L'espoir luit comme un brin de paille dans l’étable,
Que crains-tu de la guêpe ivre de son vol fou?
Vois, le soleil toujours poudroie à quelque trou.
Que ne t'endormais-tu, le coude sur la table?
Pauvre âme pâle, au moins cette eau du puits glacé,
Bois-la. Puis dors après. Allons, tu vois, je reste.
Et je dorloterai les rêves de ta sieste,
Et tu chantonneras comme un enfant bercé.
Midi sonne. De grâce, éloignez-vous madame.
Il dort. C'est étonnant comme les pas de femme
Résonnent au cerveau des pauvres malheureux.
Midi sonne. J'ai fait arroser dans la chambre.
Va, dors! L'espoir luit comme un caillou dans un creux.
Ah! quand refleuriront les roses de septembre!

This touching, humming, summery poem from Verlaine's Sagesse has been familiar to many of us since adolescence, when we came upon it in textbook anthologies or whatever. Does it really need another elucidation? Probably not, but “on a touché au vers”, in modern criticism like that of Michel Serres, who has offered a Lucretian reading of it in his usual genetic way. Well, one may agree with fusions of science and art in such approaches generally, but there is a terribly important question of emphasis, dosage, tone. I think Serres, who is usually stylish and interesting, hit extremely wide of the mark in this instance, and his misreading points to a great deal that is wrong in contemporary criticism.

The poem does imply a descent toward the origins of life in nature, womb, infancy, but the accent is not on numbers, pace Serres, or even the multiple, or his familiar “bruit de fond” (and “acousphènes”) and the like, which are rather too cold for art and certainly Verlaine's.

I'd say the poem steeps “baptismally” in utter humility and humble rural beginnings, with Christian undertones—at least subtle ones—befitting Verlaine's complete abjection and spiritual rebirth, after his prison experience, expressed notably in Sagesse. We recall the simplicity and childlike faith of “Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit” from the same collection, or “Je suis venu, calme orphelin”.

The nativity scene in a stable—sermo humilis—is to the point of the straw shining in the farm-shed here. The constant theme of Verlaine's yearning for the peace, the lost paradise, in the mother or her presence—he had a remarkably intense relation with her, we know—has an important clear overtone in Mary, the fountain of feminine grace which pervades, nostalgically, the sonnet, and has to do, for example, with the drinking of water from the well. The roses at the end of the poem are, as in traditional symbolism, Hers, “full of grace”. The whole of Sagesse is permeated with Her presence: “Je ne veux plus aimer que ma mère Marie”. (II,II).

Midi sonne, in a Catholic country, is well understood—this end-of-cycle moment of repose, of reconciliation, of Being—from a comparison with Claudel's finest poem, “La Vierge à midi”, at which calming instant he weeps with her “grand pardon”, her generous maternal gift of self: “Parce que vous êtes là pour toujours, simplement parce que vous existez …”

The sheer Being is the whole point as in Verlaine's “Le ciel est, pardessus le toit” (the comma brings out the isolated purity of the est); “Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, la vie est là” …

Claudel, of course, owed an immense debt to this Verlaine, and said so. Don't we all.

Hope which shines in the lowly stable like a wisp of straw, then, is the miracle of faith (in life, in love, in Being going on, which is woman's essence to a needy male) rising out of despair, de profundis, and out of the most ordinary everyday experience or wild, random (“fou”) nature in the raw countryside. True life “flows from the source”, like mother milk or a glass of water from the well.

Serres sees the wasp buzzing erratically as an originary chaos from which number will arise, then the subtler rhythms of art, in a developmental scheme. But true art like Verlaine's doesn't follow linear patterns of progression: it tends to be circular, like the whole and fluid patterns of the metaphoric dimension, the visionary and imaginative realm, altogether. The tone is primarily that of static “epiphany” in the Joycean sense: the divinely maternal, the sensuous, earthy, childish, primitive, rural, natural. As in Plato's Symposium or D. H. Lawrence's view of feminine temperament, there is little split between high and low, past and future …¹

So Serres' emphasis on number in connection with Midi sonne—the advent of the alexandrine with the stroke of twelve—misses the simple peaceful tone, maternal in that sense, reconciliatory with Her and the world in this still end-of-cycle moment (as in Valéry's “midi le juste” in the contemplative air of Le Cimetière Marin).

.....

Serres raises a major question when he sees number as being prior to language. This is an entirely arbitrary and one-sided scientific view. I see no reason to settle for anything other than an undecidable here, as Mallarmé did with his polar pair of music and letters, stemming from a vibrant mystery including them both. I see no grounds for accepting original “structures” (I do not quite like the word) which are more analytic than synthetic, more numerical than pre-linguistic.

