But these poems are far more than mere erotic or gastronomic diversions. Somewhat turgid, no doubt, with red health, they yet possess the same sweep and the same impetus with which Aristophanes himself once gave expression to the riotous fecundity of the earth and the Dionysian forces of nature.
In Les Moines (The Monks, 1886), Verhaeren treats a subject-matter which primâ facie would seem to denote the abandonment of the cult of the flesh for the cult of the spirit. Yet such veneration as the poet may ever have possessed for the Catholic creed was æsthetic rather than religious. He penetrates, it is true, into the "enormous shrine where the Middle Ages slumber," but it is less to worship than to describe in a rigid, but majestic prosody "the grand survivors of the Christian world"—the
"Moines venus vers nous des horizons gothiques
Mais dont l'âme mais dont l'esprit meurt de demain."
Psychologically the interesting feature of this work is that, so far from being in any way obsessed by any Chestertonian nostalgia for a dead and mediæval past, the poet anticipates with all apparent serenity the day when "the final blasphemy will have transpierced God like to an immense sword." Even, moreover, in these, as it were, antiquarian descriptions the poet emphasizes the contrast between the visionary life of the cloister (a life, albeit, where occasionally
"Un repas colossal souffle fourneaux béants
Éructant vers l'azur sa flamme et sa fumée")
and the real life of the outside world, and seems by no means unsympathetic to the rebellious monk who requires
"Le ciel torride et le désert et l'air des monts
Et les tentations en rut des vieux demons
Agaçant de leurs doigts la chair enflée des gouges
En lui brûlant la lèvre avec de grands seins rouges."
Yet both Les Flamands and Les Moines seem quite innocent and playful in comparison with the great black trinity of Les Soirs, Les Débâcles, and Les Flambeaux Noirs (1887-1891), in which Verhaeren gave expression to the mental and physical crisis which for a time seemed to imperil both his life and his reason. In these poems, many of which were written in London and its
"Gares de suie et de fumée ou du gaz pleure
Ses spleens d'argent lointain vers des chemins d'éclair,
Où des bêtes d'ennui baillent à l'heure
Dolente immensément qui tinte à Westminster,"