by Various
Ah! que n’as-tu défailli à mes genoux!
J’eusse été le modèle des époux!
Comme le frou-frou de ta robe est le modéle des frou-frou.
Ah! why didn’t I fall at your knees! Ah! why didn’t you faint at my knees! I would have been an exemplary husband! as the rustling of your gown is an exemplary rustling.
The Symbolist Movement
In 1883-4 Verlaine’s articles entitled Les Poètes maudits provided a focus and stimulus for a new surge of creative escapism, decadent revolt and aesthetic research. The atmosphere was intensified by the appearance of Jean Moréas’ volume Les Syrtes in 1884, and by the publication that same year of Huysmans’ novel A Rebours. Its hero, Des Esseintes, became the literary prototype of the over-sensitive, exquisitely bored, perverse fin-de-siècle dandy more interested in aesthetics than morality.
Simultaneously, Laforgue was composing his Complaintes, and feeling his way towards both free verse and the modernistic fusion of the unconscious with perceived reality, and the first signs were emerging of a major Belgian contribution to French literature, a Symbolist movement based in Gand and Louvain. This new source would produce two fine poets, Verhaeren and Maeterlinck, among an abundance of less innovative figures such as Elskamp, Rodenbach and Van Lerberghe. A number of the Belgians gravitated to Paris and specifically to Mallarmé’s Tuesday gatherings, where they also met the young Claudel and Valéry.
Decadence was short-lived, though it featured some interesting extremist dandies like Laurent Tailhade and Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac (the latter a model for Des Esseintes and for Proust’s Baron de Charlus), and its neurotic atmosphere imbues the work of Laforgue. But Symbolism (initially called Idealism) made a much more substantial impact, for in its various forms it dominated French verse to the turn of the century, and lived on beyond that time in the work of Paul Valéry, who brought it to perfection in an era when a fresh generation of modernist poets had already rejected it.
For the Symbolists, unlike the materialist and objective Parnassians, a landscape or scene or object is an ‘état d’âme, a projected state of sensibility or condition of the soul. Developing and synthesizing Baudelaire’s theory of latent imaginative ‘correspondances’, Rimbaud’s ‘Voyance’, Verlaine’s musicality and Mallarmé’s hermeticism, the poet seeks the inner meaning of things. He seeks a heightened state of awareness by concentration on the suggestive Symbol, the analogy that reveals progressively, by allusion, and does not name directly. In Mallarmé’s words: ‘To name an object is to suppress three-quarters of the delight of the poem, which consists in the pleasure of guessing little by little; to suggest it, that is the dream. It is the perfect use of this mystery that constitutes the symbol: to evoke an object gradually in order to reveal a state of the soul, or, inversely, to choose an object and from it identify a state of the soul, by a series of deciphering operations… There must always be enigma in poetry.’
The poem is to be a resonant yet understated symphony composed of images, sound-patterns and rhythms that prolong and multiply to infinity impression, sensation and dream. Rodenbach offered this characteristically nebulous definition: ‘The poetry of symbols is dream, nuance, art on a journey with the clouds, art capturing reflections, art for which reality is merely a point of departure, and the paper itself is a slender white certainty from which one is launched into chasms of mystery that are above us and draw us up.’
For the pure Symbolist, language is to be wilfully elliptical, complex, precious and melodic, excluding social reference and popular taste. Such is the spiritual power of the active, autonomously creative Word in poetic reverie, an energy described by Maeterlinck as a ‘force occulte’, that a mystical and ideal network of affinities can be woven on the basis of semi-conscious verbal correspondences alone. This density of perception, at the opposite pole to Mallarmé’s aesthetic of Absence, is effectively religious and is sometimes called ‘ultra-symbolism’. Its major exponent is Saint-Pol Roux, but its influence is discernible in Claudel.
On the other hand, Verhaeren leads the Belgians into a marriage between Symbolism and realism, committing poetic vision to contemporary industrial reality, and moving on a path parallel to Laforgue’s in seeking a blend of the unconscious and the material in the recording of perceptions.
