In order for a figure to exist, a comparison must be possible between one form of expression and another which could have been used instead. As Gérard Genette notes, “l'existence et le caractère de la figure sont absolument déterminés par l'existence et le caractère des signes réels en posant leur équivalence sémantique.”¹ This is the case not only with conventional tropes, but also with diction: only if another signifier is possible: je m'ennuie for je m'emmerde, catin for putain, does there come into existence a different kind of figure, a figure of register. On the next level of signification, coursier for horse carries the message “I am poetry” just as much as does voile for ship. But it stands only for a certain kind of poetry. In Verlaine's time, such usage was the norm: French poetry had a highly restricted set of conventions for poetic diction, distinguishing between high or “elevated” and low diction; between the sublime and the médiocre or burlesque; between noble and common, or “roturier.” The first terms of these sets are obviously highly valorized. Those 19th century poets, including Hugo, Rimbaud, Corbière, and Verlaine, who breached this code—using colloquial or familiar words and even vulgar and slang expressions—were clearly setting their poetry against the accepted, almost sacred canon. In doing so, they implicitly recognized that the language of this canon was now too familiar, in the sense of commonplace, and they were led to new delimitations of acceptable diction.

Theoreticians from Aristotle on have linked a specialized vocabulary like that of French neoclassical verse to the use of metaphor. But in Verlaine, the use of familiar diction does not lead to a lessening of the importance of figure; in a sense, it allows for even greater, or at least different, possibilities of figural language. If conventionally “poetic” words and their opposite can be shown to be marked registers in poetic texts, it is because their existence permits a kind of movement that can be called tropological; the use of familiar diction calls attention to the surface of the work, preventing its language from being simply referential. Its very “earthiness” prevents it from being “down-to-earth” in the sense of being stabilized or giving the reader a more direct link to the outside world. Rather, it plays on the estrangement implied by its identification as an element of a specific register. As metaphor has been considered the breaking of the semantic rules of a language, register-shifts constitute a breaching of its pragmatic rules.² And this breach is one aspect of the figural dimension of language.

Whether the gap between such terms and their conventional counterparts is called parody or humor or opposition to poetic tradition, the reader must attempt to integrate it into some kind of structure. By examining the role of informal or colloquial diction in the figural structure of Verlaine's poems, we can see the different ways in which they exploit its possible stylistic motivations. Incorporating such language into coherent interpretations of the texts does not prove to be simple, however, and such an analysis reveals the complexity of a poet whose works have often been seen as direct, univocal, and even simplistic.

Given the entrenchment of neo-classical diction, it is not surprising that Verlaine's use of familiar language has had a varied critical response, ranging from hailing him as a revolutionary to condemning his later works, (in which such language is more prevalent), as vulgar or “prosaic.” One critic tries to excuse his use of low language by referring to his low life:

Avec Verlaine, nous avons affaire à un pauvre brave type, qui sort du bistrot ou de l'hôpital, trainant la patte, et qui nous raconte des choses très simples, ou très délicates, ou très élevées, dans la langue de tous les jours. Alors que les Parnassiens, en redingote et haut de forme, sont juchés tout en haut d'un trépied, Verlaine est sur l'asphalte du trottoir parisien.³

But Claude Cuénot, in his study of Verlaine's style, is much less indulgent: “Une étude complète du vocabulaire argotique de Verlaine aurait une importance lexicographique, mais ne comporterait guère d'intérêt esthétique, puisque la poésie est absente.”⁴ “Unpoetic” words, then, cannot constitute a poem. Verlaine himself seems to support this view when he writes:

Tu n'es plus bon à rien de propre, ta parole
Est morte de l'argot et du ricanement,
Et d'avoir rabâché les bourdes du moment.
Ta mémoire, de tant d'obscénités bondée,
Ne saurait accueillir la plus petite idée …

Sagesse I, iv

Verlaine said that he wrote these lines about Rimbaud, but added, “Après coup je me suis aperçu que cela pourrait s'appliquer à ‘poor myself.’” He had introduced language of varying degrees of familiarity during the whole of his poetic career, and especially so after Sagesse, where these lines appear. And indeed, he does so in this very passage: tu n'es plus bon à …, la plus petite idée and rabâché are certainly casual, familiar expressions. His word, then, rather than being destroyed by slang, receives a new impulse forward.

