Verlaine has been neglected in recent years. The brevity of his poems; their songlike, informal diction; their paucity of metaphor and allusion; and their lack of those intellectual themes that are commonly held to characterize true “Symbolism”—from the beginning, all these features have tempted critics to judge his verse agreeable but minor. His alcoholism and the poetic decline of his final fifteen years, which he spent as a sodden derelict, have reinforced the trend to slight or to dismiss his work. Until recently even critics who have looked closely at his poems have tended to obscure our sense of the evolution of Verlaine's poetry by treating it in terms of what they perceive to be general, overarching tendencies such as “fadeur” (insipidity) or “naiveté,”¹ to say nothing of the all too familiar “musicality.” A fine recent collection of French essays is disparagingly titled La Petite Musique de Verlaine.² Once one has described Verlaine's “music” by counting syllables and noting repetitions of sounds, there seems to be little more to say.³ Like Lamartine, he has been damned with faint praise.

If one seriously addresses the question of Verlaine's musicality, it seems intuitively obvious that repetition and regularity are more “musical” than their absence. In actual music composed before the modern era, a high percentage of the measures occur more than once—only one-third or one-quarter of the total may be different—whereas in a literary work few if any sentences are repeated. Zola need use the same sentence only half a dozen times in a long novel such as La Bête humaine before critics start comparing it to a Wagnerian leitmotif. A modest amount of repetition in literature, then, has the same effect as the considerable amount of repetition in music. The phrases that echo frequently in a poem such as Verlaine's “Soleils couchants” attract all the more attention because they do not belong to a conventional pattern of recurrence in a fixed form such as the rondeau or the ballade.

No one, however, has yet done a statistical study to determine whether Verlaine deploys obvious forms of repetition—rich rhyme, internal rhyme, anaphora, epiphora, refrains, reduplication of single words, alliteration, and assonance—more frequently than less “musical” poets. Baudelaire and Mallarmé, in fact, seem to use more rich rhymes than does Verlaine; Baudelaire more often repeats lines. Nor has anyone done an empirical study to determine whether poems identified as “musical” by naive and by sophisticated audiences actually contain more repetitive devices than do other poems. No one, in short, has rigorously characterized “musicality” in language in linguistic terms. And no one who wishes to ascribe “musicality” to the verse of Verlaine and the other Symbolists has come to terms with the fact that all these poets were lamentably illiterate and incompetent as composers, as performers, and even as passive listeners to music.⁴ While awaiting the outcome of the empirical and statistical studies of the future, we can best treat the problem of literary “musicality” by recognizing that “musicality” serves merely as a metaphor for the relative prominence of phonemic and verbal repetition; for allusions to, evocations of, and descriptions of things musical; for the foregrounding of rhythm, which is the essence of music; for vagueness of denotation; and for the suppression of overt narrative progression. (These last two traits often figure together in descriptions of that critical artifact called “literary impressionism.”) Taken all together, these features do not help to distinguish Verlaine's poetry from that of many of his contemporaries.

One can obtain a more fruitful definition of Verlaine's “musicality” by observing what I consider to be a primary rule in literary criticism: once you have singled out a certain motif or a feature for analysis, seek its polar opposite. It is not the motif of “musicality” alone but the structure formed by thesis (here, “musicality”), antithesis (whatever for Verlaine may seem opposed to “musicality”), and the relationship between them which characterizes the creative individuality of the poet. This structure defines his imagination (in linguistic terms, his poetic “competence”) and its expression (in linguistic terms, his poetic “performance”) in a way that one isolated element such as “musicality,” shared by many poets, could not possibly do.

Mistrusting the act of communication, each of the major French Symbolist poets focuses his principal suspicion on one particular, discrete point along the axis of communication. What Verlaine's good early verse does is to call into question the signifying capacities of the verbal medium itself. He fears lest the very ground of his utterances be meaningless or at least vitiated by the way it is ordinarily treated. The problem is not merely that he finds words inadequate to treat transcendent subjects (Mallarmé's difficulty) but rather that he finds words unreliable, period. Since he still wishes to write poetry, he has no recourse other than to exalt the “je ne sais quoi,” the “imprécis,” and to expatiate upon the topos of inexpressibility.

Antoine Adam, a noted critic of Verlaine, does not take the poet's antilinguistic stance too seriously. He invokes the testimony of Edmond Lepelletier, who saw Verlaine daily at the time of his early publications and claimed that lyrical expressions of love and sadness in the Poèmes saturniens and the Fêtes galantes were mere poses in a person interested primarily in dogmatic poetics. He cites two lines from “Aspiration” (1861) to suggest that the critique of love language in ensuing collections may derive as much from misogyny as mistrust of communication: “Loin de tout ce qui vit, loin des hommes, encor / Plus loin des femmes” (p. 15: Far from all that lives, far from men, and yet / Farther from women). Referring specifically to the Fêtes galantes, Adam claims: “This poetry of an all-embracing melancholy dimension is, however, meant to be a game. … The poet amuses himself. … Baudelaire's sober doctrine [in Verlaine's “A Clymène”] becomes a pretext for subtle combinations of hues and fragrances. The enjambments that set off the ironical charge of a phrase, and the rhymes—profuse, unusual, employed in a hundred original ways—these are part of the fun.”⁵

But in an interpretation similar to my own, Jacques-Henry Bornecque, who studied this crucial collection in much more detail, maintains that it traces a sequence of moods declining toward pessimism and despair. Verlaine contaminates with his own sadness the playful Regency world (1715–23) into which he had hoped to escape. His other writings of the same period include many macabre pieces that express his disgust with his contemporaries. Bornecque observes, “In those verse or prose pieces that are not ‘fêtes galantes,’ Verlaine does not disguise his feelings: he gives free rein to his peevishness as to his anguish, regularly and obviously swinging between aggressive bitterness and the despairing detachment which is the ebb tide of the former.”⁶ He cites many examples, notably the sinister short story “Le Poteau,” which reveals a certain affinity with Baudelaire's “Vin de l'assassin.” The death of Verlaine's beloved Elisa Moncomble four days before the composition of the first two “Fêtes galantes” seems decisive. Bornecque characterizes the collection as the work of a convalescent—a convalescent, one could add, with nothing to live for.

Sensitive though he is to Verlaine's moods, Bornecque overlooks the poet's mistrust of language, so characteristic of the Symbolist crisis. Unlike the other major French Symbolist poets, Verlaine focuses this mistrust on the linguistic medium itself, instead of on the acts of conceiving and communicating a message. He subverts the notion of the essential “humanness” of language by playfully (and of course figuratively) replacing human speakers with nonhuman ones. And by making utterances flatly contradict the situations to which they refer, Verlaine challenges our assumption that language provides reliable information. Many instances can be found in the prose works, particularly the Mémoires d'un veuf. There “Bons bourgeois” describes a family quarrel: after an exchange of insults, “la parole est à la vaisselle maintenant” (now the crockery [which the family members start throwing at each other] does the talking). Afterward the lady of the house excuses herself to her visiting country relative by saying “Cela n'Arrive Jamais” (that never happens). “Ma Fille” cancels its own language when after an idealized description the narrator announces, “Heureusement qu'elle n'a jamais existé et ne naîtra probablement plus!” (Fortunately she never lived and probably will not be born in the future!). In another story, Pierre Duchâtelet has a conversation with his wife in which he lies to conceal his imminent departure for a ten-day mission to a battle zone; on his return he finds a letter saying simply, “Monsieur—Adieu pour toujours” (Sir: Farewell forever). And if we read allegorically, considering the hand as the writer's instrument (cf. George Sand's “L'Orgue du Titan”), we could even say that artistic self-expression destroys its subject and is itself doomed to a sudden death. Such an interpretation illuminates Verlaine's tale “La Main du Major Muller” (from Histoires comme ça), where the preserved hand that had to be amputated after a duel comes to life, poisons its owner, and then quickly rots.

The most compelling corroborative evidence for Verlaine's dour linguistic self-consciousness, however, comes from the master article of all his literary criticism (and one that should be much better known): his response to another great Symbolist poet, Baudelaire. This piece appeared in the November 16, 1865, issue of L'Art. Of three individual lines cited as models, two treat nonverbal communication: “Le regard singulier d'une femme galante” (the odd glance of a promiscuous woman) and “Un soir l’âme du vin chantait dans les bouteilles” (One evening the soul of the wine was singing inside the bottles). From the five wine poems, in other words, the one line that Verlaine cites is one that gives a voice to a nonhuman entity. And from the “Tableaux parisiens” section, likewise, Verlaine singles out this passage:

Et, voisin des clochers, écouter en rêvant
Leurs hymnes solennels emportés par le vent
Je verrai l'atelier qui chante et qui bavarde.

(And, next to the bell towers, to listen dreamily / To their solemn hymns carried off by the wind / … / I shall see the workshop singing and chattering.)

After beginning the essay with the declaration that “le public est un enfant mal élevé qu'il s'agit de corriger” (the public is a badly brought up child: you have to chastise it), Verlaine gives as examples of appropriate behaviors instances of silencing: the poem “Semper eadem” with its repeated “Taisez-vous!” (Quiet!) and elsewhere the command to the beloved, “Sois charmante, et tais-toi” (Be charming, and be still). Far more is at stake here than mere playfulness.⁷

Whereas narrative and drama represent what is meaningful to at least several people or to a collective culture, the lyric represents what is meaningful to only one person. Poetry is half a conversation, a soliloquy or apostrophe to a being that is nonhuman, absent, or dead, and therefore incapable of responding in words. When we say “Rose, thou art sick,” we don't expect an answer. In those instances where the interlocutor is not suppressed, poetry becomes “dramatic lyric” that shades into theater. In the lyric situation, where the single speaking voice is the norm, Verlaine sometimes imposes one of two marked choices. Either he uses free direct discourse—a conversation that does not identify the speakers—to multiply the sources of meaningfulness to the point where each interferes with the other and they blur; or else he introduces nonverbal elements so as to subvert meaningfulness at its source; or he does both at once, as in the paradigmatic “Sur l'herbe” of the Fêtes galantes.

