Les os, le sang, les nerfs font alliance
Avec on ne sait quoi de frémissant
Dans l'air et dans le vent;
On s'éprouve léger et clair dans l'espace,
On est heureux à crier grâce,
Les faits, les principes, les lois, on comprend tout;
Le cœur tremble d'amour et l'esprit semble fou
De l'ivresse de ses idées.[3]
Every time that Verhaeren reads his poetry, this re-birth of the first creative state is renewed. It is in the first place a deliverance from pain, and in the second place it is pleasure. Again and again the word darts along like a beast let loose; in the wildest rhythm; in a rhythm that begins slowly, cautiously; quickens; then grows wilder and wilder; grows to an intoxicating monotony, an ever-increasing speed, a rattling din that reminds one of an express whizzing along at full speed. Like a locomotive—for in Verhaeren's case one has to think in images of this kind, and not in outworn tropes as of Pegasus—the poem rushes on, driven only by a measure which reminds one of the short explosions of an automobile. And as a matter of fact the scansion of the locomotive, its restless rattling, has often been the cause of the rhythmic velocity of his verses. Verhaeren himself is fond of relating that he has often, and with delight, written poems on railway journeys, and that the cadence of his verse has then been fired by the regular rattle of the train. He describes wonderfully the rapture of the speed poured into his blood by the whizzing past of trains. The whistling of the wind in moaning trees, the dashing of the foaming sea along the shore, the echo a thousand times repeated of thunder in the mountains, all these strong sounds have become rhythm in his poems; all noisy things, all violent, swift emotions have made it brusque, angry, and excited:
Oh! les rythmes fougueux de la nature entière
Et les sentir et les darder à travers soi!
Vivre les mouvements répandus dans les bois,
Le sol, les vents, la mer et les tonnerres;
Vouloir qu'en son cerveau tressaille l'univers;
Et pour en condenser les frissons clairs
En ardentes images,
Aimer, aimer, surtout la foudre et les éclairs
Dont les dévorateurs de l'espace et de l'air
Incendient leur passage![4]
But this is the new thing in Verhaeren, that he has transformed into rhythm not only the voice of Nature, but also the new noises, the grumbling of the multitude, the raging of cities, the rumbling of workshops. Often in his rhythm can be heard the beat of hammers; the hard, edged, regular whizzing of wheels; the whirring of looms; the hissing of locomotives; often the wild, restless tumult of streets; the humming and rumbling of dense masses of the people. Poets before him imitated in the harmony of their verse the monotony of sources and the babbling of water over pebbles, or the soughing voice of the wind. But he makes the voice of the new things speak; makes the rhythm of the city, this rhythm of fever and of unrest, this nervous moving of the crowd, this unquiet billowing of a new ocean, flow over into his new poem. Hence this up and down in his verses; this suddenness and unexpectedness; this incalculable element. The new, the industrial noises have here become the music of poetry. Since he does not seek to express his own individual sensation of life, but would himself only be a voice for the multitude, the rhythm is more roaring and restless than that of any individual being. Like the first poets, those of old time, before whom there were no outworn and exhausted words; like the poets whose feeling burst into flame at every word, every cry; who discovered themselves 'en exaltant la souffrance, le mal, le plaisir, le bien'; like them when they
... confrontaient à chaque instant
Leur âme étonnée et profonde
Avec le monde,[5]
poets who would be modern must compare their own soul with that of their time, must always regulate their rhythm according to the mutation of their time. Their deepest yearning must be to find not only their own personal expression, but over and above it the poetic and musical representation of the highest identity between themselves and their time. For poets are the inheritors of a great patrimony:
... En eux seuls survit, ample, intacte et profonde,
L'ardeur
Dont s'enivrait, devant la terre et sa splendeur,
L'homme naïf et clair aux premiers temps du monde;
C'est que le rythme universel traverse encor
Comme aux temps primitifs leur corps.[6]
They must, in these days, only express themselves when they have first adapted the rhythm of their own feeling to that of the universe, to the rhythm of the cities they live in, to the rhythm of the multitude from which they have grown, to the rhythm of temporal as of eternal things. They must, like a vein in the heart of the world, reproduce every beat of the great hammer, every excitement, quickening of pace and obstruction of the feeling rolled round in the whole organism; they must learn from life the rhythm which shall again achieve the great harmony that was lost between the world and the work of art.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] 'Le Verbe' (La Multiple Splendeur).