In order to make sense of such discourse, in order to make poetry of it rather than rejecting it out of hand, the reader must try to “naturalize” it, that is, to justify its use within the context of the poem. This naturalization can operate in various ways, on various levels. First, familiar language can be integrated by assigning the text to a “low” genre, where such diction would be the norm rather than an intrusion. On another level, it can be naturalized as appropriate to the poem's subject-matter: the signified might be “low” life (i.e. a popular subject) or “modern life,” calling forth signifiers which mirror the level of the signified. Many examples of such motivation can be found in Verlaine. In texts which escape such categorizations, familiar diction must be incorporated at another level. “Art poétique” provides an example of a text whose self-referentiality leads to taking its unconventional language as signifying a rejection of conventional poetry. Other texts seem unmotivated even at this level and present a challenge to readability itself. In all these texts we must examine to what extent Verlaine's work justifies the naturalizations imposed on it by the urge to legibility and to what extent it defies any such analysis.

“Monsieur Prudhomme” is an example of a poem whose satirical quality helps to motivate the use of “low” language, satire being a genre characterized by the low style.

Il est grave: il est maire et père de famille
Son faux col engloutit son oreille. Ses yeux
Dans un rêve sans fin flottent, insoucieux,
Et le printemps en fleur sur ses pantoufles brille.
Que lui fait l'astre d'or, que lui fait la charmille
Où l'oiseau chante à l'ombre, et que lui font
les cieux,
Et les prés verts et les gazons silencieux?
Monsieur Prudhomme songe à marier sa fille
Avec monsieur Machin, un jeune homme cossu.
Il est juste-milieu, botaniste et pansu.
Quant aux faiseurs de vers, ces vauriens,
ces maroufles,
Ces fainéants barbus, mal peignés, il les a
Plus en horreur que son éternel coryza,
Et le printemps en fleur brille sur ses pantoufles.

The title already makes it status clear: Joseph Prudhomme, the main character in Henri Monnier's novels, was the archetypical bourgeois. The lampoon begins with the very first line, with the words “il est grave” and the stock expression “père de famille” heightened by the homonym maire/mère. M. Prudhomme is deaf, his ears “engulfed” in his collar (the word faux is also relevant here), as well as blind to the beauties of nature—spring is reduced to the level of his slippers. The rest of the poem confirms this description of his anti-esthetic, anti-poetic sentiments. Even the insults he addresses to poets are consummately bourgeois in the attitude they reveal (poets are unshaven, unkempt, and lazy), and in diction—maroufles or vauriens are perfectly acceptable terms. It is curious to note, however, that in order to form a contrast with his insensitivity, a conventionally poetic diction is used: not only is the subject nature and flowers, but the periphrase l'astre d'or for the sun is eminently neo-classical. It seems that when Verlaine wants to signal “poetry,” he needs the easily recognizable “poetic” expression to do so.

Features of other registers conflict with this diction, like coryza and cossu. Machin is “très trivial” (Littré) and doubly comical here, recalling the word machine and indicating that the prospective fiancé is so conventionally bourgeois as to have lost all identity. The succession of adjectives in line 10 is funny, too, the physical epithet pansu following two nouns used as adjectives. Botaniste in this series indicates the only interest nature might have for him.

