Je suis l'halluciné de la forêt des Nombres.
That art of presenting a thought like a picture, of which Verhaeren is so accomplished a master, has become more subtle than ever; and
ces tours de ronde de l'infini, le soir
Et ces courbes, et ces spirales,
of for the most part menacing speculations in the void, take visible form before us, with a kind of hallucination, communicated to us from that (how far deliberate?) hallucination which has created them. Gradually, in "Les Apparus dans mes Chemins," in "Les Campagnes Hallucinées," in "Les Villages Illusoires," in "Les Villes Tentaculaires," the hallucinations become entirely external: it is now the country, the village, the town, that is to say, the whole organized world, that agonizes among cloudy phantoms, and no longer a mere individual, abnormal brain. And so he has at once gained a certain relief from what had been felt to be too intimately a part of himself, and has also surrendered to a more profound, because a more extended, consciousness of human misery. Effacing himself, as he does, behind the great spectacle of the world, as he sees it, with his visionary eyes, in his own violent and lethargic country, he becomes a more hopeless part of that conspiracy of the earth against what man has built out of the earth, of what man has built out of the earth against the earth, which he sees developing silently among the grass and bricks. All these books are a sort of philosophy in symbols, symbols becoming more and more definite: "Le Donneur de Mauvais Conseils," who drives up to the farm gate:
La vieille carriole en bois vert-pomine
Qui l'emmena, on ne sait d'où,
Une folle la garda avec son homme
Aux carrefours des chemins mous.
Le cheval paît l'herbe d'automne,
Près d'une mare monotone,
Dont l'eau malade réverbère
Le soir de pluie et de misère
Qui tombe en loques sur la terre;
"Les Cordiers," the old man spinning his rope against the sky, weaving the past into the future:
Sur la route muette et régulière,
Les yeux fixés vers la lumière
Qui frôle en se couchant les clos et les maisons,
Le blanc cordier visionnaire,
Du fond du soir auréolaire,
Attire à lui les horizons;
and, finally, the many-tentacled towns, drawing to themselves all the strength and sap of the earth: "Les Spectacles, La Bourse, Le Bazar," the monstrous and material soul of towns.
Contrast these poems with those early poems, so brutal, so Flemish, if you would see at a glance all the difference between the naturalistic and the symbolistic treatment. The subject-matter is the same; the same eye sees; there are the same
vers bâtis comme une estrade
Pour la danse des mots et leurs belles parades.