When Verlaine does depict the normal one-sided conversation, he undermines its meaningfulness as much as he can without sacrificing coherence. He tries to express his radical skepticism regarding the power of words to signify by undermining their status and seeming to replace them with something else. For him this something else is musicality: not a flight into a balmy vagueness, but the cutting edge of his satiric attack on the verbal ground of our relationships. By using uncommon “rhythmes impairs” (five-, seven-, nine-, eleven-, or thirteen-syllable lines) instead of the octosyllables, decasyllables, or alexandrines that were to dominate French poetry through the 1920s, Verlaine again makes a “marked choice”; he selects a form of expression that violates our expectations through the absence or the excess of a certain quality. He foregrounds the supreme musicality of rhythm at the expense of the other elements of poetry. Since the essence of music lies in rhythm more than in melody, harmony, intensity, or timbre, a poetry that calls attention to its rhythm makes that element a rival of the verbal poetry rather than its adjunct. Similarly, from the Fêtes galantes on, internal rhyme and assonance become more common in Verlaine's poetry, constituting a marked choice of sound repetition in excess of what one would ordinarily expect and thus suggesting, once again, an antiverbal musicality. More obviously, of course, words seem to become ancillary in Verlaine's texts when he uses them to denote, connote, or describe music and the visual arts.⁸ He subverts language by using words to evoke indefinable states of vagueness and confusion; to designate situations in which the words themselves are trivial, insincere, or absurd; and to characterize acts whereby words cancel themselves or serve to impose silence. To produce a mere catalogue of such devices would be a facile and not very enlightening exercise. But as it happens, examining them in context can illuminate the structure of individual collections of verse and clarify the trajectory of Verlaine's entire career.

The section titled “Melancholia” in Verlaine's first collection of verse, the Poèmes saturniens (1867), presents the dilemma of the breakdown of signification thematically, by depicting the lyric self's nostalgia for a past time when love language was still meaningful. Distancing himself from his nostalgia in the last section of the Poèmes saturniens, the lyric self shifts to a parody of love language from “La Chanson des ingénues” on; such parody persists to the end of the Fêtes galantes (1869). As the historical Verlaine strives to return to a conventional life, La Bonne Chanson (1870) transiently adopts a conventional, affirmative poeticizing. The Romances sans paroles (1872) revert to undermining signification, but they show rather than tell. A supreme discursive prise de conscience affirming vagueness and musicality as the highest poetic goals appears in “L'Art poétique” of 1874 (published only when Jadis et naguère appeared in 1882). This statement itself, however, is subverted by verbal excess, for there is a fundamental paradox in specifying how to be allusive.

Verlaine's Symbolist crisis, then, as I would define it, lasted from 1866 to 1874. After his conversion in prison, he seems to have become dedicated to betraying his earlier self. He reverts to a wholly conventional prosodic practice and to a thematic questioning, typical of Romanticism, of the codes and contexts of traditional beliefs rather than a questioning of the efficacy of the communicative process itself. Some thirty-two poems from his earlier years, previously unpublished in collections, appear in the later collections (notably in Jadis et naguère, which contains twenty-seven of them) but without exception they lack the critical bite of those already published—the reason Verlaine had set them aside in the first place. A few pieces in Parallèlement (1889), composed probably between 1884 and 1889, again present a lyric self alienated from love and his own words and sinking into a preoccupation with mere physicality. But these poems appear superficial; they degenerate into self-parody; and they convey none of the fundamental questioning of signification characteristic of Verlaine's “Symbolist” period. Verlaine's 1890 article “Critique des Poèmes saturniens”⁹ rejected everything he had written before Sagesse in 1881—in other words, nearly everything most critics still find important:

L’âge mûr a, peut avoir ses revanches et l'art aussi, sur les enfantillages de la jeunesse, ses nobles revanches, traite des objets plus et mieux en rapport, religion, patrie, et la science, et soi-même bien considérée sous toutes formes, ce que j'appellerai de l’élégie sérieuse, en haine de ce mot, psychologie. Je m'y suis efforcé quant à moi et j'aurai laissé mon oeuvre personnelle en quatre parties bien définies, Sagesse, Amour, Parallèlement—et Bonheur [1891]. … Puis, car n'allez pas prendre au pied de la lettre mon ‘Art poétique’ de Jadis et Naguère, qui n'est qu'une chanson, après tout,—Je n'aurai pas fait de theorie.

[pp. 1073–74]

(The age of maturity, and art as well, can take its revenge, its noble revenge, on the childishness of youth; it treats subjects closer and more appropriate to itself, religion, the fatherland, science, and itself examined carefully in every form, what I shall term the serious elegy, out of hatred for that word, psychology. As for me, I have striven to do so and I shall have left my personal work in four distinct parts, Wisdom, Love, In Parallel—and Happiness. … Moreover, for don't take literally my ‘Art of Poetry’ in Formerly and Not So Long Ago, which is only a song, after all—I shall have created no theories.)

With that disclaimer, Verlaine's self-betrayal was consummated. It had begun with the distribution of a “prière d'insérer” (publicity flier) for Sagesse in 1881, describing him as “sincèrement et franchement revenu aux sentiments de la foi la plus orthodoxe” (p. 1111: having sincerely and openly returned to the most orthodox sentiments of religious faith), including support of attempts to restore the monarchy.

Written from the time he was fourteen, Verlaine's earliest surviving poems reflect his admiration for the grandiosity of Victor Hugo. But from 1861 on (when he was seventeen) he initiates a thematic critique of poeticism in the manner of Musset and the late Romantics such as Corbière and Laforgue. “Fadaises” presents a series of conventional lover's homages in rhyming couplets (in French this sort of versification is called “rimes plates,” “plates” also designating what is trite and inexpressive), with a surprise ending revealing that all of these compliments have been addressed to Lady Death.¹⁰ The title (“Insipidities”) already dismisses the import of the verses that follow; the pointe of the conclusion dismisses life itself: “Et le désir me talonne et me mord, / Car je vous aime, ô Madame la Mort!” (p. 16: And desire spurs me on and bites me, / For I love you, O Mistress Death!). To equate love with death is a typically Romantic gesture. If the title works in conjunction with this equation to undermine the conventionality of the earlier verses, then Verlaine has done little new. But if the title can be held to dismiss the concluding Romantic cliché, as well as those clichés that the Romantic cliché is dismissing (with the implied topos of vanitas vanitatum), then Verlaine's world-weariness extends to and contaminates the verbal medium itself. Whether it actually does so, however, we cannot tell for certain from the text alone. But in the context of Romantic practice this poem stands out because Romantic poems do not usually appear under titles that make their protests, as well as the targets of those protests, seem frivolous from the outset. They do not do so, that is, until the ironic poetry of Corbière and Laforgue.

Additional albeit equally ambiguous evidence that Verlaine early adopted a skeptical attitude toward Romanticism appears in the early poem that most specifically comments on poetic creation, the “Vers dorés” of 1866 (p. 22). There he claims that poetry should be impersonal: “maint poète / A trop étroits les reins ou les poumons trop gras” (many a poet / Has loins too narrow or lungs too fat); only those who “se recueillent dans un égoïsme de marbre” (commune with themselves within an egoism of marble) are great. At first this statement seems simply to belong to the “second Romanticism” of Gautier or De Lisle, standing in opposition to the earlier belief that “Gefühl ist alles.” But like the title of “Fadaises,” the term “égoïsme” again renders suspect Verlaine's homage to the “Neoclassic Stoic.”

After the prologue, the first section of the Poèmes saturniens, titled “Melancholia,” expresses a nostalgic faith in the charms of past love: “Et qu'il bruit avec un murmure charmant / Le premier oui qui sort des lèvres bien-aimées!” (“Nevermore,” p. 61: And how it rustles with a charming murmur / The first yes that leaves beloved lips!).¹¹ But this vision must not become too precise: in “Mon Rêve familier” the idealized woman speaks with the voice of the beloved dead “qui se sont tues” (who have fallen silent), but of her name the poet remembers only that it is “doux et sonore / Comme ceux des aimés que la vie exila” (p. 64: sweet and resonant / Like the names of loved ones whom life exiled). In the present time of narration, however—or more accurately, of lyricization—artistic self-consciousness begins to intrude. A poem such as “Lassitude,” for example, seems initially only to echo the Baudelairean taste for the illusion of love when it asks the beloved: “fais-moi des serments que tu rompras demain” (make me promises that you will break tomorrow; see, e.g., Baudelaire's “L'Amour du mensonge”). But Baudelaire never really loses faith in art, and Verlaine does. His epigraph from Luis de Góngora, “a batallas de amor campos de pluma” (for battles of love, fields of feathers), suggests by juxtaposition that not only the content of professions of love but perhaps even their verbal vehicle is false. The double meaning of pluma, feathers for lying on or writing with, implies that the falsity of the beloved's specious assurances may extend to and contaminate the verbal medium itself, where the cradling regularity of the verses reflects the sensuous pleasure of the caresses that the woman lavishes on the lyric self. Such a possibility, farfetched as it may initially seem, emerges blatantly in the poem “L'Angoisse” in the same section.

Nature, rien de toi ne m’émeut, ni les champs
Nourriciers, ni l’écho vermeil des pastorales
Siciliennes, ni les pompes aurorales,
Ni la solennité dolente des couchants.
Je ris de l'Art, je ris de l'Homme aussi, des chants,
Des vers, des temples grecs et des tours en spirales
Qu’étirent dans le ciel vide les cathédrales,
Et je vois du même oeil les bons et les méchants.
Je ne crois pas en Dieu, j'abjure et je renie
Toute pensée, et quant à la vieille ironie
L'Amour, je voudrais bien qu'on ne m'en parlât
plus.
Lasse de vivre, ayant peur de mourir, pareille
Au brick perdu jouet du flux et du reflux,
Mon âme pour d'affreux naufrages appareille.