If the use of a conventionally poetic signifier is itself a sign, whose message is “I am poetry;” than slang expressions, used here to ridicule the de-humanized characters should be a sign of opposition to this language, and often they do have this role. But, in this text, where poets are referred to explicitly, and a traditionally “poetic” subject, the flowered spring, appears twice and ends the poem, where rêve sans fin is contrasted with M. Prudhomme's thoughts of a profitable marriage for his daughter, the traditional diction is valorized and paradoxically opposed to the characters who would be likely to approve only such language, who would surely say of this text: that isn't poetry.

Even in a text that would be considered more conventionally lyrical, one might consider “low” diction to be motivated by subject-matter. An example of such a poem is “L'Auberge.”

Murs blancs, toit rouge, c'est l'Auberge fraîche
au bord
Du grand chemin poudreux où le pied brûle et saigne,
L'auberge gaie avec le Bonheur
pour enseigne.
Vin bleu, pain tendre, et pas besoin de passe-port.
Ici l'on fume, ici l'on chante, ici l'on dort.
L'hôte est un vieux soldat, et l'hôtesse, qui
peigne
Et lave dix marmots roses et pleins de teigne,
Parle d'amour, de joie et d'aise, et n'a pas tort!
La salle au noir plafond de poutres, aux images
Violentes, Maleck Adel et les Rois Mages,
Vous accueille d'un bon parfum de soupe aux choux.
Entendez-vous? C'est la marmite qu'accompagne
L'horloge du tic-tac allègre de son pouls.
Et la fenêtre s'ouvre au loin sur la campagne.

Here the popular milieu calls forth many elements usually excluded from poetry: vin bleu (cheap wine), cabbage soup, and so on. The pictures of the wise men and Maleck Adel, the hero of a popular novel, would be typical in such an inn. In its homely and banal elements, the text resembles the poetry of Coppée or the Parnassian poets who treated rural subjects or even the descriptive poetry of Delille; and it is analogous to the realist/naturalist novel and its portrayal of lower-class life.

Since everything about this milieu is valorized and opposed to the dusty, painful road, familiar words in reported speech should be neither pejorative nor startling: the casual tone they create is in harmony with the place described, where one can obviously be at ease. But what differs in Verlaine's treatment of the subject is, in fact, the intrusion of familiar diction in the language of the poem. It contains elements from the speech one might expect to hear in a country inn: shortened forms like the elliptical first and fourth lines, including “pas besoin de passe-port” and familiar expressions—n'a pas tort, entendez-vous, marmots (“kids”), and teigne (“scabby”).

These expressions play a role in the figural structure of the text as well, which is built on a correspondence between inside and outside. It is a poem concerned with signs, or language. “Ici l'on fume” and so forth, of course, imitate the messages on signs in shop windows, i.e. linked with the life inside the inn. Thus they recall the sign in the first stanza: “Happiness” is or should be the inn's name, since that is what is to be found within. And of what does this happiness consist? Of talking about happiness and comfort and love. So it is removed to yet another level, as the designatum of the inhabitants' conversation. The images or prints on the other hand are metaphors for the life outside; and they are called violent to underline the contrast. Thus, in the last line, the opening window is yet another “image” of the exterior world, framed by the window sill. The language of the poem functions as an imitation (another metaphor) or as another sign of the language of the environment.

In such a context, the speaker is placed in an ambivalent position: he is allowed, even invited within, but an inn is only a temporary lodging, a contingency of his travels. His link with it is an arbitrary one, as the phrase “pas besoin de passe-port” shows; he is just an observer. The poem has been compared to a genre painting; and indeed, it is like a print hung on the wall of a city person's apartment, with a title like “The Pleasures of the Simple Life.” But the “simple life” has turned out to be another signifier, or another metaphor; and the language of the text, rather than grounding it in a correspondence between subject and register-level, serves to de-stabilize the depiction of a world that seemed attractive in its stability.

