[Here, Stephan describes some decadent elements and themes in Verlaine 's works.]

For a quarter of a century now it is Fêtes galantes and Romances sans paroles that Verlaine critics have esteemed the most highly. Phenomenological critics have examined the psychological tensions of Fêtes galantes, where Verlaine seeks to compensate for the amorous frustrations of real life by projecting an imaginary world of commedia dell' arte figures enjoying an endless orgy of desire and gallantry unmarred by sexual achievement. Romances sans paroles is seen as a universe shimmering with sensations which hover for ever just this side of extinction. In his rendering of their fadeur, in his translations of these sensations into musical-verbal equivalents, Verlaine has developed a brilliant mode of communication with his reader, for these equivalences sensorielles which he holds at arm's length with c'est and similar impersonal constructions are no more than arm's length from the reader, either, so that our perception and Verlaine's meet at a midpoint of common communication. Dream and sensation—and music is the sensation par excellence for communicating the data of other senses—are the chief elements of this highly original formula.

In a happy fusion of biographical and textual criticism, this interpretation of Verlaine's creative endeavour posits the role played by his emotional imbalance. The dream région où vivre of his poetry depends on the poet's biographical need to sublimate the dissatisfactions of his real existence. When Verlaine did achieve a satisfactory, if temporary, resolution of his emotional problems, as during his engagement to Mathilde Mauté and after his conversion to Catholicism, the effect on his inspiration was unhappy, Hence the critics' denigration of La Bonne Chanson and of parts of Sagesse, which they call prosaic, banal, unimaginative, and given to conceptualism and allegory, for Verlaine's dream poétique does not permit his singing a real and present attainment. His own contemporaries placed a high value on the sincerity, and emotional intensity of Sagesse, and intellectual currents such as the Catholic aspect of decadence and the idealism of symbolism further nourished their high estimate of this work. Modern criticism, on the other hand, has condemned Verlaine's verse beginning with Sagesse—after his mystic experience of 1874 would be a more accurate expression—so that for some readers the term la conversion de Sagesse has become almost a pun, denoting both a religious experience and a changed poetic theory.

It is true that, while Verlaine always wrote some bad poetry, he wrote more and more of it after his prison term at Mons in 1873-75, and that as he used up his supply of unpublished early verse in Jadis et naguère, Amour, and Parallèlement his collections of verse become increasingly dreary. The same is true of his contributions to periodicals during the decade of the 1880's: except for an occasional early poem, titles like "Un Crucifix", "Saint Benoît Joseph Labre", or "La Mort de S. M. le Roi Louis II de Bavière" reveal all too eloquently the limited scope of his poetic imagination. It was unusual for him to collect his poems of the previous two or three years and to publish them immediately, as was the case with Fêtes galantes, La Bonne Chanson, and Romances sans paroles. On the contrary, his normal practice was to collect poems composed over a number of years into variegated and uneven volumes like Poèmes saturniens, Sagesse, or Jadis et naguère. Hence the critic must select poems for discussion according to their date of composition, their similarity to other poems, or some other criterion whicsuits his purpose. To single out those poems composed between 1880 and 1890 which reveal decadent characteristics, therefore, is no more presumptuous than to discuss any other aspect of Verlaine's work. Jacques Borel's studies of Jadis et naguère and Parallèlement for the latest editions of Verlaine's complete works [Oeuvres complètes, 1960, and Oeuvre poétiques complètes, 1962] draw attention to hitherto unnoticed aspects of his verse of this period. The subtlety with which Borei analyses the 'ambiguity' of Verlaine's simultaneous rejection, in 1884-87, both of his earlier work based on a poétique of dream and of sensation, and of the new-found religious orthodoxy which causes him to reject it, suggests that Verlaine's poetry after Sagesse is ripe for reappraisal. When Borei calls Parallèlement, rather than some earlier collection, 'le dernier sans doute des recueils intèressants', it has the effect of prolonging Verlaine's creative period for another fifteen years, thus proposing for our examination poems which perhaps deserve more attention than they have received.

On 26 May, 14 July and 18 August 1883, then, Verlaine published eight poems in Le Chat Noir under the collective title 'Vers à la manière de plusieurs' ('Le Poète et la muse' was added to this series in Jadis et naguère only in 1884). While most of these were composed in the 1860's or early 1870's, 'L'Aube à l'envers', and perhaps 'Madrigal' and 'Langueur' too, were composed after his return to Paris in 1882, and in any case the first two illustrate his decadent manner. In spite of the importance traditionally attached to it, 'Langueur' is not particularly representative of Verlaine's decadent manner, and possibly, as Eléanor Zimmermann argues [in Magies de Verlaine, 1967], it was composed in 1872-74, with the 'Ariettes oubliées', rather than after his contacts with the decadent milieu. Still, the poem is useful as an indication of the direction his poetry would take.