[p. 65]

(Nature, nothing in you moves me, neither the nurturant fields, / Nor the crimson echo of Sicilian pastorals, / nor the splendor of dawn, / Nor the plaintive ceremony of the sunsets. // I laugh at Art, I laugh at Man as well, at songs, / Poetry, Greek temples and the spiraling towers / That the cathedrals stretch forth into the sky, / And I see the virtuous and wicked as the same. // I don't believe in God, I abjure and forswear / All thought, and as for that old irony, / Love, I'd rather you not speak to me of it at all. // Wearied of living, afraid of dying, like / The lost brig, a plaything of the ocean's ebb and flow, / My soul is being rigged for fearsome shipwrecks.)

The poet rejects art, the very activity that defines him, and its products of music and verse. He surrenders himself to the rocking, delusive movement of the alexandrine verses like a lost ship. This “musicality,” this hypnotic empty signifier, is reinforced by the pervasive additional regularity of verbal parallelisms. The first stanza is built around four successive clauses beginning in “ni”; the second begins by repeating “je ris de” and then lists four items each of which is preceded by “des”; the last verse of this stanza pairs “les bons et les méchants.” The third stanza deploys a fourfold anaphora of “je” associated with what the poet abjures. More verbal parallels in lines 9 (“j'abjure et je renie.”), 12 (“lasse de vivre, ayant peur de mourir”), and 13 (“du flux et du reflux”)—the last with an internal rhyme—create a countercurrent of soothing regularity beneath the explicit textual meanings of the negation of nature, art, God, and love. Ultimately, of course, such denials and a passive yielding to rhythmic flux lead to the same thing: the ultimate disaster for which the lyric self prepares in the last line; the loss of a personal identity, which can be expressed and maintained only through words.

Generally, then, during the course of the “Melancholia” section of the Poèmes saturniens the poet affirms that words once had a transcendent meaning that they now have lost: they expressed the eternity of love (see “Le Rossignol,” pp. 73–74). As “Lassitude” reveals, the poet prefers this willfully recreated illusion to the reality of sexual fulfillment in the present. But the illusion can be sustained not by specific words themselves but only by the idea of words, just as the name of the beloved in “Nevermore” can be preserved only as a general impression. Finally, in “L'Angoisse” the despairing poet will reject all talk about love—remembered, potential, or allusive—to surrender himself to the rocking rhythm of the hemistiches. Thus the self comes to be suspended between life and death, as it is more specifically in the concluding lines of “Chanson d'automne”:

Et je m'en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m'emporte
Deça, delà,
Pareil à la
Feuille morte.

[p. 73]

(And I go off / On the evil wind / That carries me / Here and there / Like the / Dead leaf.)

For the historical Verlaine, alcoholism achieved a similar compromise between suicide and survival, preserving him as much as possible in a blurry, dreamy swoon that did not threaten immediate self-annihilation but offered the one advantage of that state—relief from pain. Such a narcissistic retreat into the self effaces the disappointments of the exterior world. And the incursions of the other arts into Verlaine's poetry obscure the meretricious words with which one attempts to communicate with that world. Not only is this poetry opposed to commitment—expressing “l'amer à la bouteille” rather than “la bouteille à la mer”—it also is anti-impressionist. For real impressionism opens itself to sensory experience; it does not exploit such experience as a narcotic.

The following section of the Poèmes saturniens, titled “Eaux-fortes” (engravings), moves away from the verbal toward the visual. But at the same time the relative impersonality of these descriptive poems added to the frequent marked choice of “rythmes impairs” makes them more nearly “musical” than the ordinary poem, in a context that allows us to recognize such musicality as antiverbal. “Croquis parisien” has one five-syllable line amid three decasyllabic lines in each stanza; “Cauchemar” has lines of seven and three syllables; “Marine” has five-syllable lines. These are the first three of five poems in this section. When Verlaine returns to conventional versification in the last two, he preserves the titles that suggest works of visual art: “Effet de nuit” and “Grotesques.” And as if to offset the return to rhythmical conventions, he treats subjects that make explicit his feelings of alienation: outcasts rejected by the elements and menaced with imminent death.

To the “musicality” of a marked choice of an unusual rhythm (pentasyllables again), the first of the “Paysages tristes,” “Soleils couchants,” adds the “musicality” of an exceptional amount of repetition. In sixteen lines there are only four rhymes—two in each group of eight lines. Line 3 is the same as line 5; 11 is the same as 16. The expression “soleils couchants” appears four times as well as in the title, while the word “défilent” occupies the first three of five syllables in lines 13 and 14.

Moreover, the flux of transition subverts the stability essential to allow representation, and this poem is liminal on many levels. Both dawn and sunset, passages between darkness and light, are evoked. The poem's beach stands between sea and land, as its dream stands between waking and sleeping and its phantoms between life and death. Furthermore, these diverse states interpenetrate. The poem literally begins with a weak dawn light that suggests a sunset; in the last eight lines this natural setting, in turn, becomes the stage for “d’étranges rêves” associated only by simile with the setting suns. The event of the title, “setting suns,” has been twice displaced, first to dawn and then to dream. The apparent history of the poem's composition thus moves backward: instead of the title serving as the pretext for the poem, the poem becomes, as it were, the pretext for the title. This multiplication of perspectives makes any particular sequence of associations appear arbitrary. The constellation of associations comes to seem rather like a musical theme that could equally well be played cancrizans (backward) or inverted. Verlaine is well aware of his poems’ resistance to interpretation, as we can see in the sardonic self-glossing of stanzas 8 through 10 of “Nuit du Walpurgis classique,” the fourth poem in “Paysages tristes”:

—Ces spectres agités, sont-ce donc la pensée
Du poète ivre, ou son regret, ou son remords,
Ces spectres agités en tourbe cadencée,
                              Ou bien tout simplement des morts?
Sont-ce done ton remords, ô rêvasseur qu'invite
L'horreur, ou ton regret, ou ta pensée,—hein?—tous
Ces spectres qu'un vertige irrésistible agite,
                              Ou bien des morts qui seraient fous?—
N'importe! ils vont toujours, les fébriles fantômes.

[p. 72]

(These agitated ghosts, now are they the thoughts / Of the drunken poet, or his regrets, or his remorse, / These ghosts stirred up in a rhythmical rabble, / Or are they quite simply the dead? // Now are they your remorse, day-dreamer courted / By horror, or your regrets, or your thoughts, eh? All / These ghosts agitated by an irresistible vertigo, / Or else might they be dead people gone mad? // No matter! They're moving still, the feverish phantoms.)

The tenor of the poem, visionary Romantic disorder, is negated by its triply Apollonian vehicle: the orderly alexandrines, the allusion to classical ancient Greece in Goethe's Faust, part II, and the regular French (rather than unkempt English) gardens of Le Nôtre, “correct, ridicule, et charmant” (proper, ridiculous, and charming). These words conclude and define the poem while repeating the last line and a half of stanza 1. The implied author retains a bit of playfulness by breaking the frame rather than affirming it, for example in the first stanza, when an excess of regularity creates dislocation because the vision is described as “un rhythmique [sic] sabbat, rhythmique, extrêmement / Rhythmique” (p. 71: A rhythmical Sabbath, rhythmical, extremely / Rhythmical). The word “extremely” forces the word “rhythmical” beyond the end of the line in an enjambment that disrupts rhythm. And again, at the beginning of stanzas 6 and 7, the word “s'entrelacent” (embrace) applied to the dancing specters literally obliges one stanza to carry over a sentence from the previous one. Thus, contrary to the classical norm, according to which each stanza contains one neat, complete sentence, these stanzas run over into each other, swept up in the grotesque, promiscuous dance of the dead.

It would be tempting to assume that Verlaine's mockery of conventional prosody in his Walpurgis Night functions to enhance by contrast his unconventional prosody, and that the latter's “musicality” offers us a haven of nonreferential innocence by challenging the false primacy of words. But Verlaine will not allow this impression to stand. The ensuing Saturnian poems will assail the innocence—both verbal and nonverbal—associated with love language and then insinuate this now-debased language into the “musical” world of purity so as to threaten the reassuring connotations of the orderly repetitions of “musicality” itself. The first move in Verlaine's parodic enterprise can be observed in “La Chanson des ingénues” of the section “Caprices.” From the outset, these ingénues are faced with extinction because they inhabit “les romans qu'on lit peu” (novels that are seldom read). Are they actual young women or sentences (“la phrase,” of feminine grammatical gender in French) in the text? The second stanza, beginning “Nous allons entrelacées” (p. 75), introduces a series of sentences that Verlaine has “interlaced” into one monstrously long sentence by replacing periods with semicolons for the remaining seven stanzas of the poem. The portrait of the ingénues also becomes textually “interlaced” with other suspect depictions of innocence, for the first phrase with which they characterize themselves—“Et le jour n'est pas plus pur / Que le fond de nos pensées” (And the daylight is no purer / Than the depths of our thoughts)—parodies Hippolyte's equivocal protestation to his father in Racine's Phèdre (IV, 2). The assaults of suitors are repulsed by “les plis ironiques / De nos jupons détournés” (the ironic folds / Of our averted skirts). These folds, ostensibly protective owing to the extra density of material that they interpose between female and male, also suggest both the folds of the female sexual organs and partially hidden thoughts. Such “pensers clandestins” emerge in the last two lines, where the ingénues imagine themselves as the future lovers of libertines. These young women were initially interchangeable from one novel to another. Now they have proven interchangeable in the roles of innocence and experience as well. They are unmasked as empty signs whose meaning is not innate or even fixed, but arbitrary and unstable.

“Sérénade” and “Nevermore,” near the end of the collection, intimately link the lulling reassurance of “musicality” to the falsity of words. “Sérénade” stresses rhythm by employing the unusual alternation of ten- and five-syllable lines we have already observed in “Croquis parisien.” The poem recalls the Baudelairean quasi-pantoum (see “Harmonie du soir,” where the second and fourth lines of each stanza become the first and third lines of the next), except that it uses stanzas rather than lines to achieve its lulling effect: the first of seven quatrains is also the fourth, and the second reappears as the seventh. The poem displays many other Baudelairean motifs: the beloved's onyx eyes, the Lethe of her breast, the Styx of her dark hair, her “parfum opulent.” But Verlaine condenses Baudelaire's alternatives of adoration and sadistic assault into single lines: the poem as “chanson” is both “cruelle et câline” (cruel and cajoling); the woman is “Mon Ange!—ma Gouge!” (My Angel!—my Whore!) Such laconism appears flippant, as if Verlaine were suggesting that he could easily replicate Baudelaire's tricks. The anticlimactic platitude of the poet's supreme appeal for contact—“Ouvre ton âme et ton oreille au son / De ma mandoline” (open your soul and your ear to the sound / Of my mandolin)—plus the humbleness of his instrument add up to a pungent satire of lyrical conventions and a devaluation of lyricism itself, both in the modern sense of an emotional effusion and in the medieval sense of a poem designed to be accompanied by music. Above all, Verlaine writes a gay mockery of heterosexual romance.