In other poems, the link between the signified and the “low” register level of the signifier can be naturalized in different ways, serving a variety of stylistic functions. In the sixteenth poem of La Bonne Chanson, “low” language is linked with imagery of lowness and contrasted with “paradise,” the presence of the loved one. In Sagesse III, xix, (“Parisien, mon frère”) it is the country-side which is opposed to the city. The two speakers in “Qu'en dis-tu, voyageur” (I,iii) are distinguished by the levels of language they use. “Sonnet boiteux,” from Jadis et naguère, uses low diction to denigrate the city it describes; and in conjunction with repetitions, unfamiliar sounds and unusually long verses, it creates an effect of irritation and frustration. In “Nocturne parisien” (Poèmes saturniens), familiar diction sets modern Paris apart from the conventional subjects of Romantic and Parnassian poetry, as well as from the diction characteristic of such verse.

In a letter to Delahaye, Verlaine himself spoke of “ma poétique de plus en plus moderniste” (26 October 1872). There is an element of “modernism” in much of his poetry, from the Poèmes saturniens onward, in the sense of portraying 19th-century life as Baudelaire did, especially in his Tableaux parisiens, where the latter had himself introduced a certain amount of familiar discourse. Much of Verlaine's verse, and particularly “Croquis parisien,” which echoes Baudelaire's title, recalls this section of Les Fleurs du mal. Dedicated to François Coppée, whose sentimental verse treated emotional moments in ordinary banal lives, usually in Parisian settings, it thematizes the opposition between the contemporary and the past:

La lune plaquait ses teintes de zinc
                                        Par angles obtus
Des bouts de fumée en forme de cinq
Sortaient drus et noirs des hauts toits pointus.
Le ciel était gris. La bise pleurait
                                        Ainsi qu'un basson.
Au loin, un matou frileux et discret
Miaulait d’étrange et grêle façon.
[Le long des maisons, escarpe et putain
                                        Se coulaient sans bruit,
Guettant le joueur au pas argentin
Et l'adolescent qui mord à tout fruit.]
Moi, j'allais, rêvant du divin Platon
                                        Et de Phidias,
Et de Salamine et de Marathon,
Sout l'oeil clignotant des bleus becs de gaz.

Although the third stanza was omitted in Poèmes saturniens, this poem was the target of several critical attacks. It was said to be “impressionistic,” cacophonous, its images supposedly impossible to understand. Jules Lemaître wrote, “Il y a dans tout cela bien des mots mis au hasard.—Justement. Ils ont le sens qu'a voulu le poète, et ils ne l'ont que pour lui.”⁶ He criticized especially the first stanza, which contains elements like zinc and par angles obtus which Robichez calls “inédits” (p. 513). Indeed, the use of artistic terminology, unusual images, elements from modern life, and familiar expressions, in their novelty, constitute a metaphor for modern life itself. In other words, new forms of expression are to traditional poetry as the new age is to the old.

Like the artist's vocabulary, angles obtus is an unexpected lexical item, an intrusion from mathematical terminology. Elements normally considered low are included in the poem—gas jets, the meowing tomcat. Colloquial expressions like bouts de fumée and moi, j'allais also stand out in this manner, while giving the impression of a casual, conversational style. In the eliminated stanza, escarpe, a slang word for thief, and putain, which Littré calls a “terme grossier at malhonnête” are even stronger and are surely at least part of the reason for the stanza's suppression. The poem's rhythm contributes to its conversational tone: the five-syllable second line of each stanza throws off its regularity. And the short, declarative sentences, without the inverted syntax characteristic of traditional poetry, tend to negate their division into verses. The rhymes are all masculine, another unusual procedure; and the false rhymes—zinc/cinq and Phidias/gaz—reinforce this effect. These devices heighten the contrast set up between 19th-century Paris and ancient Greece. The sculptor Phidias is opposed to the aquafortists and sketchers of modern times, the battles of Salamis and Marathon to those between the prostitute and her clients, the thief and his victims; and, by implication, Plato's city state to the modern city of Paris. The winking gas-jets are the guiding lights of a new age; and their mention in the last line of the poem brings us back to the everyday world.