While other poets of the period chose the homosexual as the epitome of classical decadence, for Verlaine decadence was aestheticism, represented by the poet who composes acrostic verses as victorious armies of barbarians march past, just as Nero is said to have fiddled while Rome burned. It is appropriate that Verlaine, who sought to fix in verse the nuances of langueur, should choose lethargy and superficiality as attributes of decadence: 'O n'y pouvoir, étant si faible aux voeux si lents, / O n'y vouloir fleurir un peu cette existence!' The tone of languid, careless aestheticism recalls Nero's 'Qualis artifex pereo', The 'style d'or' (today we speak rather of 'Silver Age' Latin) is rendered by the excessive anaphora of the last eight lines and by the use of diminutives: L'Ame seulette, fleurir un peu, mourir un peu. Diminutive endings were a feature of vulgar Latin, as is evident from the number of modern Romance words derived from them rather than from standard classical forms (e.g. oreille auricula auris). Could Verlaine have had in mind the emperor Hadirna's poem to his departing soul, the charm of which is due largely to its use of affectionate diminutive endings?

'L'Aube à l'envers', a landscape of the modern industrial city, and 'Madrigal' are examples of Verlaine's new manner, a poétique based on style and diction. 'Madrigal' also illustrates the elaborate imagery and a somewhat obscure allusiveness which comprise this manner:

Tu m'as, ces pâles jours d'automne blanc, fait mal
A cause de tes yeux où fleurit l'animal,
Et tu me rongerais, en princesse Souris,
Du bout fin de la quenotte de ton souris,
Fille auguste qui fis flamboyer ma douleur
Avec l'huile rancie encor de ton vieux pleur!
Oui, folle, je mourrai de ton regard damné.
Mais va (veux-tu?) l'étang là dort insoupçonné,
Dont du lys, nef qu'il eût fallu qu'on acclamât,
L'eau morte a bu le vent qui coule du grand mât.
T'y jeter, palme! et d'avance mon repentir
Parle si bas qu'il faut être sourd pour l'ouïr.

The pond is a typically decadent setting. In lines 1-3 and 9-10 closely connected grammatical elements are separated by interrupting phrases. The vocabulary is elaborately chosen: in line 1 pâle (before its noun!) and blanc repeat each other; quenotte and souris in line 4 are colloquial terms, nef in line 9 and ouïr in line 13 are archaic. The poem concludes with an antithetical pointe, that one must be deaf to hear his softly uttered repentance. Esoteric vocabulary terms are drawn not from a single class but from several lexical categories, so that comparatively few such items suffice to give an impression of pronounced strangeness. Souris (smile) puns with souris (mouse), and their use as rhyme words draws attention to the pun. Of the numerous alliterations and assonances we notice line 5, with its 'Fille auguste qui fis flamboyer . . . ' and 'l'huile rancie' in the following line; in line 9 the combination of [k] and [y] render the line cacophonous and even hard to pronounce. In the phrase 'Mais va (veuxtu!)' veux-tu is a colloquial expression for reinforcing an imperative; the three vowels [a], [oe], and [y] form a progressive closing and tightening of the mouth; this tensioning of the vocal organs is set off and contrasted by the open, relaxed, and harmonious vocables immediately following: l'etang là dort. (Such cacophony, caused by the repetition of plosives and of tense, shrill vowels like [oe] [y], [i], and often followed by more relaxed and musical vocables, is a distinctive feature of Verlaine's decadent manner.) Lines 9 and 10 are very confused grammatically: the proper sequence is 'l'étang, dont l'eau a bu le vent qui coule du grand mât du lys, (lequel est une] nef qu'il eût fallu qu'on acclamât'. This involved and inverted grammatical construction, and the accumulation of de's (lines 4 and 9-10), are but two of several factors which in combination create an impression of obscurity. Here, as in other poems addressed to his exwife, Mathilde Mauté, or to Arthur Rimbaud, Verlaine does not explain the biographical frame of reference, whence an air of mystery and of private association which are troubling to the uninitiated reader. In the poem at hand, the girl to whom the poem is addressed is compared, to a mouse, and this figure is completed by the animality of her look and by the gnawing teeth of her smile; it is not necessary to know that the girl is Mathilde Mauté, nor the circumstances of their separation. The next figure, however, is hermetic: a lily floating on a pond is compared to a ship, and the water in the pond has drunk the wind flowing from the mainmast. While appreciating the tone of dark foreboding which this figure adds to the poem, still we should like to see it clarified. While Verlaine is never hermetically obscure, nevertheless confused grammar, allusiveness, and complex imagery do produce a murkiness of expression which is unusual in his verse and hence distinctive of his decadent manner.