“Nevermore” again adopts a Baudelairean device by repeating the first line of a five-line stanza at its end. Given an appropriate context, repetition above and beyond the ordinary in the lyric usually creates a reassuring world of regularity and stability. In Verlaine's poem the motif of repetition introduced by the versification reflects the psychic condition of the subject: the lyric self's aging heart will attempt to rebuild and readorn the past monuments of its hymns. But the fundamental falsity of existence has now extended its domain to encompass prayer as well as love: “Brûle un encens ranci sur tes autels d'or faux. … Pousse à Dieu ton cantique. … Entonne, orgue enroué, des Te Deum splendides” (Burn a rancid incense on your altars of false gold. … Heave your canticle to God. … Thunder forth, hoarse organ, splendid Te Deums). Other voices join the poet's in chorus in a pseudo-elegiac movement, but only to mingle the ludicrous with the noble: “Sonnez, grelots; sonnez, clochettes; sonnez, cloches!” (Ring, sleigh bells; ring, hand bells; ring, bells!). And at the end, the almost breathless recital of Baudelairean motifs in condensed form—an impatient and halfhearted reenactment—robs them of the tragic grandeur they had in the original: “Le ver est dans le fruit, le réveil dans le rêve, / Et le remords est dans l'amour: telle est la loi” (The worm is in the fruit, awaking in the dream, / And remorse is in love: such is the law). Finally, the title “Nevermore,” connoting the irretrievable uniqueness of an experience, is undercut from the beginning, for not only does it echo the refrain of Poe's “Raven,” it has also been previously used in the Poèmes saturniens themselves.

The concluding poems just before the Epilogue are, in the manner of Parnassianism, intrinsically false. The notes to the Pléiade edition misleadingly claim that Verlaine tried to profit from the current vogue of Leconte de Lisle (considered, as recently as the early years of the twentieth century, to be the second greatest poet of nineteenth-century France, after Victor Hugo) and that he was untrue to himself by imitating Leconte de Lisle; but the Epilogue clearly shows that Verlaine's homage of imitation is once again ironic. He mocks the specious sublimity of the Parnassian pantheon and neo-Hellenism by casting himself in the role of one of “les suprêmes Poètes / Qui vénérons les Dieux et qui n'y croyons pas” (we supreme Poets / Who venerate the gods and don't believe in them). The following lines that reject inspiration in favor of effort are obviously ironic and parody the movement of “l'Art pour l'Art” (headed by Théophile Gautier) as well as the Parnassian school of Leconte de Lisle: “A nous qui ciselons les mots comme des coupes / Et qui faisons les vers émus très froidement.” (Here's to us who chisel words like goblets / And write emotional verse quite in cold blood.) The truculence of Verlaine's parody, sharp as that of the young Rimbaud, has long been underestimated.

Verlaine's sense of the absurdity of language culminates in the Fêtes galantes. More radically than before he attacks the notion that language is the proud, unmatched achievement of humanity. He deprives humans of speech and bestows it on nonhuman entities. By means of cacophony, he further assails the assumption that what is poetic is what is harmonious. By having the names of musical notes invade the poems, he refutes the belief that only what is verbal signifies. Finally, his satire of love language in this collection undermines the conventional association of intensity with originality by stressing the conventional rhetorical nature of expressions of intense love feelings.¹²

According to J. S. Chaussivert in his fine study of the Fêtes galantes,¹³ the twenty-two poems in this collection are arranged in a cyclothymic movement, a mood swing rising to and then falling away from a manic episode. The first two poems express a certain sadness and hesitation before the lyric self embarks on the adventure of the festival. The latter, Chaussivert continues, affords an opportunity for what Mikhail Bakhtin calls “carnival,” episodic, ritualized, socially sanctioned transgression. The very title conveys this notion insofar as “galant” refers to flirtation and sex outside of marriage. (In classical French parlance, a “femme sensible” has had one lover; a “femme galante” has or has had several.) For Chaussivert, the poem “En bateau” sums up the irresponsible mood that colors the entire collection:

C'est l'instant, Messieurs, ou jamais,
D’être audacieux, et je mets
Mes deux mains partout désormais!

[p. 115]

(This is the time, Sirs, if ever there was one, / To be audacious, and I'm going to put / My two hands everywhere from now on!)

Poems 3 through 19 depict this “phase where flirtatious playfulness fully unfolds,”¹⁴ while the last three are impregnated with a postorgiastic melancholy.

Beneath the mounting and ebbing excitement of the festival, however, the Fêtes galantes follows a different trajectory, a steady devaluation of the word which is unaffected by the climax of the carnival mood. First, in “Clair de lune” and “Pantomime,” Verlaine invokes a silence that supplants conversation. Then music invades and disrupts the fragmented conversation of “Sur l'herbe.” Intensifying these shifts in the discourse of an unchanging set of characters in style direct libre (a sequence of conversational remarks whose speakers are unidentified), the more radical kaleidoscopic shifts of characters in “Fantoches” and “En bateau” totally destroy narrative coherence. “Mandoline” then simultaneously dehumanizes the lovers and strips them of significant discourse while attributing such discourse to things.¹⁵ Next, “Lettre,” “Les Indolents,” and “Colombine” show rather than tell (as “Mandoline” had done) that the language of lovers is a set of empty signifiers. But although these poems leave declarations of passion unanswered, or reject or banish them, they do so in a lighthearted vein. Beneath the superficial frivolity of the concluding poems, “L'Amour par terre” and “Colloque sentimental,” however, the tone turns serious; and the lyric self, having been introduced as a personified observer, now becomes implicated in the failure of the language of love.¹⁶

The title Fêtes galantes itself calls into question the primacy of words by evoking Watteau's painting of the same name. And the tone of the frolicking masquers in the first poem, “Clair de lune,” clashes with their message: “l'amour vainqueur et la vie opportune” (conquering love and a life of opportunity). For they celebrate love “in a minor key.” They themselves are “quasi tristes,” as is the moonlight in which they gambol. That moonlight mingles with their songs in the second stanza and then supersedes human words in the third with its omnipotent nonverbal message: “Qui fait rêver les oiseaux dans les arbres / Et sangloter d'extase les jets d'eau” (p. 107: Which makes the birds dream in the trees / And the fountains sob with ecstasy). The birds become silent and immobilized; the inanimate fountains take on inarticulate human feelings in response to the moon's message. To be sure, in ordinary poetic prosopopoeia and apostrophe a real-life verbal exchange between two living, waking, neighboring human beings becomes an exchange between only one such human being and an addressee who could not actually respond. But one side of a conversation nevertheless remains. By the end of “Clair de lune,” however, the singing humans have been swept from the stage, and nature is left to commune wordlessly with itself.

The second poem, “Pantomime,” removes words from people altogether, except for the unspecified voices that Colombine hears in her heart. Each of the four stanzas presents a discrete character, totally cut off from the others in the present time of lyricization. People recapture words in the third poem, “Sur l'herbe,” but in a contextfree style direct libre that recalls Apollinaire's “Lundi rue Christine.” We cannot say precisely how many speakers are involved or who is saying what. At least four persons must be present because the text mentions “Mesdames” and “Messieurs” in direct address. Three individuals are specified: an abbé, a marquis, and the dancer La Camargo. Dashes reveal that at least two are talking. But Verlaine is not particular about the distribution of their lines. A variant of the initial verse had no dash at mid-line to indicate a change of speaker, whereas one appears in the definitive version. Lines 7 through 11 suggest at least three male speakers, although theoretically any of them could be women. The free-floating conversation consists of insults and bantering flattery. We cannot tell whether the final five syllables (“Hé! bonsoir, la Lune!”) constitute a facetious address to a celestial body or a comic sexual reference to an earthly one. (“Je vois la lune” in familiar parlance means “I see somebody's bare ass.”) As if all these features did not make the poem sufficiently incoherent, a series of musical notes invades it twice. Even as music the two series remain ambiguous. Both begin with an ascending major triad but finish unresolved, one ending on the double dominant, the other on the dominant. And as the added emphasis in the text cited below indicates, in the middle stanza the musical notes homophonically invade their immediate context. Their innate musicality elicits a further “musical” response in the form of the marked repetitions of assonance and alliteration. The musical term “croche” (eighth note) is embedded here as well. And the stability of individual signifiers is further weakened by homonyms of the rhyme—si and l'une—inserted in stanzas 2 and 3:

L'abbé divague.—Et toi, marquis,
Tu mets de travers ta perruque.
—Ce vieux vin de Chypre est exquis
Moins, Camargo, que votre nuque.
—Ma flamme … Do, mi, sol,
la si.
L'abbé, ta noirceur se
dévoile!
—Que je meure, Mesdames, si
Je ne vous décroche une étoile!
—Je voudrais être petit chien!
—Embrassons nos bergères l'une
Après l'autre.—Messieurs, eh bien?
—Do, mi, sol.—Hé!
bonsoir, la Lune.

(The Abbé is rambling.—And you, Marquis, / You put your wig on crooked. /—This old wine from Cyprus is exquisite, / Less, Camargo, than your nape. //—My love … Do, mi, so, la si. / Abbé, your evil scheme is exposed! /—I hope to die, ladies, if / I don't bring down a star for you! // I'd like to be a little dog! /—Let's kiss our shepherdesses one / After the other.—Well, gentlemen? /—Do, mi, so—Hi there! Good evening, Moon.)