Much Symbolist poetry now seems insipid, technical and imitative, and space cannot be found here even for the free-verse attempts of Vielé-Griffin and Merrill (both of American origin) and of Gustave Kahn (see the introduction to Laforgue, page 326). Another exclusion is Albert Samain, much admired in his time but rarely read now. Samain is perhaps typical of the empty mystique and gutlessness of Symbolism. His sensibility is dreamy, elegant, nostalgic, his versification languidly musical and atmospheric. But his verse is thematically conventional and devoid of vigour, lacking in stimulating irony or originality of imagery.
Some mention should also be made of Alfred Jarry, best known today for his remarkable pre-Absurdist Ubu plays. A flamboyant fringe Symbolist, a subversive apostle of esoteric counter-culture, his life was itself an iconoclastic work of art prefiguring Dadaism. Jarry wrote poems and prose-poems full of subtle word-play and technical virtuosity, few of which would be readily translatable.
Emile Verhaeren
(1855–1916)
Verhaeren is one of the most talented, most concrete and thematically wide-ranging of the Belgian Symbolists. His identity is firmly, even aggressively, rooted in his French-speaking Flemish background. He is a melancholy poet of Flemish mists and rural stagnation, but also a vibrant, passionate observer of the glories and horrors of industrial urbanization.
His early work on rural themes is marked by profound pessimism and psychological anguish, in which potentially suicidal depression is objectified into hallucinatory and even apocalyptic forms. Later he awakens to the exciting multiplicity of modern city life, and his own personality blends dynamically with it. Though he never loses his capacity for horrific perception, Verhaeren becomes increasingly an apostle of progress through the power of the human mind, and develops a prophetic, socialistic vision of a new society of joyful work and universal solidarity. As with Walt Whitman, whom Verhaeren admired, the poet is part of history in the making, intoxicated by the process.
A pioneer of free verse as the organic, flexible instrument of visionary thought, he writes often in a feverish, incantatory, uneven style given unity by leitmotifs and emotional force, but like all good free-verse poets he can also show mastery of orthodox technique.
Major volumes (his output was prolific): Les Flamandes 1883, Les Moines 1886, Les Soirs 1887, Les Débâcles 1888, Les Flambeaux noirs 1890, Les Apparus dans mes chemins 1891, Les Campagnes hallucinées 1893, Les Villages illusoires 1895, Les Villes tentaculaires 1895, Les Heures claires 1896, Les Visages de la vie 1899, Les Forces tumultueuses 1902, La Multiple Splendeur 1906, Les Rythmes sourverains 1910, etc.
Le Moulin1
Le moulin tourne au fond du soir, très lentement,
Sur un ciel de tristesse et de mèlancolie,
Il tourne et tourne, et sa voile, couleur de lie,
Est triste et faible et lourde et lesse, infiniment.
Depuis l’aube, ses bras, comme des bras de plainte,
Se sont tendus et sont tombés; et les voici
Qui retombent encor, là-bas, dans l’air noirci
Et le silence entier de la nature éteinte.
The Mill
The mill turns in the deep of the evening, very slowly, against a sad and melancholy sky; it turns and turns, and its sail, the colour of dregs, is sad and weak and heavy and weary, to infinity.
Since dawn, its arms, like arms of lamentation, have stretched up and fallen; and now they fall again, there, in the blackened air and the all-encompassing silence of extinct nature.
Un jour souffrant d’hiver sur les hameaux s’endort,
Les nuages sont las de leurs voyages sombres,
Et le long des taillis qui ramassent leurs ombres
>
Les ornières s’en vont vers un horizon mort.
Sous un ourlet de sol, quelques huttes de hêtre
Très misérablement sont assises en rond;
Une lampe de cuivre est pendue au plafond
Et patine de feu le mur et la fenêtre.
Et dans la plaine immense et le vide dormeur
Elles fixent – les très souffreteuses bicoques! –
Avec les pauvres yeux de leurs carreaux en loques,
Le vieux moulin qui tourne et, las, qui tourne et meurt.
