Thus, in Stuart Merrill we discover the contrast and struggle of a spirited temperament and a very gentle heart, and according as one of the two natures prevails, we hear the violence of brasses or the murmurings of viols. Similarly does his technique oscillate from Gammes to his latest poems, from the Parnassian stiffness to the verso suelto of the new schools, which only the senators of art do not recognize. Vers libre, which is favorable to original talent, and which is a reef of danger to others, could not help winning over so gifted a poet, and so intelligent an innovator. This is how he understands it:

Venez avec des couronnes de primevères dans vos mains,
O fillettes qui pleurez la soeur morte à l'aurore.
Les cloches de la vallée sonnent la fin d'un sort,
Et l'on voit luire des pelles au soleil du matin.
Venez avec des corbeilles de violettes, ô fillettes
Qui hésitez un peu dans le chemin des hêtres,
Par crainte des paroles solennelles du prêtre.
Venez, le ciel est tout sonore d'invisibles alouettes....
C'est la fête de la mort, et l'on dirait dimanche,
Tant les cloches sonnent, douces au fond de la vallée;
Les garçons se sont cachés dans les petites allées;
Vous seules devez prier au pied de la tombe blanche....
Quelque année, les garçons qui se cachent aujourd'hui
Viendront vous dire à toutes la douce douleur d'aimer,
Et l'on vous entendra, autour du mât de mai,
Chanter des rondes d'enfance pour saluer la nuit.
[(Tr. 53)]

Stuart Merrill did not embark in vain, the day he desired to cross the Atlantic, to come and woo the proud French poetry, and place one of her flowers in his hair.

[SAINT-POL-ROUX]

One of the most fruitful and astonishing inventors of images and metaphors. To find new expressions, Huysmans materializes the spiritual and the intellectual spheres, thus giving his style a precision somewhat heavy and a lucidity rather unnatural: rotten souls (like teeth) and cracked hearts (like an old wall); it is picturesque and nothing else. The inverse operation is more conformable to the old taste of men for endowing vague sentiments and a dim consciousness to objects. It remains faithful to the pantheistic and animistic tradition without which neither art nor poetry would be possible. It is the deep source from which all the others are formed, pure water transformed by the slightest ray of sunshine into jewels sparkling like fairy collars. Other "metaphorists" like Jules Renard, venture to seek the image either in a reforming vision, a detail separated from the whole becoming the thing itself, or in a transposition and exaggeration of metaphors in usage; finally, there is the analogic method by which, without our voluntary aid, the meaning of ordinary words change daily. Saint-Pol-Roux blends these methods and makes them all contribute to the manufacture of images which, if they are all new, are not all beautiful. From them a catalogue or a dictionary could be drawn up:

Wise-Woman of lightmeansthe cock.
Morrow of the caterpillar in balldress—butterfly.
Sin that sucks—natural child.
Living distaff—mutton.
Fin of the plow—plowshare.
Wasp with the whip sting—diligence.
Breast of crystal—flagon.
Crab of the hand—open hand.
Letter announcement—magpie.
Cemetery with wings—a flight of crows.
Romance for the nostrils—perfume of flowers.
To tame the carious jawbone
of bemol of a modern tarask		—to play the piano.
Surly gewgaw of the doorway—watchdog.
Blaspheming limousine—wagoner.
To chant a bronze alexandrine—to peal midnight.
Cognac of Father Adam—the broad, pure air.
Imagery only seen with closed eyes—dreams.
Leaves of living salad—frogs.
Green chatterers—frogs.
Sonorous wild-poppy—cock-crow.

The most heedless person, having read this last, will decide that Saint-Pol-Roux is gifted with an imagination and with an equally exuberant wretched taste. If all these images, some of which are ingenious, followed one after another towards les Reposoirs de la Procession where the poet guides them, the reading of such a work would be difficult and the smile would often temper the aesthetic emotion; but strewn here and there, they but form stains and do not always break the harmony of richly colored, ingenious and grave poems. Le Pèlerinage de Sainte-Anne, written almost entirely in images, is free of all impurity and the metaphors, as Théophile Gautier would have wished, unfold themselves in profusion, but logically and knit together; it is the type and marvel of the prose poem, with rhythm and assonance. In the same volume, the Nocturne dedicated to Huysmans is but a vain chaplet of incoherent catachreses: the ideas there are devoured by a frightful troop of beasts. But l'Autopsie de la Vieille fille, despite a fault of tone, but Calvaire immémorial, but l'Ame saisissable are masterpieces. Saint-Pol-Roux plays on a zither whose strings sometimes are too tightly drawn: a turn of the key would suffice for our ears ever to be deeply gladdened.