Less radical, “A la promenade” exploits the semantic connotations of embedded homophony to underline the tone of pleasurable insincerity imposed on love language:

Trompeurs exquis et coquettes charmantes,
Coeurs tendres, mais affranchis du serment,
Nous devisions délicieusement …

[p. 109; emphasis added]

(Exquisite deceivers and charming coquettes, / Tender hearts, but freed from our vows, / We chatted deliciously …)

Both rhymes in this stanza end in a syllable that is a form of the verb mentir, to lie. This stanza, the middle one of five, is framed by notations of nonverbal communication far more significant than words, which thus are once again depreciated. The first stanza describes the indulgent, complicitous “smile” of the landscape; the last ends by conjuring up the provocative pout of a flirtatious mouth. Because words have been repressed, the suggestiveness of the sexual challenge in such details is all the broader. But predictably “La moue assez clémente de la bouche” (the rather lenient pout of the mouth) again contains a homonym of the verb mentir.

“Dans la grotte” further devalues words by superimposing banality on insincerity. The poem consists entirely of a tissue of clichés descending to what even in this context is an anticlimax, and the third line of each quatrain, an alexandrine among octosyllables, presents the objective correlative of the rhetorical excess that pervades the poem. In the first stanza the lover announces, “Là! je me tue à vos genoux!” (There! I'll kill myself at your knees!). The fearsome Hyrcanian tiger seems a lamb next to his cruel Clymène. But he moderates his outburst in the second stanza. His sword, which has felled so many heroes, will end his life. Not only has the act been safely postponed to an indefinite future but metonymy separates the potential suicide from the instrument of his death (he now says “my sword will kill me” rather than “I shall kill myself). This substitution of the instrument for the agent implies that the lover is now at some distance from the act and also that he has a choice of possible ways to do himself in—or indeed he might choose not to kill himself at all. And so, as we could have predicted, in the third stanza the hero prudently concludes he does not need a sword; did not love pierce his heart with sharp arrows the moment the beloved woman's eye shone on him? The equivocal device of a rhetorical question, whose vehicle expresses uncertainty while its tenor conveys certitude, brings the poem full circle from despair to flirtation.

Obsession with sexuality forms the fixed center around which Verlaine's badinage and verbal artifice circle in the next three poems. “Les Ingénus,” “Cortège,” and “Les Coquillages” first offer exciting glimpses of the woman's body: “Parfois luisaient des bas de jambes … c’étaient des éclairs soudains de nuques blanches” (Sometimes bare ankles twinkled … white napes suddenly flashed). These voyeuristic thrills are associated with specious words. In “Cortège” such glimpses become more overtly sexual, but they are not offered from the viewpoint of a poetic “nous”; instead, they are attributed to the lyric self's dissociated, projected primitivism and animality in the form of a monkey and of a “négrillon.” The female object's going up- and downstairs in this poem represents sexual intercourse with an archetypal symbolism of regular movement and increasing breathlessness as one “mounts” the stairway. As in a series of dreams where the inadmissible repressed moves gradually toward direct expression, in this series of poems the lyric self at last becomes a “je.” In “Les Coquillages” as in “Dans la grotte” the setting is again a cavern, but now the sexual symbolism—the lyric self enters the cave as a penis enters a vagina—is no longer masked by the reversal whereby the poet figure overtly imagines piercing himself with his sword rather than penetrating the desired woman. And the specious rhetoric of female “cruelty” (rejection) has disappeared. The cavern “où nous nous aimâmes” (where we once loved) is studded with shells. Each suggests part of the woman's complexion or body; one, particularly disturbing, suggests her vagina and thus reduplicates the entire rupestral setting. As the next poem, “En patinant,” implies with its scornful concluding cacophony “—quoi qu'on caquette!” (p. 113: whatever they may cackle!), only nature remains meaningful, and culture in the form of words may be dismissed entirely.

Here, midway into the collection, Verlaine moves beyond disparagement, mockery, cliché, hyperbole, and erasure to more radical ways of subverting words. Cacophony, the intimate enemy of lyric, gains reinforcement from structural incoherence, the enemy of context already apparent in “Sur l'herbe.” Each of the nine stanzas of “Fantoches” and “En bateau” introduces a different set of characters. Such composition by juxtaposition becomes pictorial rather than narrative or syntactical. “Fantoches” attributes no words to its human characters, only gestures and body movements. A nonhuman being assumes the task of verbal communication: on behalf of a lovesick Spanish pirate, “un langoureux rossignol / Clame la détresse à tuetête” (p. 114: a languorous nightingale / Yells out distress at the top of its lungs). Any musical delights the mention of the dreamy nightingale might lead us to anticipate are promptly canceled by the excessive loudness and harshness of its song, described with six stop consonants within eight syllables. Similarly, in “Le Faune” inhuman noises shatter the momentary serenity surrounding the silent humans. The sinister laughter of a terra-cotta faun ushers them in, and the clattering of tambourines making noise without players escorts them out.

The sounds of nature become agreeable in the next poem, “Mandoline,” only further to devalue faithless love and its empty words by contrast. Maids and swains “échangent des propos fades / Sous les ramures chanteuses” (exchange trite remarks / Beneath the singing branches). While the trees sing, the promiscuous multiplicity of the human messages voids them of meaning. Damis “pour mainte / Cruelle fait maint vers tendre” (writes many a tender verse for many a cruel lady). The characters, portrayed as “donneurs de sérénades” and as “écouteuses,” have no functions other than these idle diversions (p. 115). They are stock characters from pastoral, so familiar—like the “éternel [i.e., predictable and boring] Clitandre”—that they pall. Insubstantial as these phantoms already are, they will be further reduced: to their clothes, to their mood, and finally to their limp shadows, which whirl until they in turn are absorbed into the moonlight. The last word applicable to human speech in this poem, “jase,” refers to the empty background chatter of the mandolin. Not only the signifying power of the speakers' words but even the speakers themselves have been erased.

The major transition of the Fêtes galantes occurs when the next poem, “A Clymène,” shifts from presenting lovers in general, as the previous pieces have done, to dramatizing the lyric self as lover. This self thus becomes directly involved in the failure of love language to signify. When the phrase “romances sans paroles” (borrowed, of course, from the title of Mendelssohn's musical composition) denotes the effect that the beloved woman has on the poet, words have been altogether deleted from the love relationship. Described as an “étrange / Vision,” the woman's very voice is metaphorically robbed of sound as well as of words. The stripping away of its capacity for rational communication is represented by the violent enjambment that shatters the phrase placed in opposition to “voix.”

The six concluding poems in the Fêtes galantes call into question the signifying abilities of words even more thoroughly and explicitly than any of the preceding poems. Through incongruous juxtaposition, through a diaphoric alternation of mutually incompatible tones,¹⁷ “Lettre” presents a devastating critique of lovers' language which anticipates Roland Barthes or Nathalie Sarraute's satire of literary criticism in Les Fruits d'or. The verses in rhyming couplets (which in and of themselves suggest banality) begin by protesting the lover's total physical dependence on the presence of the beloved: “Je languis et me meurs, comme c'est ma coûtume / En pareil cas” (I'm languishing and dying, as my habit is / In such a case). The platitudinous iterative of the last three words promptly undercuts the melodramatic singulative. Undaunted by, and apparently unaware of, the breakdown of the illusion of devotion he is attempting to create, this unreliable narrator/lover continues with a pseudo-Platonic turn:

enfin, mon corps faisant place à mon âme,
Je deviendrai fantôme à mon tour aussi, moi,
Mon ombre se fondra pour jamais en votre ombre.

[p. 117]

(Finally, my body giving way to my soul, / I too will become a ghost in my turn, … / My shade will melt into yours forever.)

But this lofty assertion of selfless love is vitiated by the prosaic self-emphasizing disjunctive pronoun of the second line cited (moi); and in the line immediately following, the respectful distance of the “vous” is canceled by the presumptuous “tu” appearing in the flattest of homage clichés: “En attendant, je suis, très chère, ton valet” (Meanwhile, dearest, I am your humble servant). The typography itself emphasizes this presumption and triteness by isolating the line. The total effect is like that of the dialogue in a French classical play when the discourse of the master is interwoven with that of the servant, the master typically representing the superego and idealistic love, the servant embodying the id and the domination of bodily, materialistic impulses.

The third group of typographically distinct lines deploys the deliberate anticlimax (or, to use the more evocative French term, “rechute dans la banalité”) of inquiring prosaically about the beloved's pets and friends (the conjunction implying their shared animality), particularly

                                                  cette Silvanie
Dont j'eusse aimé l'oeil noir si le tien n’était
bleu,
Et qui parfois me fit des signes, palsambleu!

[p. 117]

(That Sylvania, / Whose dark eyes I would have liked if yours had not been blue, / And who sometimes signaled to me, my word!)

By successfully tempting the poet to contemplate infidelity, Silvanie's nonverbal communication retrospectively nullifies all the exalted protestations of passionate fidelity that he had broadcast in his letter.

The fourth block of lines returns to the tone of exalted homage. The lyric self, more amorous than Caesar or Mark Anthony with Cleopatra, claims that he plans to conquer the whole world so as to lay its treasures at the beloved's feet as an unworthy token of his devotion. (That the woman as object of devotion is compared to a promiscuous historical figure, however, implicitly transforms her from a guiding star to a “femme galante” who is no better than she should be.) But then the last three lines intervene, impatiently breaking off the rhyming couplets in the middle of a pair. After repeating the mundane “très chère” of the isolated line, they blatantly dismiss as trivial and otiose all that has gone before,

                                                                                Car voilà trop causer,
Et le temps que l'on perd à lire une missive
N'aura jamais valu la peine qu'on l’écrive.

[p. 117]

(For that's too much chat, / And the time you lose reading a missive / Will never have been worth the trouble to write it.)

What we have learned from reading this poem, according to the lyric self, is that we should not have wasted our time on it in the first place. Rather than guide us to unknown heights of love, it has cast us down. By situating his metalanguage in final position, Verlaine has canceled his statement en bloc.

In the demonic world of the Fêtes galantes, the ultimate realities are lust and death. Such an interpretation may sound melodramatic, but it is borne out by the text of “Le Monstre,” a poem composed at the same time as the poems in this collection:

                                                                                et les victimes dans la gueule
Du monstre s'agitaient et se plaignaient, et seule
La gueule, se fermant soudain, leur répondait
Par un grand mouvement de mâchoires.