An ailing winter day sinks into sleep over the hamlets, the clouds are weary of their dark journeys, and along the copse-woods gathering up their shadows, the ruts run on towards a dead horizon.
Beneath a rim of soil, some beechwood huts sit most wretchedly in a circle; a copper lamp hangs from the ceiling and casts a patina of firelight on wall and window.
And in the vast plain and the sleeping void they stare – those impoverished hovels! – with the poor eyes of their tattered panes, at the old mill which turns and, weary, turns and dies.
Chanson de fou
Vous aurez beau crier contre la terre,
La bouche dans le fossé,
Jamais aucun des trépassés
Ne répondra à vos clameurs amères.
Ils sont bien morts, les morts,
Ceux qui firent jadis la campagne féconde;
Ils font l’immense entassement de morts
Qui pourrissent, aux quatre coins du monde,
Les morts.
Alors
Les champs étaient maîtres des villes,
Le même esprit servile
Ployait partout les fronts et les échines,
Et nul encor ne pouvait voir
Dressés, au fond du soir,
Les bras hagards et formidables des machines.
Madman’s Song
You’ll howl in vain at the earth, with your mouth in the pit, not one among the departed souls will ever answer your bitter clamour.
They are truly dead, the dead, those who once made the countryside fertile; they form the immense mass of the dead who rot, in the four corners of the world, the dead.
Then, the fields were masters of the cities, the same cringing spirit bent brows and backbones everywhere, and none could yet see raised, in the depths of evening, the gaunt and fearful arms of the machines.
Vous aurez beau crier contre la terre,
La bouche dans le fossé:
Ceux qui jadis étaient les trépassés
Sont aujourd’hui, jusqu’au fond de la terre,
Les morts.
You’ll howl in vain at the earth, with your mouth in the pit: those who once were the departed souls are now, unto the depths of the earth, the dead.
Les Usines
Se regardant avec les yeux cassés de leurs fenêtres
Et se mirant dans l’eau de poix et de salpêtre
D’un canal droit, marquant sa barre à l’infini,
Face à face, le long des quais d’ombre et de nuit,
Par à travers les faubourgs lourds
Et la misére en pleurs de ces faubourgs,
Ronflent terriblement usines et fabriques.
The Factories
Gazing at each other with the shattered eyes of their windows and at their reflection in the pitch and saltpetre water of a straight canal, its line inscribed to infinity, face to face, along the wharves of shadow and darkness, all through the oppressive suburbs and the weeping poverty of those suburbs, factories and mills roar with terrible voice.
Rectangles de granit et monuments de briques,
Et longs murs noirs durant des lieues,
Immensément, par les banlieues;
Et sur les toits, dans le brouillard, aiguillonnées
De fers et de paratonnerres,
Les cheminées.
Se regardant de leurs yeux noirs et symétriques,
Par la banlieue, à l’infini,
Ronflent le jour, la nuit,
Les usines et les fabriques.
Oh les quartiers rouillés de pluie et leurs grand’rues!
Et les femmes et leurs guenilles apparues
Et les squares, où s’ouvre, en des caries
De plâtras blanc et de scories,
Une flore pâle et pourrie.
Granite rectangles and brick monuments, and long black walls that run for leagues, immeasurably, through the suburbs; and on the roofs, in the fog, needled with wires and lightning conductors, the chimneys.
Gazing at each other with their black symmetrical eyes, across the suburbs, to infinity, factories and mills roar day and night.
Oh! districts mildewed by rain and their main streets! And the women and their manifest ragged bodies and the squares where among rotting white plaster-work and slag a pale and putrid flora opens.
Aux carrefours, porte ouverte, les bars:
Ètains, cuivres, miroirs hagards,
Dressoirs d’ébène et flacons fols
D’où luit l’alcool
Et sa lueur vers les trottoirs.
Et des pintes qui tout à coup rayonnent,
Sur le comptoir, en pyramides de couronnes;
Et des gens soÛls, debout,
Dont les larges langues lapent, sans phrases,
Les ales d’or et le whisky, couleur topaze.
