The Music of Poetry - Verlaine and the Art of Suggestion
Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) transformed French poetry from statement to song. Where Baudelaire shocked through subject matter, Verlaine revolutionized through sound. His musical innovations—fluid rhythms, subtle rhymes, suggestive rather than declarative language—created poetry of unprecedented delicacy and emotional nuance.
Verlaine's famous "Art poétique" outlined his aesthetic:
De la musique avant toute chose, Et pour cela préfère l'Impair Plus vague et plus soluble dans l'air, Sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose.
(Music before everything, And for this prefer the Uneven More vague and more soluble in air, With nothing in it that weighs or poses.)
This manifesto rejects Classical poetry's rhetorical weight for something lighter, more atmospheric. Verlaine advocates odd-numbered meters (5, 7, 9, 11 syllables) over the traditional alexandrine's twelve. These "impair" rhythms create effects of suspension and uncertainty.
Early Work: The Parnassian Period
Verlaine began as Parnassian, writing objective, formally perfect verse. Poèmes saturniens (1866) shows his early mastery:
Les sanglots longs Des violons De l'automne Blessent mon cœur D'une langueur Monotone.
(The long sobs Of violins Of autumn Wound my heart With languid Monotony.)
"Chanson d'automne" demonstrates Verlaine's early genius. The short lines (4-3-4-4-3-4 syllables) create falling rhythm that mimics both violin music and autumn leaves. The technique is Parnassian—objective correlation between natural phenomenon and emotional state—but the execution reveals Verlaine's distinctive musicality.
The Fêtes galantes: Rococo Revival
Fêtes galantes (1869) creates an imaginary 18th-century world of masked balls and artificial pleasures. These poems use rococo aesthetics to explore modern alienation:
Votre âme est un paysage choisi Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques, Jouant du luth et dansant, et quasi Tristes sous leurs déguisements fantasques.
(Your soul is a chosen landscape Where go charming masks and bergamasks, Playing lute and dancing, and almost Sad beneath their fantastic disguises.)
"Clair de lune" presents artificial paradise shadowed by melancholy. The masqueraders dance and play music, but sadness underlies their revelry. Verlaine uses historical distance to examine contemporary emotional states—a technique borrowed by many modern poets.
The collection's title poem "Fête galante" achieves extraordinary effects through sound alone:
Et la mandoline jase Parmi les frissons de brise...
(And the mandolin chatters Among the shivers of breeze...)
The alliteration ("mandoline"/"parmi," "frissons"/"brise") creates musical effects independent of meaning. Verlaine proves poetry can work like instrumental music, affecting readers through pure sound.
La Bonne Chanson: Love and Simplicity
La Bonne Chanson (1870) celebrates Verlaine's engagement to Mathilde Mauté. These poems achieve remarkable effects through apparent artlessness:
Il faut, voyez-vous, nous pardonner les choses: De cette façon nous serons bien heureuses...
(We must, you see, forgive ourselves things: This way we'll be quite happy...)
The syntax mimics ordinary speech—"voyez-vous" (you see), conversational hesitations, simple vocabulary. Yet the meter (11-syllable lines) creates subtle music. Verlaine makes formal verse sound spontaneous.
Rimbaud: The Fateful Encounter
In 1871, seventeen-year-old Arthur Rimbaud arrived in Paris carrying revolutionary poems. Verlaine, ten years older and married, became infatuated with the boy genius. Their relationship scandalized literary Paris and nearly destroyed both poets.
But artistically, their collaboration proved extraordinary. Rimbaud's visionary ambitions pushed Verlaine toward formal experiment. Verlaine's musical genius refined Rimbaud's wild innovations. Together they created some of French poetry's greatest masterpieces.
Romances sans paroles (1874), written during their travels, shows this collaboration's fruits:
Il pleure dans mon cœur Comme il pleut sur la ville...
(It weeps in my heart As it rains on the town...)
The poem uses weather as emotional metaphor, but the relationship isn't simple allegory. Interior and exterior states blend until distinguishing them becomes impossible. This psychological impressionism anticipates modern poetry's explorations of consciousness.
Religious Conversion: Sagesse
After shooting Rimbaud in Brussels (1873), Verlaine was imprisoned and underwent religious conversion. Sagesse (1881) explores Christian faith through his distinctive musical style:
Ô mon Dieu, vous m'avez blessé d'amour Et la blessure est encore vibrante...
(O my God, you have wounded me with love And the wound still vibrates...)
Verlaine adapts mystical tradition to personal experience. The "wound of love" conventionally describes divine union, but Verlaine makes it psychologically real. His religious poetry avoids theological abstraction for immediate spiritual experience.
Late Work: Decline and Renewal
Verlaine's later years saw personal dissolution—alcoholism, poverty, bohemian excess. Yet his late poems often achieve his greatest musical effects. Parallèlement (1889) contains verses of extraordinary technical audacity:
Circonscrite en ces bords mystérieux qu'Amour Pare et couvre d'un long frisson mélancolique...
(Circumscribed in those mysterious shores that Love Adorns and covers with a long melancholic shiver...)
The alexandrine's traditional structure dissolves into flowing rhythm. Verlaine uses enjambment and caesura displacement to create effects of continuous motion. French verse would never sound the same.
Technical Innovations
Verlaine's prosodic innovations transformed French poetry permanently. His use of odd-numbered meters broke the alexandrine's dominance. His subtle rhyme schemes—assonance, slant rhyme, internal rhyme—created new sonic possibilities.
Most importantly, Verlaine proved that technique serves emotion rather than dominating it. His formal innovations feel inevitable, never forced. He expanded French poetry's expressive range while maintaining its essential musicality.
Influence on Symbolism
Verlaine's aesthetic theories influenced all subsequent Symbolist poetry. His emphasis on suggestion over statement, music over meaning, became Symbolism's core principles. Mallarmé acknowledged his debt to Verlaine's musical innovations.
The famous line from "Art poétique":
Car nous voulons la Nuance encor, Pas la Couleur, rien que la nuance!
(For we want Nuance still, Not Color, nothing but nuance!)
This became Symbolism's rallying cry. Poetry should work through subtle suggestion rather than direct statement. Verlaine's practice demonstrated how such aesthetic theories could create powerful effects.
Women and Verlaine's Poetry
Verlaine's treatment of women reflects period contradictions but shows unusual psychological insight. Mathilde appears in La Bonne Chanson as idealized beloved, yet the poems acknowledge relationship difficulties:
J'ai peur d'un baiser Comme d'une abeille...
(I fear a kiss Like a bee...)
This unexpected image suggests anxiety about intimacy rather than conventional romantic confidence. Verlaine's honesty about emotional ambivalence anticipates modern relationship poetry.
His later poems about prostitutes and working women avoid both idealization and condemnation:
Elle était très brune avec des yeux très doux...
(She was very brown with very gentle eyes...)
These portraits achieve dignity through understatement. Verlaine sees these women as individuals rather than social types.
Legacy and Influence
Verlaine's influence extended far beyond French poetry. His musical innovations influenced the English Decadents and Irish poets like Yeats. His psychological impressionism anticipates modernist stream-of-consciousness techniques.
Most importantly, Verlaine legitimized poetry's musical dimension. After him, all serious poets had to consider their work's sonic effects. Free verse poetry, seemingly opposite to Verlaine's formal concerns, actually extends his insights about rhythm and sound.
Contemporary poets continue learning from Verlaine's technical mastery. His ability to create emotional effects through pure sound remains unmatched. In an age increasingly dominated by visual media, Verlaine reminds us of language's essentially musical nature.