About two years later, in May and June of 1885, Lutece published a group of six poems, collected subsequently in Parallèlement under the heading 'Lunes', which also illustrate Verlaine's decadent manner:

Je veux, pour te tuer, ô temps qui me dévastes,
Remonter jusqu'aux jours bleuis des amours chastes
Et bercer ma luxure et ma honte au bruit doux
De baisers sur Sa main et non plus dans Leurs cous.
Le Tibère effrayant que je suis à cette heure,
Quoi que j'en aie, et que je rie ou que je pleure,
Qu'il dorme! pour rêver, loin d'un cruel bonheur,
Aux tendrons pâlots dont on ménageait l'honneur
Es-fêtes, dans, après le bal sur la pelouse,
Le clair de lune quand le clocher sonnait douze.
['Lunes, l']

Again, in lines 1 and 6 we have a harsh alliteration of plosives, the mysterious allusions to Sa main (Mathilde's) and Leurs cous (those of the street-walkers with whom he was living), a classical allusion to Caesar Tiberius in line 5, and, in the last four lines, a combination of interrupted word-order and of choice vocabulary (tendrons, ès, pâlots). We recognise in these poems traits which we have come to regard as typically decadent: exaggerated alliterations and assonances, all manner of word plays, impressionist style, conversational mannerisms of language, classical allusions, the presence of a pond and of flowers, and, in 'L'Aube à l'envers', a modern, urban landscape. 'Lunes I, III, IV, and V hint at the depravity of some decadent poetry.

The figures of the lily compared to a ship in 'Madrigal' and of Tiberius, to whom the poet compares himself in 'Lunes, 1', are examples of the elaborate, sometimes hermetic imagery which distinguishes Verlaine's manner in Parallèlement, but which is not otherwise typical of decadent verse. In 'Fernand Langlois' the poet's heart is compared to a lock which Langlois patiently opens, in 'Autre Explication' there are the tropes of constancy (compared to a prostitute), the cuttlefish, and the hour. Curiously, it is in two of the Poèmes saturniens, 'Crépuscule du soir mystique' and 'Le Rossignol', with their decadent ponds, flowers, and birds, that we find a previous instance of such extended imagery. In 'Le Rossignol' the poet's memories are likened to a flock of birds swooping down on the tree of his heart, mirrored in the water of Regret; and the nightingale is the poet's first love. On the other hand, his practice in these poems of capitalising words taken in a symbolic sense is a common one in decadent verse; in Les Déliquescences 'Pour avoir péché' and 'Platonisme' parody this Baudelairean device.

As with decadent verse in general, an intensification of his usual traits distinguishes 'Madrigal' and 'Lunes' from Verlaine's earlier verse and makes them appear as self-parodies. Recent critics who have drawn attention to this parodying quality in Verlaine's poetry of the 1880's suggest that the very intention of the 'Lunes' cycle, and of 'A la manière de Paul Verlaine' in particular, is to reject his earlier manner by making fun of it. . . . Verlaine's relationship with the decadents was an ambivalent one, since he did not take the decadence very seriously, and it is therefore always possible that the target of his caricatural poems was decadence itself as well as his own earlier manner. If so, in the perverse logic of decadence, which was fascinated by what it loathed, such poems are all the more decadent!

It is in any case certain that Verlaine consciously adopted decadent mannerisms during the 1880's. His use of Latinisms and classical allusions corroborates this point. Although his unpublished verse included three schoolboy translations from Latin, which he apparently valued enough to save, in the 110 poems of Poèmes saturniens, Fêtes galantes, La Bonne Chanson, and Romances sans paroles there are only five containing Latin phrases or allusions to classical antiquity—and two of these reflect merely his Parnassian affectation of Greek mythology. In contrast, of the 128 poems of Jadis et naguère, Amour, and Parallèlement, we count twelve—almost one in ten—containing Latin expressions or classical allusions; this proportion would undoubtedly be still greater if we excluded poems composed before 1880.

