or the silent smash of
"Dites suis-je seul avec mon âme,
Mon âme hélas maison d'ébène
Où s'est fendu sans bruit un soir
Le grand miroir de mon espoir?"
At times transcending the blank negativity of despair, the poet will coquet positively with his own madness, as he wanders "hallucinated in the forest of numbers," or wishes to march towards "madness and her suns, her white suns of moonlight in the great weird noon, and her distant echoes bitten by dins and barkings and full of vermilion hounds." Or abandoning the more specific formulation of his own emotions, he will give vent to his feelings by letting his brain dance upon the lurid boards of some macabre theme. The little poem, La Tête, is dank with all the smooth bloodiness of the guillotine, while the Dame en Noir, with the ghastly rhymes and assurances of its refrain, is swathed in a black pathos, in comparison with which the most lurid horrors of Baudelaire appear the mere artificial extravagances of a perverse mind.
As we have already seen, the blackness of the trilogy which we have just considered was no mere dabbling in morbidity, but the genuine expression of a genuine unhappiness. In, however, Les Apparus dans Mes Chemins, Les Vignes de Ma Muraille the storm gradually exhausts itself, and is replaced by a more serene and confident mood. Contrast, for instance, with the drastic violence of Les Débâcles the jaded weariness of such a lyric as Celui de la Fatigue, where the poet sings of an "ardour broken on the whirling staircase of the infinite," or of such a passage as
"Je m'habille des loques de mes jours
Et le bâton de mon orgueil il plie,
Mes pieds dites comme ils sont lourds
De me porter de me trainer toujours
Au long de siècle de ma vie."
And as a complete antithesis, again, to the black bloodiness of such poems as La Tête or Un Meurtre, take the white suavity of St. Georges:
"Il vient un bel ambassadeur
Du pays blanc illuminé de marbres
Où dans les pares au bords des mers sur l'arbre
De la bonté suavement croit la douceur."
But this serenity marked rather a respite in Verhaeren's development than a real abatement of his poetic fury. With the furnaces of his mind recharged to their maximum capacity with blazing health, he starts to race his muse over the main lines of the modern civilisation, which lead from The Hallucinated Country-sides to The Tentacular Towns. Though written at different times, these two sets of poems constitute the contrasting halves of a complete whole, and were published together in 1895 with two prologues, La Ville and La Plaine. The prologues, in particular, well illustrate the new rushing irregular prosody, specially forged for the purpose of hammering out that white-hot steel of the modern civilisation which enmeshes in its fabric all the helpless flotsam of the agricultural economy. The academic harmony of the alexandrine is here abandoned. The rhymes crash out at lesser and greater intervals as they march along on feet that range from the quick spasm of some dissyllabic line to the spondaic emphasis of a full-length alexandrine.
In Les Campagnes Hallucinés itself the prosody is no doubt simpler, as the poet describes the ruined and pestilential country with its fevers, its sins, its beggars, its pilgrims, its diseases, insanities and débauchés, and the immense monotony of its interminable plains.
"C'est la plaine, la plaine blême
Interminablement toujours la même,
Par au-dessus, souvent
Rage si forte le vent,
Que l'on dirait le ciel fendu
Au coup de boxe
De l'équinoxe;
Novembre hurle ainsi qu'un loup
Lamentable par le soir fou."