any consolation at all, and certainly without the satisfaction of believing in his own judgment. But, despite the thematic similarity between the two poems, and the similarity is so close that the first can be used to elucidate the second, it is immediately obvious that it is the 'Dimanches' of the Derniers Vers that is the more mature work, with a greater internal integrity.

These examples are not isolated ones. The eighth and ninth poems in the Derniers Vers, for instance, are quite heavily dependent upon Des Fleurs de Bonne Volonté. Drawing upon his earlier poems at will, he achieves the poem that in a sense had been haunting him for many years: 'une poésie qui serait de la psychologie dans une forme de rêve … d'inextricables symphonies avec une phrase (un sujet) mélodique, dont le dessin reparaît de temps en temps.'

The single example that space permits will be the last half of the Derniers Vers III 'Dimanches':

Oh! voilà que ton piano
Me recommence, si natal maintenant!
Et ton cœur qui s'ignore s'y ânonne
En ritournelles de bastringues à tout venant,
Et ta pauvre chair s'y fait mal! …
A moi, Walkyries!
Walkyries des hypocondries et des tueries!

Ah! que je te les tordrais avec plaisir,
Ce corps bijou, ce cœur à ténor,
Et te dirais leur fait, et puis encore
La manière de s'en servir
De s'en servir à deux,
Si tu voulais seulement m'approfondir ensuite un peu!

Non, non! C'est sucer la chair d'un cœur élu,
Adorer d'incurables organes
S'entrevoir avant que les tissus se fanent
En monomanes, en reclus!

Et ce n'est pas sa chair qui me serait tout,
Et je ne serais pas qu'un grand cœur pour elle,
Mais quoi s'en aller faire les fous
Dans des histoires fraternelles!
L'âme et la chair, la chair et l'âme,
C'est l'Esprit édénique et fier
D'être un peu l'Homme avec la Femme.

En attendant, oh! garde-toi des coups de tête,
Oh! file ton rouet et prie et reste honnête.

—Allons, dernier des poètes,
Toujours enfermé tu te rendras malade!
Vois, il fait beau temps tout le monde est dehors,
Va donc acheter deux sous d'ellébore,
Ça te fera une petite promenade.

Again there is the balance or counterpoint of the last lines, anticipating for example passages in Joyce. Disgust is weighed against charity, then dissolved into a final irony. He will tolerate neither a bluntly sexual union nor an anaemic brotherly affair, a Platonic friendship. Rather, he will go for a little walk: 'Go out and buy a pennyworth of hellebore.' This hellebore, with its highly pertinent and delightful reference back to the tortoise and the hare of La Fontaine, is both the realist's laxative that will purge the poet of the neuroticism of the poem and the traditional remedy for madness. The irony that at the earlier date was expressed in ostentatiously violent and shocking contrasts is now achieved economically with the pointing of a single word.

Laforgue died without having the satisfaction of seeing Derniers Vers published in book form. Dujardin's important editions of 1890 and 1894 did not achieve wide circulation. Not until the Mercure de France edition of 1902-3 were the poems published in the normal sense, and even then it took T. S. Eliot to understand their significance for the modern poet.