Collating two versions of the same poem provides further corroboration. 'L'Aube à l'envers' is clearly contemporary with Verlaine's residence at Boulogne-sur-Seine in the summer of 1882, while the second version, 'Nouvelles Variations sur le Point-du-Jour', published in Lutèce at the very end of 1885, must be an elaboration of the first poem.

L'Aube à l'envers
Le Point-du-Jour avec Paris au large,
Des chants, des tirs, les femmes qu'on 'rêvait',

La Seine claire et la foule qui fait
Sur ce poème un vague essai de charge.

On danse aussi, car tout est dans la marge
Que fait le fleuve à ce livre parfait,
Et si parfois l'on tuait ou buvait,
Le fleuve est sourd et le vin est litharge.

Le Point-du-Jour, mais c'est l'Ouest de Paris!
Un calembour a béni son histoire
D'affreux baisers et d'immondes paris.

En attendant que sonne l'heure noire
Où les bateaux-omnibus et les trains
Ne partent plus, tirez, tirs, fringuez, reins!

Already the poem is distinctly decadent on account of its naturalist subject, with commuter steamers and trains the play on Point-du-Jour, which means 'daybreak' as well as designating a landmark to the west of Paris, and the artificiality implicit in the book trope of line 6. It is precisely these elements that Verlaine expands in the later version:

Nouvelles Variations sur le Point-du-Jour
Le Point du Jour, le point blanc de Paris,
Le seul point blanc, grâce à tant de bâtisse
Et neuve et laide et que je t'en ratisse,
Le Point du Jour, aurore des paris!

Le bonneteau fleurit 'dessur' la berge,
La bonne tôt s'y déprave, tant pis
Pour elle et tant mieux pour le birbe gris
Qui lui du moins la croit encore vierge.

Il a raison, le vieux, car voyez donc
Comme est joli toujours le paysage:
Paris au loin, triste et gai, fol et sage,
Et le Trocadéro, ce cas, au fond,

Puis la verdure et le ciel et les types
Et la rivière obscène et molle, avec
Des gens trop beaux, leur cigare à leur bec:
Epatants ces metteurs-au-vent de tripes!

The basic play on words now fills the first stanza with variants: Le Point du Jour, le point blanc, Le seul point blanc; Point du Jour, aurore des paris; Paris-paris. These are followed up with homonyms: tant de bâtisse, t'en ratisse; Le bonneteau, La bonne tôt. Popular locutions abound, such as je t'en ratisse, à leur bec, dessur, birbe, Il a raison, le vieux, les types, and in general the diction is rhetorically self-conscious. In lieu of the book and margin figure, Verlaine has introduced the old man who seduces the young maid (in the sense of bonne, since he spells out that she is no longer vierge!), a decadent motif. La Seine claire has been replaced by La riviere obscene et molle, in which the adjectives somehow make us think of putrefaction and of flabby degeneracy. While even the 1882 version could be contrasted with Verlaine's landscapes in Poèmes saturniens or Romances sans paroles, the revisions of the 1885 version have emphasised those qualities which Les Déliquescences and minor poems like them have led us to call decadent. . . .

The most general conclusion to be made concerning Verlaine's decadent style is simply that it incorporates pell-mell all manner of previous tendencies: exotic and esoteric vocabulary, colloquialisms, impressionist style, original syntax, As critics from Gautier to A. E. Carter have pointed out, concern with language and with new forms of diction is an essential element of decadence. The progressive exaggeration of his own personalised diction over a twenty-year period, perhaps even for the sake of self-parody, parallels the development of decadent poetry. In its final form Verlaine's asyndetic style reduces the sentence to a series of word groups, the alliterations of plosives have a staccato effect which literally detaches some syllables from their context, interjections are set off by dashes or parentheses, and strong caesuras destroy the entity of the poetic line. Thus the whole of a poem, stanza, or line disintegrates into isolated, autonomous fragments, and this fragmentations of the whole into its parts is typical of decadent style. The conversational tendency in Verlaine's style, and the development of the friendship theme, with its apostrophes to Mathilde and Rimbaud, its frequent poems addressed to personal acquaintances (nine in Amour alone; consider also the very title of Dédicaces), with a poem such as 'A Fernand Langlois' (especially stanzas 6-8), which is structured on a conversational situation, recall the language of the naturalist novel, similar poems we saw in early issues of La Nouvelle Rive Gauche and Le Chat Noir, some poems of Jean Lorrain, and, of course, Corbière and Laforgue. Verlaine, to be sure, lacks the latter's pungent, humorous irony, and in no case do we see their influence on his verse. On the other hand, Claude Cuénot seems to have missed the point when he condemns the vulgar, slangy quality of Verlaine's late verse; such language, like his divergent use of both popular and literary diction, is simply a feature of the decadent preoccupation with language for its own sake.