The familiar expressions in such a poem, then, can be naturalized as appropriate to their subject, Parisian street-life, a subject or field that is itself unusual. But also, the thematization of the modern, explicitly in opposition to the classical world, is paralleled in its language: the “divine” Plato is no more as the word divin is no longer in everyday use. And the poem's protagonist does not ponder his philosophy; he is dreaming as he travels through the city. A conversational language and tone, then, are doubly appropriate to the text.

It is interesting to note that the artistic vocabulary employed here refers primarily to etching, as the title of the section in which it appears, “Eauxfortes,” would lead one to expect. Plaquer, teintes, angles, and en forme de refer to art work in general, while zinc and even argentin recall the metal engraving plates, and mordre is the expression used for the corrosive action of the acid's inscription in the metal.⁷ The line “Des bouts de fumée en forme de cinq” makes explicit the link between such inscription and writing: written figures are analogous to engraved figures (or shapes); and this analogy is itself a figure, in yet another sense of the word. It is not the city which the poem describes (or which is inscribed in the poem), but rather, a sketch, an etching of the city. The text, then, is the representation of a representation. The scene is similarly presented as a series of unrelated impressions; and the line “Moi, j'allais …” underlines the speaker's detachment from what he sees. In his preoccupation with ancient Greece, he makes no attempt to comprehend what he sees and hears around him. But the final line makes clear the specular relation between him and his surroundings: he is himself observed by the gas jets: he is part of the picture. This integration by means of the eye incorporates the world of Greece as well, as the analogies between it and modern Paris show. And yet, the final line does not accomplish altogether a metaphoric totalization of the disparate images in the text. Plato and the famous Greek battles are known to the speaker and to us only through books, or, as here, through his dreams. The scene is that of a sketch; and even the rain is likened to music, rather than being a natural sound. So this written text cannot be said to describe the real world, but only another text; it is the metaphor of a metaphor, opening on to the possibility of a limitless play of relations characteristic of figural language.

As poems like “Monsieur Prudhomme,” “L'Auberge,” and “Croquis parisien” show, even texts whose familiar diction would seem to be motivated by genre or subject-matter can be seen to resist the totalization imposed upon them by the process of naturalization. Such resistance can be seen even more clearly in “Art poétique,” which calls for analysis at another level: as a metalinguistic text, it has often been taken as a description of Verlaine's poetics. It exhibits a characteristic trait of the ars poetica genre: the tending toward the limit of performative, toward what Austin in How to Do Things with Words called the coincidence of action and utterance. Of course, there is no explicit performative “I hereby poeticize correctly” but the poem itself comes to represent such an utterance, and its theory/illustration model can bring into play a certain amount of self-referential discourse.

In this text, there are moments of theoretical statement simply followed by illustration. The second stanza, for instance, can be taken as a reading of the third, where the juxtaposition of the “indécis” and the precise is demonstrated. The reference to beautiful eyes, presumably clear and bright (on the level of the signified), is followed by derrière des voiles, which blurs the effect of the first part of the line as veils might do eyes. The word tremblant annuls the effect of grand jour (broad daylight) in the same way, as does attiédi for ciels d'automne. Similarly, the last line incorporates the contrast between fouillis and clair, while bleu gives the impression of their fusion, since it contradicts the whiteness of claires étoiles.

There are several examples of what could be called “méprises” in the text as well. Soluble en l'air contradicts the meaning of soluble, which refers to a liquid; assassine is used as an adjective; and not only is the jewel said to be forged, but it conflicts with “d'un sou.” Vent crispé is another example: crispé means “dont la surface est un peu crispée par le souffle de quelque vent” (Littré); and there is an added resonance of the English “crisp air.” But there are always instances of “méprises” in the choice of words; for the confusion of words, the taking of one for the other, is just another way of designating figural language. Bijou d'un sou, for example, can be called an oxymoron; vent crispé a kind of hypallage.

