Sophomoric Maeterlinck

Poems, by Maurice Maeterlinck. [Dodd, Mead and Company, New York.]

The publisher of Maeterlinck’s Poems states apologetically that there has been a demand for a complete edition of the Belgian’s works, hence his justification in publishing a translation of the poems that originally appeared twenty years ago. The service rendered thereby to the author is of doubtful value: great writers are inclined to forget their youthful follies; as far as the English reading public is concerned the little book may be of some interest as a pale suggestion of an early stage in the development of Maeterlinck’s talent. I say a pale suggestion, for with all the conscientious labor of the translator the poems Anglicised have lost their chief, if not sole value—their Verlainean musicalness. If as a verslibrist Maeterlinck was obviously influenced by Whitman, his rhymed verses bear the unmistakable stamp of the poet who preached: “De la musique avant toute chose.... De la musique encore et toujours!” Back in the eighties Maeterlinck belonged to the Belgian group of Symbolists, who, like Elskamp, Rodenbach, van Lerberghe, Verhaeren, reflected the French school which began with Baudelaire and culminated through Rimbaud and Verlaine in Mallarmé. Yet, unlike his great friend, Verhaeren, the Mystic of Silence directed his genius into a different channel and abandoned verse as a medium of expression. In the collected poems, the Serres Chaudes and the Chansons, despite the mentioned influences, we discover the Maeterlinckian key-note—the languor of the oppressed soul, helplessly inactive in “a hot-house whose doors are closed forever.” We are dazzled frequently with such beautiful lines as “O blue monotony of my heart!”; “Green as the sea temptations creep”; “the purple snakes of dream”; “O nights within my humid soul”; “My hands, the lilies of my soul, Mine eyes, the heavens of my heart.” A friend confessed to me that these similes reminded him of Bodenheim; to be sure, this compliment should be laid at the door of the translator.