Verhaeren leaves the objective mood of his earlier poems to clothe his soul in the Nessian shirt of the most poisonous subjectivity. But true tragic dignity stalks in the very extremity of his agony. Compared, indeed, with the gigantic bass of this unhappiness, black, definite, drastic, what is the grey wistfulness of Verlaine but the hysterical falsetto of a whining child? Verhaeren, on the other hand, with the ecstatic defiance of a kind of Nietzschean Prometheus sets himself to plumb the lowest abysses of despair, and himself eggs on the eagles of torment to devour every shred of his own soul. With "brutal teeth of fire and madness he bites and outrages his own heart within him," lashes himself in his thought and in his blood, in his effort, in his hope, in his blasphemy:
"Et quand lève le soir son calice de lie
Je me le verse à boire insatiablement."
Or take again the sinister gusto of the passage:
"Aurai-j'enfin l'atroce joie
De voir nuits après nuits comme une proie
La démence attaquer mon cerveau,
Et détraque, malade, sorti de la prison
Et des travaux forcés de sa raison
D'appareiller vers un lointain nouveau?"
The technique of these poems is worthy of some study. Having little use for the orthodox alexandrine (except in a few instances like Le Gel, where the icy massiveness of the blocked couplets faithfully mirrors the polar desolation of his own soul), he fashions his own metres to incarnate his own moods. Such a refrain as "Ce minuit dallé d'ennui" will boom out again and again the dull monotonous clank of his own weary spirit. At other times the grinding engines of a disorganised mind whirr and jar with spasmodic feverishness:
"C'est l'heure où les hallucinés,
Les gueux, et les déracinés
Dressent leur orgueil dans la vie."
Note, too, the ghastly effectiveness of the internal rhymes. Is not, for instance, such a line as
"Les chiens du noir espoir out aboyé ce soir"
a triple series, as it were, of metrical mirrors, where the bitten mind barks savagely back at its own mad image. Or listen to the Titanic thud of such a line as
"La Mer choque ses blocs de flots contre les rocs,"