The last two stanzas present themselves as a summa of the precepts set forth in the poem. It incorporates vague expressions like la chose, d'autres, and plural nouns. There is a “méprise” in la bonne aventure, which here has the sense of “adventure” as well as its usual meaning of “fortune” (telling); it can also be taken as a metonymy for “fortune teller” or gypsy. That its epithet is éparse is another instance of a turning away from normal usage. Only aventure/littérature is a rich rhyme. But there are moments where precept and illustration coincide more directly. First, with reference to the rhythm: “préfère l'Impair” is part of a 9-syllable line. Second, there is an instance of onomotopoeia in which the coincidence of sound and sense parallels the precept enunciated: “sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose.” The stanza on rhyme, a critique of Parnassian verse and its extremely rich and rare rhymes and the funny, tricky rhyme of Banville, incorporates a mixture of internal rhyme and alliteration in f and s to a degree that has been called cacophonous. The two interior lines—where ou is repeated six times and echoes the rhyme in the preceding stanza—are difficult to read aloud, and their exaggerated rhyme has a comic effect. And the phrase “sans quelque méprise” itself illustrates imprecision.

But perhaps the clearest example of self-referentiality is the line “Prends l’éloquence et tords-lui son cou”: the expression is itself the antithesis of eloquence, both as signified and as signifier, since the use of “tords-lui” and son rather than le are markers of a more casual style. This “neck-wringing” takes place throughout the poem in the conversational rhythm and the use of familiar expressions. Fouillis is a colloquial expression, and this status underlines its contrast with claires étoiles. Grise, while obviously representing the indécis/précis distinction, carries with it a resonance of its familiar meaning, “tipsy.” Other elements from conversational speech include the tutoiement; “c'est des beaux yeux,” tu feras bien, and elle ira jusqu'où, where the omission of the interrogative inversion is reinforced by its position as the rhyming word. Elements from situational registers usually avoided in poetry can be found here, too: assagie carries a connotation of childishness; and ail de basse cuisine is highly unusual in poetry. The use of familiar speech and elements from everyday life serve to create a contrast with the title, which would have led one to expect an elevated style like that of Boileau. And in this contrast itself resides the “message” of the art poétique. There is a reversal of the hierarchy: “la pointe” or eloquence, which should have been “elevated” is “basse” here. And it is music, which is “before everything else,” which lets verse fly away and the soul go off to “other skies.”

But, curiously enough, there are parts in the poem which are self-contradictory rather than self-referential. Cou/jusqu'où is an example of the exaggerated rhyme censured. Though impure laughter is to be avoided, “cet ail de basse cuisine” is used to refer to it. And the most curious instance of this procedure occurs in the fourth stanza, where nuance is repeated three times, contrasted with color to render it even clearer and creating an internal rhyme like that decried in the seventh stanza. The harping tone created by all this is reinforced by the demanding “nous voulons”; and pas, rien que and seul are also pleonastic. All this thwarts the nuance so expressly called-for. This circumventing of the theory/illustration model can be seen again in the relation of the lyrical last two stanzas to the rest of the poem. The didactic tone—though at times a comic one—of the first section is absent here; the imperatives have become much more gentle subjunctives; there are no traces of familiar vocabulary; (in fact, vont fleurant is an obsolete, literary construction); the garlic has been transmuted into much more delicate seasonings. This poem, then, might seem to repeat the pattern of a text like Hugo's Réponse à un acte d'accusation: polemical passages using familiar discourse followed by a relapse into the elevated style. In that case the last two stanzas would represent ideal poetry, while the preceding explanations could be dismissed as didactic theorizing. But this poem cannot be called a simple statement of Verlaine's poetics—nor a “simple” statement” at all. Verlaine himself said of it: “Puis—car n'allez pas prendre au pied de la lettre L'Art poétique de Jadis et naguère, qui n'est qu'une chanson, après tout, JE N'AURAI PAS FAIT DE THEORIE” (Préface aux Poèmes saturniens).