At the crossroads, with open doors, the bars: pewter, brasses, gaunt mirrors, ebony dressers and prodigious flagons whose alcohol shines its light towards the pavements. And pint-pots suddenly radiant, on the bar-top, in pyramids of diadems; and drunken people, standing there, their broad and wordless tongues lapping golden ales and topaz-coloured whisky.
Par à travers les faubourgs lourds
Et la misère en pleurs de ces faubourgs,
Et les troubles et mornes voisinages,
Et les haines s’entrecroisant de gens à gens
Et de ménages à ménages,
Et le vol même entre indigents,
Grondent, au fond des cours, toujours,
Les haletants battements sourds
Des usines et des fabriques symétriques.
Ici, sous de grands toits où scintille le verre,
La vapeur se condense en force prisonniére:
Des mâchoires d’acier mordent et fument;
De grands marteaux monumentaux
Broient des blocs d’or sur des enclumes,
Et, dans un coin, s’illuminent les fontes
En brasiers tors et effrénés qu’on dompte.
All through the oppressive suburbs and the weeping poverty of those suburbs, and the turmoils and the dismal proximity, and the hatreds criss-crossing from people to people and from household to household, and the theft even among the poverty-stricken, deep in the yards, never ceasing, sound the dull, rumbling, panting throbs of the symmetrical factories and mills.
Here, under great roofs where glass shimmers, steam condenses in captive power: steel jaws bite and smoke; great monumental hammers pound golden blocks on anvils, and in a corner glows the smelting iron in contorted, unbridled yet tamed furnaces.
Là-bas, les doigts méticuleux des métiers prestes,
A bruits menus, à petits gestes,
Tissent des draps, avec des fils qui vibrent
Légers et fins comme des fibres.
Des bandes de cuir transversales
Courent de l’un à l’autre bout des salles
Et les volants larges et violents
Tournent, pareils aux ailes dans le vent
Des moulins fous, sous les rafales.
Un jour de cour avare et ras
Frôle, par à travers les carreaux gras
Et humides d’un soupirail,
Chaque travail.
Automatiques et minutieux,
Des ouvriers silencieux
Réglent le mouvement
D’universel tictaquement
Qui fermente de fiévre et de folie
Et déchiquette, avec ses dents d’entétement,
And there, the meticulous fingers of the nimble crafts, with minute sounds, with spare gestures, weave sheets, with vibrating threads as light and delicate as fibres. Transversal leather bands run through the rooms from end to end and the broad violent flywheels turn like the sails of demented windmills in stormy blasts. A miserly, shorn daylight from the yard, through moist and oily ventilator panes, grazes each operation. Mechanical and meticulous, silent workers regulate the universal ticktacking movement that ferments in fever and madness and hacks to pieces, with the teeth of its obsession, abolished human speech.
Plus loin, un vacarme tonnant de chocs
Monte de l’ombre et s’érige par blocs;
Et, tout à coup, cassant l’élan des violences,
Des murs de bruit semblent tomber
Et se taire, dans une mare de silence,
Tandis que les appels exacerbés
Des sifflets crus et des signaux
Hurlent soudain vers les fanaux,
Dressant leurs feux sauvages,
En buissons d’or, vers les nuages.
Et tout autour, ainsi qu’une ceinture,
Là-bas, de nocturnes architectures,
Void les docks, les ports, les ponts, les phares
Et les gares folles de tintamarres;
Et plus lointains encor des toits d’autres usines
Et des cuves et des forges et des cuisines
Formidables de naphte et de résines
Dont les meutes de feu et de lueurs grandies
Mordent parfois le ciel, à coups d’abois et d’incendies.
Further on, a clamour thundering with impacts rises from the shadow and forms itself in blocks; and suddenly, breaking the momentum of violent forces, walls of noise seem to fall and be stilled in a pool of silence, while the embittered cries of harsh whistles and sirens suddenly howl at the lanterns that raise their savage glow in golden bushes towards the clouds.