To look now at themes, Verlaine's changing attitudes toward homosexuality and toward licentious verse in general can perhaps be ascribed to his decadent manner as well as to personal considerations. In July of 1883 he omitted from 'Vers à la manière de plusieurs' the compromising 'Le Poète et la muse'. Now, although the nature of his relationship with Rimbaud had always been known—so much so that in 1874 it was Lepelletier who had to dissuade him from dedicating Romances sans paroles to Rimbaud—from the time of his imprisonment until after his return to Paris Verlaine maintained a firm and tactful silence on the whole subject of perversion (indeed, until his death he always denied that their relationship had been sexual). But in March of 1884 he published the compromising 'Vers pour être calomnié', followed in December by 'La Dernière Fête galante', with its revealing conclusion, 'O que nos coeurs . . . / Dès ce jourd'hui réclament . . . / L'embarquement pour Sodome et Gomorrhe!'. Then the publication of 'Explication' and 'Autre Explication' in Lutèce for 19-23 July 1885 initiated a series of poems in which during the next several years he was to write ever more openly of his relationship with Rimbaud and even to justify homosexuality. Jacques Borei argues convincingly for the psychological reasons which, when he was preparing Parallèlement, induced Verlaine to take up again the Rimbaud theme, with its candour and its exaltation of ' . . . ceux-là que sacre le haut Rite' ('Ces passions qu'eux seuls . . . ' ) : nostalgia for the mystic exhilaration of their adventure, or the false rumours of Rimbaud's death in 1887, which inspired at least one poem. Similar considerations apply to a reprise of the theme of female eroticism; Verlaine's early penchant for erotic verse appears in Les Amies (1868) and in the indecent poems appended to La Bonne Chanson (1870). But these were clandestine works, and less than two decades later he was openly publishing poems of this sort.

Perhaps there was no longer the same need for prudence. While until 1882 Verlaine had good reason to maintain his pose as a respectable gentleman misunderstood by his contemporaries, by 1884 he had little to gain from further claims to respectability. For one thing, the truth was by now widely known; for another, after his dismissal from the Collège de Rethel, after the rejection of his application for re-employment in the city administration, and in view of the impossibility of rejoining Mathilde (who remarried in 1885), it was apparent that he was to be permanently excluded from conventional, self-respecting bourgeois life. On the other hand, with the growth of his 'legend' and with his decision to stake everything on a full-time literary career, he had rather more to gain than to lose by frankly accepting the role of an incorrigible if penitent sinner, as richly endowed with the grace of poetry as he was deprived of that of common morality. But to admit past indiscretions is not the same as singing current offences. Would not Verlaine's new-found candour also have been brought about by the decadent milieu, with its treatment of vice, its preference for perversion because it is unnatural, and its implication that Paris rivalled Rome as a centre of debauchery? Since Baudelaire, since A Rebours, since the more lurid decadent novels like Péladan's Le Vice suprême, homosexuality was becoming less taboo and more, if not acceptable, at least tolerated in avant-garde circles. The first issue of Le Décadent, for example, contains an instalment of Luc Vajarnet's La Grande Roulotte, in which the lesbian attachment of Countess Jeanne and her chambermaid Mariette is presented in such detail as to be erotically stimulating to male readers. Against this background we can understand Verlaine's including in Parallèlement poems such as 'Sur une statue de Ganymède', 'Ces passions qu'eux seuls nomment encore amours', and 'Laeti et errabundi'. Heterosexual love, which, if less original, still figures prominently in the decadent aesthetic, was handled quite freely, to the point where La Plume saw some of its issues seized by the police. In comparison to his relative shyness in 1883, Verlaine's plans for Parallèlement are revealing. Although the first edition already included Filles and Les Amies, for a projected new edition he wanted to include 'Nous ne sommes pas le troupeau', 'Billet à Lily' (from the pornographic volume Femmes), 'Le Bon Disciple' (from Hombres), as well as 'un dialogue entre éphèbes et vierges à la Virgile; le cadre me permettra les dernières hardiesses. Inititulé Chant alterné.' The use of a classical setting as an excuse for licentious verse is particularly indicative . . . , for this common practice of decadent poets reflects their fundamental interpretation of Greco-Roman antiquity.