The last line, relapsing into the casual mode, forestalls an interpretation which would divide the poem into a theoretical first part followed by a contradictory application. The Petit Robert gives as one meaning of the word littérature: “ce qui est artificiel, peu sincère,” and uses this line as the example. But there was no such meaning of the word at the time: it is this poem itself which turns littérature into a pejorative word. The use of familiar discourse in this poem, then, because it is a “song” and in its deviation from conventional diction constitutes a sign denoting a rejection of traditional “literature.” Verlaine has taken Boileau's title for a poem that, in its shiftings of style and tone, is distinctly anti-classical. The text's awareness of itself as language, as indicated by the title, leads to its disruption as simple assertion. Each time it seems to refer to something outside itself, beautiful eyes, for instance, it refers instead to its own language: here, the words “beaux yeux” and what follows. The signs become the referents; and the poem itself refers to this referring, or deferring. This va-et-vient between the surface of the text and its referent puts into action the figural movement of the text, a circular motion indicated by the imagery of joining and the figure of the sun. It seems to be a text about poetry; but it can only be “about,” and turning about, itself.

Other texts likewise play on the reader's recognition of the stylistic incongruity of familiar language and invite interpretations which can take it into account. “Paysage,” from the section called “A la manière de plusieurs,” parodies the dixains of Coppée, turning around the familiar Romantic topos of a day in the country with a lover and using familiar expressions and constructions to push Coppée's platitude to the extreme. Poems like “Charleroi,” “Jean de Nivelle” (Romances sans paroles), and “Images d'un sou” (Jadis et naguère), combine elements from different milieux and several registers to produce a humorous tone or the disorienting effects prized so greatly later on by the decadents. Another text in which familiar language is at odds with rather than justified by its context is “Un Pouacre,” where insults, slang, and repugnant details produce a comic effect in their juxtaposition with the cliché of seeing the spectre of one's past, the figure of remorse.

Sometimes it seems that such contradictions in tone and level are impossible to incorporate at any level whatever. An example of such an instance is “Nouvelles Variations sur le Point du Jour” (Parallèlement) where a description of Paris calls up familiar language with no contrasting elevated moments.

Le Point du Jour, le Point blanc de Paris,
Le seul point blanc, grâce à tant de bâtisse
Et neuve et laide et que je t'en ratisse,
Le point du Jour, aurore des paris!
Le bonneteau fleurit “dessur” la berge,
La bonne tôt s'y déprave, tant pis
Pour elle et tant mieux pour le birbe gris
Qui lui du moins la croit encore vierge.
Il a raison, le vieux, car voyez donc
Comme est joli toujours le paysage:
Paris au loin, triste et gai, fol et sage,
Et le Trocadéro, ce cas, au fond …
Puis la verdure et le ciel et les types
Et la rivière obscène et molle, avec
Des gens trop beaux, leur cigare à leur bec:
Epatants ces metteurs-au-vent de tripes!

