If it does not give this, a work, perfect though it be adjudged, is everything that is contemptible. It is useless and ugly, since nothing is more absolutely useful than beauty. With Verhaeren, beauty is made of novelty and strength. This poet is a strong man and, since those Villes tentaculaires which surged with the violence of a telluric upheaval, no one dares to deny him the state and glory of a great poet. Perhaps he has not yet quite finished the magic instrument which for twenty years he has been forging. Perhaps he is not yet master of his language. He is unequal; he lets his most beautiful pages grow heavy with inopportune epithets, and his finest poems become entangled in what was once called prosaism. Nevertheless, the impression of power and grandeur remains, and yes: he is a great poet. Listen to this fragment from Cathédrales:
* * * * *
—O ces foules, ces foules
Et la misère et la détresse qui les foulent
Comme des houles!
Les ostensoirs, ornés de soie,
Vers les villes échafaudées,
En toits de verre et de cristal,
Du haut du choeur sacerdotal,
Tendent la croix des gothiques idées.
Ils s'imposent dans l'or des clairs dimanches
—Toussaint, Noël, Pâques et Pentecôtes blanches.
Ils s'imposent dans l'or et dans l'encens et dans la fête
Du grand orgue battant du vol de ses tempêtes
Les chapiteaux rouges et les voûtes vermeilles,
Ils sont une âme, en du soldi,
Qui vit de vieux décor et d'antique mystère
Autoritaire.
Pourtant, dès que s'éteignent le cantique
Et l'antienne naïve et prismatique,
Un deuil d'encens évaporé s'empreint
Sur les trépieds d'argent et les autels d'airain,
Et les vitraux, grands de siècles agenouillés
Devant le Christ, avec leurs papes immobiles
Et leurs martyrs et leurs héros, semblent trembler
Au bruit d'un train hautain que passe sur la ville.
[(Tr. 6)]
Verhaeren appears a direct son of Victor Hugo, especially in his earliest works. Even after his evolution towards a poetry more freely feverish, he still remains romantic. Here, to explain this, are four verses evoking the days of former times.
Jadis—c'était la vie errante et somnambule,
A travers les matins et les soirs fabuleux,
Quand la droite de Dieu vers les Chanaans bleus
Traçait la route d'or au fond des crépuscules.
Jadis—c'était la vie énorme, exaspérée,
Sauvagement pendue aux crins des étalons,
Soudaine, avec de grands éclairs à ses talons
Et vers l'espace immense immensément cabrée.
Jadis—c'était la vie ardent, évocatoire;
La Croix blanche de ciel, la Croix rouge d'enfer
Marchaient, à la clarté des armures de fer,
Chacune à travers sang, vers son ciel de victoire.
Jadis—c'était la vie écumante et livide,
Vécue et morte, à coups de crime et de tocsins,
Bataille entre eux, de proscripteurs et d'assassins,
Avec, au-dessus d'eux, la mort folle et splendid.
[(Tr. 7)]
These verses are drawn from Villages illusoires, written almost exclusively in assonant free verse, divided by means of a gasping rhythm, but Verhaeren, master of free verse, is also master of romantic verse, to which he can force, without being dashed to pieces, the unbridled, terrible gallop of his thought, drunk with images, phantoms and future visions.
[HENRI DE RÉGNIER]
He lives in an old Italian palace where emblems and figures are written on walls. He muses, passing from room to room. Towards evening he descends the marble stairs and goes into gardens flagged like streams, to dream of his life among fountain basins and ponds, while the black swans grow alarmed in their nests, and a peacock, alone like a king, seems to drink superbly the dying pride of a golden twilight. De Régnier is a melancholy, sumptuous poet. The two words which most often break forth in his verses are or and mort (gold and death) and there are poems where the insistence of this royal and autumnal rhyme returns and even induces fear. In the collection of his last works we could doubtless count more than fifty verses ending thus: golden birds, golden swans, golden basins, golden flowers, and dead lake, dead day, dead dream, dead autumn. It is a very curious obsession and symptomatic, not of a possible verbal poverty, rather the contrary, but of a confessed liking for a particularly rich colour and of a sad richness like that of a setting sun, a richness turning into the darkness of night.