[p. 128]

(And the victims in the maw / Of the monster struggled and lamented, and only / The maw, suddenly closing, answered them / With a great movement of its jaws.)

In this Dantesque inner circle of Hell, the only response to words is annihilation. Words themselves, however, are false lust and false death, since they postpone both the gratification of lust and the consummation of death. In “Dans la grotte,” for example, the despairing homage of a promise of suicide functions to defer death; in “Les Indolents” the male's proposition of a suicide pact delays the fulfillment of lust until his practical lady friend interrupts: “Mais taisonsnous, si bon vous semble” (But let's stop talking, if you like). The implied author's mocking “Hi! hi! hi!” of conclusion then echoes the earlier laughter of the lady and of the watching fauns who serve as wordless advocates—so to speak—for the claims of nature against antinature.

Even the absence of words, however, does not guarantee sincerity in Verlaine's eyes. The false promises of a flash of exposed flesh are enough to dupe “Les Ingénus.” “Colombine” accords a more extensive treatment to the motif of the unreliability of nonverbal communication. The heroine of that poem, “une belle enfant méchante” (a beautiful, wicked child), leads her flock of gulls on to no one knows where. The etymological sense of “enfant”—“without speech”—is clearly relevant in this poem. The level of communication has already been reduced to nonsense when the antics of the clowns who try to impress Colombine are summed up by a series of musical notes: “Do, mi, sol, mi, fa.” But it degenerates further to an exchange among metaphorical animals. The tacit sexual promises made by Colombine's provocative clothes and seductive body are contradicted by her perverse feline eyes, which transmit the tacit command “A bas / Les pattes!” (Down, boy!).

The ominous title of the following poem, “L'Amour par terre,” announces at once the overthrow of the ideal of love. And it concludes with an unheard, unanswered question addressed to the lyric self's distracted female companion, who is engrossed in following the flight of a butterfly, itself an emblem of her inconstant attention. The twofold frustration of desire and art symbolized in the poem leaves her unaffected. She does not see the fallen statue of Cupid or the phallic pedestal standing sadly alone beside it, a pedestal on which the lyric self can scarcely decipher the sculptor's name. The topos of exegi monumentum has been superseded by that of disjecta membra poetae. And in each of the last three quatrains the lyric self's “c'est triste” contrasts jarringly with the playful, heedless mood of his insouciant female companion.

A rhetorical framework of six imperatives in “En sourdine,” the next-to-last poem, strains for a possible moment of happiness in love: “Pénétrons … Fondons … Ferme … Croise … Chasse … Laissonsnous persuader” (Let us imbue … melt together … close your eyes … fold your arms … banish every plan … allow ourselves to be persuaded). But in the final analysis the best these lovers have to hope for is the successful accomplishment of a speech act—in other words, that they will be persuaded. Paradoxically, they can achieve even that tenuous, imaginary triumph only by completely forswearing all verbal communication and, indeed, all purpose whatsoever (“tout dessein”). The couple's relationship survives only in the deep silence of a dark wood; there it is the gentle breeze rather than their own words that will “persuade” them to abandon themselves to languor; and when night falls, it must be the nightingale's song rather than their own voices that will convey their despair.

The final poem of the Fêtes galantes, “Colloque sentimental,” deploys an oxymoronic title to oppose feeling with debate. In French, moreover, the first word can convey an ironic nuance, suggesting a conversation whose participants exaggerate the importance of what is being discussed. The verbal exchange occurs between two specters in the icy wasteland of a deserted park. Four times in succession, one of them tries to evoke the love and ecstasy that they shared in the past, only to be flatly refuted by the other with retorts such as “Non” and “C'est possible.” Translating Baudelairean spleen into dialogue, this conclusion creates a verbal exchange at cross-purposes, like those in the theater of the absurd. By offering no scope for expansion or development, the eight isolated couplets of this poem reveal that there is no hope of escaping back into the past or forward into a happier future. Further, in the framework of the conversation, the partial repetitions of the first couplet in the third and the second in the last, instead of creating the reassuring effect of the stability of repetition, underscore the poem's drift toward entropy. “Two shapes” reappear as “two ghosts”; “you can hardly hear their words” in the last line becomes “and only the night heard their words” as the void engulfs them.¹⁸ As a country-and-western song says, “If love can never be forever, what's forever for?” Discourse and love perish together.¹⁹ Verlaine's greatest originality and achievement in the Poèmes saturniens and the Fêtes galantes was to combine the conventional Romantic motif of loss of faith in the permanence of love with the Symbolist's crisis of doubt regarding the transcendental permanence of any signified.

From this perspective La Bonne Chanson (1870), published the year after the Fêtes galantes, seems retrogressive.²⁰ In the two earlier collections the poet, lacking faith in love, had also lacked faith in language. La Bonne Chanson, in contrast, represents a transient episode during which love and language are glorified together. The certitude of being loved restores and enhances the imagined value of all the ways in which the lyric self can communicate with the beloved. During this phase words, rather than being experienced as a source or token of spiritual impoverishment, become pregnant with promise. The eighth poem of the collection, “Une Sainte en son auréole,” for example, celebrates

Tout ce que contient la parole
Humaine de grâce et d'amour;
Des aspects nacrés, blancs et roses,
Un doux accord patricien:
Je vois, j'entends toutes ces choses
Dans son nom Carlovingien.

[p. 147]

(Everything that human speech contains of grace and love; … Pearly prospects, white and pink, / A sweet patrician harmony: / I see, I hear all of these things, / In her Carlovingian name.)

One detail in the text, however, makes this apparent triumph of signification seem suspect, transient, and unstable: an enjambment dissociates “parole” from “humaine” and introduces the latter term as if it expressed a limitation.

As the earlier collections have done, La Bonne Chanson establishes throughout a dichotomy of sincerity/insincerity, but places the lyric self squarely in the camp of sincerity, representing him as

                                                            témoignant sincèrement,
Sans fausse note et sans fadaise,
Du doux mal qu'on souffre en aimant.

[II, p. 143]²¹

(sincerely bearing witness, / Without a false note or insipidity, / To the sweet sickness one suffers from in loving.) And again he exclaims:

                                                                                ah! c'en est fait
Surtout de l'ironie et des lèvres pincées
Et des mots où l'esprit sans l’âme triomphait.

[IV, p. 144]

(ah! It's done with, / Especially the irony and the pursed lips / And words where wit used to triumph without soul.)

Bathed in the aura of a harmony of shared sentiments, the lovers will find that communication is assured: “elle m’écoutera sans déplaisir sans doute; / Et vraiment je ne veux pas d'autre Paradis” (IV, p. 144: No doubt she will listen to me without displeasure; / And truly I want no other Paradise.) When the poet finds himself flooded by the vertiginous impressions of the howling noise, acrid odors, and rushing movement of a railway carriage, he no longer feels, as he did before, that his being is dissolving,

Puisque le Nom si beau, si noble et si sonore
Se mêle, pur pivot de tout ce tournoiement,
Au rhythme [sic] du wagon brutal,
suavement.

[VII, p. 146]

(Because the Name, so lovely, so noble and so resonant / Mingles, the pure hub of all this turning, / Sweetly, with the rhythm of the rough carriage.)

The untitled tenth poem refutes “Lettre” in the Fêtes galantes. Like its precursor, it is written in alexandrine rhyming couplets and divided into five blocks of lines. But in this poem the lyric self receives a letter rather than sends one. His tone remains consistent, and he is deeply moved. Even when at first glance his conversation with the loved one seems banal, the poet can read her expressions of love beneath the surface of the words (XIII). Her words and gestures are all-powerful (XV); the characteristic description of nonverbal communication, even here, represents an element of antilogocentrism that never entirely disappeared from Verlaine's poetry. The last five poems depict the poet and his fiancée united against the world. The couple is posited as a core of meaning (XVII, XVIII); the wedding day is eagerly anticipated (XIX), and the poet experiences exhilaration at the prospect of his union with his Ideal (XX, XXI). The beloved, in short, has become a signifier whose signified is the transformation of the poet: “tous mes espoirs ont enfin leur tour” (XXI, p. 155: all my hopes finally have their day). For the historical Verlaine, however, this attempt to metamorphose appears to have been an act of desperation. “So,” observes Jacques Borel, “it seems that Verlaine must have rushed into marriage, so to speak, largely in order to ward off his tendency toward homosexuality.”²²

In the Romances sans paroles, whose original title was La Mauvaise Chanson, Verlaine's underlying sense of the inadequacy of the signifier reerupts. He is not just writing about being bad; writing itself is bad. These poems represent not only a rebellion against conventional social expectations but also the cancellation of Verlaine's recent praise of the “chanson” as verbal artifact. He now achieves the summit of his art by freeing himself from the former excesses of metalanguage, specifically from the continual need to depreciate words verbally, a need that had pervaded the Fêtes galantes. He now can evoke the indefinable without needing to dismiss the definable. But as a result, the poems in Romances sans paroles lack the thread of narrative continuity which had linked the various Fêtes galantes together into a progressive drama of the disintegration of the word.

The three section titles, “Ariettes oubliées,” “Paysages belges,” and “Aquarelles,” all denote a transposition of the arts which reinforces the word-canceling gesture of the collective title, Romances sans paroles. The nine poems of the first section are untitled; thus the ostensible pretext, which titles so often convey, has been suppressed in favor of impressionistic drift. In the Romances sans paroles as in the Fêtes galantes, words, removed from human beings and ascribed instead to natural entities, no longer provide a mocking, jarring contrast to human aspirations. We have returned to an elegiac mode wherein nature appears to echo human hopes and desires. The satiric edge of the Fêtes galantes is lacking.²³

The pathetic fallacy impregnates the nine “Ariettes oubliées” with anthropomorphism. In the first one, the choir of little voices in the branches expresses the plaintive, humble anthem of two human lovers' souls (p. 191). A murmur of unspecified origin in the second of these poems allows the lyric self to intuit “le contour subtil des voix anciennes” (the subtle contour of ancient voices); “les lueurs musiciennes” (the musical gleams) reveal to him a future dawn. The subtle synesthesias (a singing voice compared to an outline drawn by an artist, light compared to music) imply an overarching network of horizontal correspondences of sense impressions that ultimately derive from the organic unity of nature. The poet's heart and soul become a double eye reflecting “l'ariette … de toutes lyres!” (p. 192: the arietta of every lyre!). In the third poem the rain on the town corresponds to the weeping in the speaker's heart. By dispensing with a human verbal message Verlaine restores the harmony of self and externality that had been shattered in the Fêtes galantes, although of course he must use words to do so.