I quote from “The Structure of Ancient Wisdom” by Harvey Wheeler (J. Social Biol. Struct. 1982 5, 223–32):

“Although Giorgio de Santillana thinks that numbers came before letters (de Santillana, 1961) and Mary Danielli holds that mandalic ideograms predated both (Danielli, 1974), it is generally assumed that naming and counting have almost equally remote symbolic and notational origins. The earliest Sumerian texts show that skills in these two idioms were taught in roughly coordinated sequences …”

Wheeler gives many examples, including one from Leibnitz. But it is really a matter of common sense to throw up one's hands in a sort of “fifty-fifty” gesture in all such problematic cases (heredity-environment, freedom-necessity, order-disorder …) where a dialectic goes off into infinite regress, chicken-and-egg, to deep mystery rather than any specific historical documentation. Since Mallarmé and his “fiction” epistemology, we tend to keep such matters open, problematic …

.....

Serres is likewise unconvincing on the notion of a progression from an even to an uneven rhythm. He sees a neat scheme of evolution from the regular bercement to the last line which features a sept and a rose pattern which he claims to be pentagonal and an eleven-syllable line following an “Ah”. This is far-fetched and forced. A bercement is regular but it is not at all monotonous; it is, rather, incantational, magic, as artistic as anything—one thinks of wonderful “Berceuses” like Stravinsky's in The Firebird. On the other hand, advanced music is very regular, as well as not. No, there is a circle, or spiral, here, not a scientist's line of progress.

So Mallarmé in his Tombeau d'Anatole saw a maternal bercement as the matrix of his poet's rhythm; before him, Baudelaire, in La Chevelure, wrote:

Et mon esprit subtil que le roulis caresse
Saura vous retrouver, ô féconde paresse,
Infinis bercements du loisir embaumé!

There is here, as in the Mallarmé text (or his two Eventail poems), a notion not so much of poetic evolution, but rather a paradoxical, ironic (oxymoronic) play, interchangeably between up and down, fecundity and laziness, etc.

Similarly, the “pas de femme” of our sonnet have nothing to do with an advance from rhythm to music; they are a pure lovely phenomenon in themselves, as Mallarmé knew in Le Nénuphar Blanc: “Subtil secret des pieds qui vont, viennent …”, with a fiercely tender erotic undertone, as in Valéry's canny Les Pas, accompanying a basically maternal tone: mother-sounds bringing comfort, or retreating in the night … The whole poem, as Henri Peyre comments, seems to be addressed by a mother to a sick child. But the poet's own viewpoint is intermingled: it is out of his own suffering self that this pietà is imagined. So there is a good deal of narcissistic feeling, self-accusation and self-pity, as so often in “le pauvre Lélian”. The epiphany of a sacrificial child is really his. To whom—a third party?—is addressed “De grâce, éloignez-vous, madame?” That is unimportant: it gives the familiar feeling of a caring woman tip-toeing or walking out from a room as a child falls asleep …

A similar unsureness is in the last line: who says it? Small matter: the feeling is of the elegiac poet, as so often in Verlaine, yearning for a lost innocence in his sinning older years, which is the tone of “septembre” in part, the autumn of life as of the year. And the rose, pace Serres, is not a “pentagon”, really, or not here; it is the symbol of woman and specifically the Virgin Mother. It ends the poem on another round note, that of plenitude and reconciled “womb” of Eden, (or beyond) as in Dante; the roundness of the o on the page has to do with this, as in Baudelaire's Le Balcon, addressed to a maternal muse; it begins with O and ends with a plunging into the globality of sky and ocean. Similarly, La Chevelure, likewise addressed, begins “O boucles” and ends with images of “l'azur du ciel immense et rond”, “océan”, and “oasis”. Note all the o's as in Verlaine's roses.

Much of what Serres said can be included in an adequate commentary;² but the tone could hardly have been farther from the intimate musicality and intuitive art of Verlaine, which includes all sorts of drowzy echoes (dort-dorloter, arrose-rose, résonnent-sonne) and down-home visual effects, and altogether a great deal that is longingly personal, sentimental in a high sense, intensely human, desperately nostalgic, sinning and singing, freshly childlike under the prison dirt.

A more intimate look at details tells us:

In line 1: the image suggests a reminiscence of a nativity scene, pertinent to a Christian rebirth, and it is also what any sensitive child might see that is out of the way for his wayward glance alone. Little, he typically bends down to the little gleam in the hollow, below. Here, the light is coming down, like a blessing, through a chink in the stable wall, singles out an insignificant blade of straw, seen by “me”, who am maybe if not a favorite son, at least a comforted one. Later, in Rimbaud, the light, with the impartiality it has in Vermeer (e.g., on a loaf of bread), touches a pissotière gnat with glory; and “la lumière donne sur une merde”.