The diction ranges from casual (“Il a raison le vieux,” voyez donc) to slang (birbe, “old man,” type, bec épatants, je t'en ratisse) to vulgar expressions like metteurs-au-vent de tripes, (murderers, who disembowel their victims), and especially ce cas. This last word has two slang senses: “excrement” and “penis” and whichever applies in this case is highly improper in poetry. This poem appears in the section of Parallèlement called “Lunes,” which has the same slang meaning as mooning does in English. Robichez finds such usage an “aveulissement du language” (p. 697). Since there is no opposition of such language to a different milieu, it cannot be naturalized in the same way as in the earlier poems. It seems that the language of the poem is taking over, responding to the impulses of sound and figure rather than logic. Word play is evident, as in the phrase “Sur le point de” in the title. “Point du Jour de Paris” calls forth “aurore de paris;” and it is related to the gambling imagery in the text, paris, bonneteau, and je t'en ratisse, meaning to “take” someone in a card game. As in a card game, the relations between the words are purely arbitrary or metonymic; they have only their sound in common. Thus le bonneteau becomes “la bonne tôt …”; Paris calls up paris; tant, t'en. The name of the quarter, “Point du Jour” has no relation to its referent either, since it is situated at the west of Paris. Verlaine had noted this fact earlier in the poem “Aube à l'envers,” evidently referred-to indirectly in the title “Nouvelles variations.” The manuscript of the later poem shows an alternative title, “Couchants,” which makes this explicit and which contains another twist because of the meaning of coucher, “to sleep with.” Grâce à rather than par la faute de is another shift from what would be expected; as épatants seems an unlikely epithet for “metteurs-au-vent de tripes.” Car has lost its function of drawing a conclusion from evidence: the countryside has no obvious connection with the maid's virginity. Besides, we have already been told she is corrupted and that the old man is in fact wrong. The poem seems carried along by its words as by the river it describes: the accumulation of disparate nouns and contradictory adjectives joined by et's, puis, and avec, the repetitions of the first stanza, all seem purely gratuitous. There is no consciousness ordering experience, no totalizing power. Attempts to link the white color of the dawn to the virginity of the maid or to her apron in a metaphoric process are futile: only metonymic relations of sound and contiguity seem to apply. The use of vulgar diction contributes to this contravention of the traditional mode of poetry, indeed of language in general. The only element joining this fragmented assemblage together is the poem's rhythmic structure, its rhyme, and its disposition into stanzas on a printed page. “Variations” could lead one to expect a theme in which the variations would be grounded. But the point of “Le Point du Jour” is its pointlessness: that where there should be a theme there is a hole or rather, a river, carrying the unordered detritus of the life in the city.

“Nouvelles Variations” is only an extreme example of a process seen in the poems discussed earlier: familiar discourse can play an important role in the texts where it appears, but it is an intrusion into conventional poetry and it does not let itself be dismissed with easy generalizations. It reminds us of its otherness, and as such, improper language becomes im-propre, figural, standing for a message not carried by its surface signification. In taking its place in the figural structure of the text, it escapes our attempts to account for it fully. The texts in which Verlaine uses familiar discourse, then, are far from lacking “poetry;” they are not to be excused by referring to his low life: from Les Poèmes saturniens on, they exploit important stylistic resources and take their place among the innovations in poetic language during the course of the 19th century. It is through the practice of such poets as Verlaine that the use of familiar language, slang, technical words, and so on have come to be more predictable in poetry. Because of the resistance these texts oppose to the reader's efforts to incorporate them into seamless, totalizing interpretations, they show Verlaine to be a much more complex, innovative, and interesting poet than the “naïf” versifier he is often taken to be.

Notes

1. Figures (Paris: Seuil, 1966), p. 210.

2. Charles Morris defines pragmatics as “that portion of semiotic which deals with the origin, uses, and effects of signs within the behavior in which they occur.” Signs, Language, and Behavior (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1946), p. 219. See also his Foundations of the Theory of Signs, International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, I, 2 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1938).

3. Charles Bruneau, Verlaine: Choix de poésies (Paris: Centre de Documentation universitaire, 1950), p. 24.

4. Claude Cuénot, Le Style de Verlaine (Paris: Centre de Documentation universitaire, 1963), p. 137.

5. Paul Verlaine, Oeuvres poétiques, ed. Jacques Robichez (Paris: Garnier, 1964), p. 600. Poems quoted are from this edition or, when so noted, from the Y.-G. le Dantec Pléiade edition of the Oeuvres poétiques complètes, revised by Jacques Borel (Paris: Gallimard, 1962).

6. Quoted in Jacques-Henry Bornecque, Les Poèmes saturniens de Paul Verlaine (Paris: Nizet, 1952), p. 166.

7. I am endebted to Stephen Spector for this last remark.