Considered as a group, the “Ariettes oubliées” are what John Porter Houston percipiently identified as “mood poems” when he characterized them as the one clear innovation of French Symbolism.²⁴ This innovation, however, has its ties to the past; it represents a further deterioration of the vestiges of the religious sentiment that survived, in degenerate form, in the lyric worldview of Romanticism. When at the turn of this century Romanticism was condemned as “split religion,” the accusation meant that Romanticism presented free-floating, invertebrate religious sentiment without any doctrinal, institutional, or dogmatic support. But Verlaine's “Symbolism” in these poems further debases the Romantics' material/spiritual correspondences to material/sentimental ones, to a harmony between the order of physical nature and the poet's feelings. Unlike the Christian and the Romantic modes of sensibility, moreover, Verlaine's lacks a social context and therefore entails no revelation, no “message,” nothing useful for humanity:

O que nous mêlions, âmes soeurs que nous sommes,
A nos voeux confus la douceur puérile
De cheminer loin des femmes et des hommes,
Dans le frais oubli de ce qui nous exile!

[IV, p. 193]²⁵

(O let us mingle, kindred spirits that we are, / With our uncertain hopes the boyish sweetness / Of traveling far from women and men, / Newly oblivious of what is exiling us!)

The dreamy swoon so characteristic of the “Ariettes oubliées,” where the poet's feelings are in harmony with his surroundings, recalls the infantile bliss of being fed and cradled. These poems are indeed deeply regressive. “Le contour subtil des voix anciennes” in the second poem clearly evokes the voice of the mother recalled from infancy. And in the same poem, the “escarpolette” “balançant jeunes et vieilles heures!” (the child's swing, swaying young and old hours to and fro!) represents not—or at least not only—an alternation between homosexual and heterosexual feelings, as many critics have claimed. Instead, it reflects Verlaine's desire to move back and forth between a remembered infantile relationship with the loved woman and his present involvement with his wife Mathilde. What the poet weeps for in “Il pleure dans mon coeur” is the loss of this blissful past. The predominance of the infantile over the homosexual becomes apparent in the fifth poem when the “air bien vieux” in the “boudoir longtemps parfumé d'Elle” (p. 193: the ancient melody … the boudoir filled for a long time with her scent) is metaphorically transformed into “ce berceau soudain / Qui lentement dorlote mon pauvre être” (p. 193: that sudden cradle / Which slowly coddles my poor being). A tune from former days which elicits memories of the poet's past momentarily consoles him. More playfully and subtly, the same motif recurs in the sixth “Ariette” through the mediation of medieval and fairy-tale literature. There the “petit poète jamais las / De la rime non attrapée!” (the little poet who is never weary / Of chasing the rhyme he will never catch!) is a self-image, and rhyme figures the relationship between two separate entities, the first of which engenders the second as a mother engenders a child. The primordial loss of fusion with the mother is the source of the sense of exile and sadness in the seventh poem. This mood also generates the impression of the death of the moon (as a figuration of the mother-imago) and, in the ninth poem, the death of the shadows of trees and of smoke, which figure memories:

Combien, ô voyageur, ce paysage blême
                              Te mira blême toi-même,
Et que tristes pleuraient dans les hautes feuillées
                              Tes espérances noyées!

[p. 196]

(How much, O traveler, this pale landscape / Caught sight of you, pale yourself, / And how sadly among the high foliage were weeping / Your drowned hopes!)

Language disappoints because it reminds us of the need to earn and to sustain in adult relationships the positive regard the mother unconditionally grants to the infant. Therefore the “Ariettes oubliées” attempt to create the semblance of a regression to a preverbal state, an impression that contrasts sharply with the ostensible modernity of the short, unusual line lengths and the synesthetic network of associations with the other arts. “Regression in the service of the ego” this poetry may be, but it also foreshadows a historical forward movement, away from the antiverbal crisis that marks the first phase of French Symbolism to the second Symbolist generation, characterized by a renewed aspiration to found a unity of the arts and to invent a cosmic, totalizing discourse.

From this point on Romances sans paroles deteriorates. Superficially the “Paysages belges” section appears to offer an impressionistic series of vignettes in rapid movement, but in fact these vignettes gravitate as a group around the fixed center of a happy home—inn, nest, or château—explicitly mentioned by the first three poems of the group. One could characterize the impossible return to infancy as centripetal, the demands of adult life as centrifugal (in the absence of a coherent sense of identity), and the resulting movement as circular. This motion appears in the next two poems in the form of a merry-go-round and of weathervanes. “Malines” combines the poles of movement and immobility in the image of railway cars speeding through the night but each providing at the same time an intimate home:

Chaque wagon est un salon
Où l'on cause bas et d'où l'on
Aime à loisir cette nature …

[p. 201]

(Each railway car is a living room / Where you talk in low tones and from which you can / Love this nature at leisure.)

These first two groups of poems are dated from May through August 1872; the last seven poems of the collection, dated from September 1872 through April of the next year, revert to an anecdotal, self-justifying confessional tradition characteristic of Verlaine's later verse and illustrated here most starkly by “Birds in the Night” and “Child Wife.”

Written in prison in 1874 after Verlaine's drunken brutality and his escapades with Rimbaud had irrevocably ended his marriage, “L'Art poétique” reintroduces a corrosive subversion of the word through incongruous juxtaposition, self-contradiction, disunity of tone, pleonasm, and hyperpoeticism.²⁶ Robert Mitchell has pointed out that, except for the nine-syllable lines corresponding to Verlaine's recommendation to use imparisyllabic meters, “the form of the poem is basically unfaithful, and even antithetical, to its substance.”²⁷ Verlaine advocates weaving an airy creation “sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose” (without anything in it that weighs down or comes to rest), but he creates a strongly didactic statement in which twelve exhortations to the reader fill up all but three of the nine stanzas. Repeated and therefore heavy-handed commands to seek “nuance” (the word occurs three times among the twenty-seven words of stanza 4) strikingly subvert the desired effect of delicacy.²⁸ And from that point on the text is invaded by a decidedly antipoetic diction as in stanzas 5 and 6 the poem evokes that which it wishes to destroy: “tout cet ail de basse cuisine! … tords-lui le cou! … en train d’énergie … elle ira jusqu'où” etc. (all that greasy-spoon garlic! … wring its neck! … getting energetic … how far will it go). Condemning the mechanical repetition of rhyme (i.e., of the same sounds), stanza 7 itself accumulates six ou's in lines 2 and 3, and four s's and f's each in lines 2 through 4. The last two stanzas return to enunciating a “poetical” statement of the ideal described as a free ramble through the fresh morning air “vers d'autres cieux à d'autres amours” (p. 327: toward other skies, to other loves). But even here—if we are to assume that this concluding image of an aimless stroll corresponds to the “music” that Verlaine recommended “above all else” in his first line—Verlaine's putative “musicality” amounts to precisely the opposite of what a musician would understand by that word: the absence of structure and direction.

The jarring incongruity of prescribing a light touch in “L'Art poétique” in a language coarsened by pedestrian diction and crude excesses of alliteration and assonance not only conveys an ironic reflection on the claims of poetry but also betrays an inner conflict between faith in poetry and disdain for it as a vehicle for aspirations.²⁹ Through the Romances sans paroles Verlaine's poetry—based on a fantasized relationship to an Other whose domain is language—alternates between vulnerable openness and wary mistrust. The losses of his wife Mathilde and of his lover Rimbaud, the shock of these failures of love, robbed love of its justification for Verlaine. No longer having the energy to mistrust, he regressed into a relationship with himself. For a time he tried to aggrandize himself through a religious conversion that seemed to hold the promise of associating his self with a greater self. But transcendence eluded him. Throughout his later collections of verse he remained inextricably entangled in self-justifications of various kinds. He tried to have something to show for his past; he yielded to the rhetoric that must accompany such a stance and sank back into a dilute reworking of the confessional strain of late Romantic elegiac poetry. As Jacques Borel observes, by the time of La Bonne Chanson Verlaine was already beginning to retreat from the full originality of his personal vision: “He will be impelled forward by Rimbaud, called on in a sense to pursue down to its ultimate consequences an experiment that he had been the first to initiate by having a presentiment of the liberating power of the dream, but away from which, suspecting the dangers that ‘Crimen Amoris’ and then ‘Mort!’ will denounce, he had already turned into the elegiac comfort of 1870.”³⁰

Our faith in the referentiality of language—that there exists a real link between the signifier and a signified—depends upon our faith in intersubjectivity, the belief that we share a common code and that each signifier means the same thing to us as to the significant others in our lives. Once Verlaine had experienced “l'incommunicabilité,” the impossibility of communication, he attacked the belief in referentiality in three distinct ways in his poetry. At times, as in the theater of the absurd, he depicted a dialogue of the deaf, as in “Colloque sentimental,” where each signifier has different referents for different people. At other times he exalted “musicality” over verbality: thus he was attracted to the libretti of Favart, which he studied with Rimbaud, because they provided the model for a form intermediate, so to speak, between language and music, insofar as the importance of the words was minimized by the necessity of tailoring them to the prepotent musical form. Verlaine's marked choice of unusual rhythms augmented the ostensible importance of the “musical”—that is, the rhythmic—dimension of his verse by calling attention to its rhythms so they could not be taken for granted. As Verlaine, like the other Symbolists, was not himself musical and was in fact rather unfamiliar with music, the inspiration that music could provide for his verse had to remain limited.³¹ Yet his fascination with musicality represented a positive response to the experience of the emptiness of language, for it implied that one can shift out of an unreliable system into another system that is self-contained. When you name musical notes, for example, your referents are elements of a preexisting structure independent of language; their “meanings” are precisely nonreferential, consisting as they do in internal relationships between the parts of a musical composition.