2: Verlaine instills in us pity for the vulnerable fearing “child”, himself, together with the balm of the soothingly maternal voice, which protects from all outside the circle of her love.

3: her on-going presence, like the river of Proust's mother's voice reading to him and following him far through life, is in “toujours” as it is in Baudelaire's “Longtemps! toujours” (La Chevelure) and Claudel's “là pour toujours”. Her affection is mingled with the sun's, a tender “Father's”.

4: the injunction to sleep extends the soothing note out from a hypothetical bed into the surroundings; the whole peasant scene is safe, at peace with the world, having said grace perhaps at table or just at home in the simple rural scene. One easily sees Verlaine in that posture, perhaps because of Le Coin de Table where he appears with Rimbaud leaning on his elbow. It is crisp, concrete, alive as a Van Gogh portrait, that touch.

5: The modesty of the glass of water “au moins” adds to our affectionate concern; perhaps the child is sick, can take no more than that. He is pale and poor, a near-ghostly “âme”.

6–8: dors-dorloter is incantatory, right for cradling a “child”. And the summery humming of chantonner is right for this near-nothing simplicity, almost as natural as the wasp's.

9: Midi is well coupled with grâce, suggestively, at this calming point at mid-day, a good time to fall asleep, at middling home in the cosmos. Catholic bells then take us to the core, lull, promise. The incantatory appeasement is partly in sonne-étonnant-résonnent-sonne (as it was in autumn-monotone of another langorous poem).

10: In dort, the light of summer (or) filters into sleep; the pas de femme were discussed in our earlier pages. It is astonishing what they do to penetrate to an early core and reassure. Baudelaire's Le Beau Navire lingers over the effect on our instincts of a woman's walking.

11: cerveau: just as the “tête sonore” of Green resonates with kisses, this modern and understatedly concrete “brain” communicates very directly with the abdomen of plunging sensation. Indeed, like the “tête sonore (qui roule)”, it is a loose-hanging, in this sense, as the soft head of a young elephant in Le Beau Navire. And it is sonorous as the image in Le Bateau Ivre: “plus sourd que les cerveaux d'enfants”.

12: arroser continues the tone of solicitude, summer refreshment, and chimes with roses; sonne seems “sunny” and “filial” appropriately, to us English or German readers and perhaps to this bummer-around-England and visitor to Germany.

13: the caillou has the comforting gleam and something of the round sufficiency of the “golden ball” of childhood myth (The Frog Prince), which anthropologists like Robert Bly connect with the radiant integrity of our quondam innocence. The creux may suggest a place of rebirth and at-homeness, the womb, whence the reintegrated self may emerge clean and fresh. Such was the “trou chaud qui souffle la vie” in Rimbaud's poem about desperate children, Les Effarés.

14: Baudelaire's two masterpieces chanting the maternal calm in Jeanne Duval's hair or “blotti dans tes genoux”—La Chevelure and Le Balcon—both end with a question mark. So does Verlaine's sonnet. The greater the bliss, the more anguishing the thought of losing it, and it is partly faced in this way, offering a more open and vibrant ending, consonant with the undecidables of modern art (Rimbaud's defeated closes are a more radical expression of this mood). Moreover, the septembre and the absence of the roses further the elegiac, wistfully hopeful note, very typical of Verlaine.

And yet, the plenitude of what is hoped-for is in the rondeur of the roses, as it is in Dante and, as in him, la boucle est bouclée, at least suggestively: the hope of the beginning (“L'espoir”) is restated. What progress is there then? We are obviously in an ultimately circular poetic universe, where Eden is lost and can be regained only at severe cost: winter, it is hinted, lies not far off ahead. We are not sure at all. Yet the promise is there, or far-out there, at least. Death seems less threatening in childlike faiths of this sort:

Qui cherche, parcourant le solitaire bond
Tantôt extérieur de notre vagabond—
Verlaine? Il est caché parmi l'herbe, Verlaine
A ne surprendre que naïvement d'accord
La lèvre sans y boire ou tarir son haleine
Un peu profond ruisseau calomnié la mort.

(Mallarmé)

Notes

1. The quiet tetrapolar pattern of this epiphany—like a croisée—is at play here as in typical Symbolist poetry (e.g. Mallarmé's Les Fenêtres).

2. For example, one can see the floating between odd and even as in “Midi sonne”, thanks to the uncertainty of the mute e (Verlaine's Art Poétique itself plumps for the flottement: “l'indécis au précis se joint”); but one can find these aesthetic generalities at work in any good poem. That is not the gravamen of the sonnet at all.