The pessimistic mode of Verlaine's assault on signification, the one with which he ended, was the specular, narcissistic short circuit in which all signifiers voiced by the poet refer back to the poet himself. In his earlier collections of verse, images of the moon symbolize this condition. The heavenly body corresponds to the poet's body (e.g., the Pierrot's white face explicitly mimics the appearance of the moon), and the moon also recalls the fantasized maternal breast, surviving in the preconscious as the dream screen and existing only to gratify the needs of the imperial self.³² In the weaker later verse, the confessional tradition back into which Verlaine sinks narrativizes this pessimistic solution of narcissism. If you cannot communicate with others, then you must commune with your own emptiness.

Notes

1. See James Lawler, The Language of French Symbolism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), chap. 2, “Verlaine's ‘Naiveté,’” pp. 21–70; and Jean-Pierre Richard, Poésie et profondeur (Paris: Seuil, 1955), “Fadeur de Verlaine,” pp. 165–85.

2. La Petite Musique de Verlaine (Paris: SEDES [for the Société des Etudes Romantiques], 1982).

3. For more sophisticated studies of Verlaine's “musicality,” however, see Nicolas Ruwet, “Blancs, rimes, et raisons: Typographie, rimes, et structures linguistiques en poésie,” Revue d'esthéthique, 1/2 (1979), 397–426; and Eléonore M. Zimmermann, Magies de Verlaine: Etude de l’évolution poétique de Paul Verlaine (Paris: Corti, 1967), pp. 11, 20–27, 65, and passim. A detailed data base for such studies has recently been provided by Frédéric S. Eigeldinger, Dominique Godet, and Eric Wehrli, comps., Table de concordances rythmique et syntaxique des Poésies de Paul Verlaine: “Poèmes saturniens,” “Fêtes galantes,” “La Bonne Chanson,” “Romances sans paroles” (Geneva: Slatkine, 1985).

4. Henri Peyre, “Poets against Music in the Age of Symbolism,” in Marcel Tetel, ed., Symbolism and Modern Literature: Studies in Honor of Wallace Fowlie (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1978), pp. 179–92.

5. See Antoine Adam, The Art of Paul Verlaine (New York: New York University Press, 1963), pp. 63, 70, and 84.

6. See Jacques-Henry Bornecque, Lumières sur les “Fêtes galantes” de Paul Verlaine (Paris: Nizet, 1959), pp. 50–59, 76–89, 97–103, and 109–10. This quotation appears on p. 50.

7. See Paul Verlaine, Oeuvres en prose complètes, ed. Jacques Borel (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), pp. 77–79, 82, 57, 154–61, and 599–612.

8. See the classic theoretical statement by Calvin S. Brown, Music and Literature: A Comparison of the Arts (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1948).

9. Paul Verlaine, “Critique des Poèmes Saturniens,” Revue d'Aujourd'hui, 3 (March 15, 1890), reproduced in Verlaine, Oeuvres poétiques complètes, ed. Yves Le Dantec and Jacques Borel (Paris: Gallimard, 1962). Unless I have indicated otherwise, all subsequent references to Verlaine are from this edition and appear in the text, identified by page number only.

10. In his informative edition of Verlaine's Poésies (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1980), Jacques Décaudin refers to “Fadaises” as “an anticipatory ‘Fête galante,’ which capsizes in anguish and the death wish, a poem of loneliness and sadness” (p. 10).

11. Décaudin, Poésies, sees the title of the first poem in the collection, “Votre âme est un paysage choisi,” as a clue to the meaning of the entire collection: these are “paysages intérieurs” (p. 19). This observation is congruent with John Porter Houston's identification of the “mood poem” as Verlaine's greatest original creation (see below, n. 24). For a sprightly interpretation of the two poems titled “Nevermore” in the Poèmes saturniens, see Jefferson Humphries, Metamorphoses of the Raven: Literary Overdeterminedness in France and in the South since Poe (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), pp. 60–68. Humphries reads the second poem as “an allegory of its own inadequacy” (p. 67).

12. See Pierre Martino, Verlaine (Paris: Boivin, 1951), pp. 71–72 and note.

13. J. S. Chaussivert, “Fête et jeu verlainiens: Romances sans paroles. Sagesse,” in Petite Musique de Verlaine, pp. 49–60.

14. Chaussivert, “Fête et jeu verlainiens,” p. 49.

15. For a fuller discussion see Laurence M. Porter, “Text versus Music in the French Art Song: Debussy, Fauré, and Verlaine's ‘Mandoline,’” Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 12 (Fall 1983-Winter 1984), 138–44; and the companion article (with musical examples) “Meaning in Music: Debussy and Fauré as Interpreters of Verlaine,” Topic: A Journal of the Liberal Arts, 35 (1981), 26–37.

16. See Georges Zayed, “La Tradition des ‘Fêtes galantes’ et le lyrisme verlainien,” Aquila: Chestnut Hill Studies in Modern Languages and Literatures, 1 (1968), 213–46. This rich, sensitive article, which deserves to be much better known, shows how common the term “fêtes galantes” and its associated commedia dell'arte figures were before and during Verlaine's time. Zayed celebrates this collection as Verlaine's masterpiece and mentions as sources Victor Hugo's “Fête chez Thérèse” (often mentioned by others), “Passé,” and “Lettre”; Théophile Gautier's Poésies diverses of 1835; and Théodore de Banville's “Fête galante” in Les Cariatides. But none of the twenty-seven examples cited from precursors contains any direct discourse, which so typifies the imagination of Verlaine. Compare, e.g., Gautier's “Le Banc de Pierre” in the first Parnasse contemporain of 1866 with the “Colloque sentimental”:

    Ce qu'ils disaient la maîtresse l'oublie;
    Mais l'amoureux, coeur blessé, s'en souvient,
    Et dans le bois, avec mélancolie,
                                  Au rendez-vous, tout seul, revient.

    (What they used to say, the mistress forgets; / But the man who loved her, with a wounded heart, remembers; / And all alone, with melancholy mein, to the grove / Where they used to meet, returns.)

    Zayed, like Bornecque, stresses the presence of the memory of Elisa Moncomble: see pp. 237–45.

17. See Philip Wheelwright, Metaphor and Reality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), pp. 78–86.

18. For sources, see Bornecque, Lumières sur les “Fêtes galantes,” pp. 179–83.

19. Claude Cuénot, who also considers the Fêtes galantes to be Verlaine's masterpiece, comments on their conclusion:

    “The frail decor of these painted canvasses is torn apart at the end, no doubt deliberately, by the two pieces called ‘En sourdine’ [the renunciation of love in the ecstasy of the void] and ‘Colloque sentimental’ [the excruciating memory of a dead love]”: see “Un type de création littéraire: Paul Verlaine,”

    Studi francesi, 35 (May-August 1968), 229–45; the quotation appears on p. 235.

    In an interesting overview of Verlaine, R. A. York concludes:

    “Above all, Verlaine subverts the idea of a coherent and fully intended speech act. Hence his love of inapt register, of excessive pedantry, of implausible personae, of pastiche and irony. Hence his liking for disguised speech acts, most often for utterances which purport to be explanations or justifications of some previous remark, but which prove to be no more than rephrasings of it”

    (The Poem as Utterance [London and New York: Methuen, 1986], p. 77; see also pp. 61–78).

20. J. S. Chaussivert, however, eloquently defends its artistic merits: see L'Art verlainien dans “La Bonne Chanson” (Paris: Nizet, 1973), pp. 7–8, 31–33, 115, and passim. Chaussivert provides a helpful diagram of the collection's structure (p. 31).

21. The roman numerals that appear in citations from La Bonne Chanson refer to the numbers of individual poems.

22. In Verlaine, Oeuvres poétiques complètes, p. 136 (editor's note).

23. One would expect the contrary, owing to the constant presence of Verlaine's lover Rimbaud—whose own poetry is preeminently satiric—during the composition of Romances sans paroles. But cf. Charles Chadwick, Verlaine (London: Athlone, 1973), p. 51, who claims that Rimbaud's influence on Verlaine's poetry was negligible. More likely, sexual satisfaction made Verlaine lose his edge.

24. John Porter Houston, French Symbolism and the Modernist Movement: A Study of Poetic Structures (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), pp. 19–40, esp. 22–23; reviewed by Laurence M. Porter in Comparative Literature, 36 (Winter 1984), 94–96.

25. The roman numeral iv refers to the number of this poem in the series of “Ariettes oubliées.”

26. See Carol de Dobay Rifelj, Word and Figure: The Language of Nineteenth-Century French Poetry (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987), esp. pp. 120–25.

27. Robert Mitchell, “Mint, Thyme, and Tobacco: New Possibilities and Affinities in the Artes poeticae of Verlaine and Mallarmé,” French Forum, 2 (September 1977), 238–54. On “Images d'un sou,” also from the “Jadis” section of Jadis et naguère, cf. Zimmermann, Magies de Verlaine, p. 133.

28. Mitchell, “Mint, Thyme, and Tobacco,” pp. 240–43.

29. See Michel Grimaud, “Questions de méthode: Verlaine et la critique structuraliste,” Oeuvres et Critiques, 9 (1984), 125–26, for detailed comments.

30. Verlaine, Oeuvres poétiques complètes, p. 171 (editor's introduction).

31. See once again Peyre, “Poets against Music,” cited in n. 4 above.

32. See Jeanne Bem, “Verlaine, poète lunaire: Mythe et langage poétique,” Stanford French Review, 4 (Winter 1980), 379–94. For a recent discussion of the “Isakower phenomenon” (adult hallucinations of the mother's breast) and the related “dream screen” and “blank dream” experiences, plus a valuable bibliography, see Philip M. Brombert, “On the Occurrence of the Isakower Phenomenon in a Schizoid Disorder,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 20 (1984), 600–601 and 623–24; see also chap. 2, n. 40.