1900-1914
COSMIC POETRY
... Les vols
Vers la beauté toujours plus claire et plus certaine.
É.V., 'Les Spectacles.'
The poetic conquest of life represents, as it were, a process of combustion. Every poet feeds the flame of his inner being, his artistic passion, with the things of the world around him, transmutes them into flame, and himself shoots on high and dies down with them. The more the flame cools with the feebler circulation of the blood, the weaker grows this fire, and gradually the pure crystals, the residue from this battle of the inner flame with the things of reality, are separated from this process of combustion. Verhaeren's work was in his youth and prime a flame exceedingly hot, lawless, free, and flaring like the very years of his youth and prime. Now, however, in the work of his fifties, now that passion has cooled, the yearning is revealed to find the goal of this passion, the inherent lawfulness of this unrest. Enthusiasm for the present, poetic consumption of the world in visions without the residue of philosophy and logical knowledge, no longer suffice him. For all deeper contemplation of the present is unthinkable without an exceeding of its limits: all that is, is at the same time something that has been and something that will be. Nothing is so entirely the present that it is not intimately connected with the past and the future. The eternal and the permanent is the inward side of all phenomena. And the more the poet turns his visions from the exterior, from the pictorial, to the inner world, to psychology, the more he descends from external phenomena to the roots of forces, the more he must apprehend the permanent behind the transitoriness of things. No perception of a contemporary state is fertile unless it is impregnated with the perception of laws that are independent of time, unless the changing phenomena are recognised as transformations of the unchangeable primordial phenomenon. This transition from maturity to age, from contemplation to knowledge, corresponds to a new artistic transition in the incomparably organic development of this poet. A transition: no longer a re-formation, but a formation which moves both forwards and backwards, which is at the same time an evolution and a retrogression, just as the poetic form of Verhaeren's poetry no longer undergoes a transformation, but is petrified. What a man has acquired in the years of his prime is an inalienable possession; its value can be further increased only by knowledge, by the appraising of the possession. It may be said that a man who has passed his prime experiences nothing new: the static equilibrium is realised; what has been experienced is only the better understood. The experience is no longer a struggle, no longer a state of unrest, something that slips away; it is a possession. What passion has fought for and won with a leap is now set in order and appraised at its true value, by calm. This transition from youth to age is in Verhaeren, to use Nietzsche's phrase, a transition from the Dionysiac to the Apollinarian, from a plethora to harmony. His yearning is now vivre ardent et clair, to live passionately, but at the same time clearly to preserve his inner fire, but at the same time to lose his unrest. Verhaeren's books in these years grow more and more crystalline; the fire in them no longer blazes openly like a flaring pyre, but glitters and sparkles as with the thousand facets of a precious stone. The smoke and the unrest of the fire die down, and now the pure residues are clarified. Visions have become ideas, the wrestling earthly energies are now eternal immutable laws.
The will of these last years, of these last works, is the will to realise a cosmic poem. In the trilogy of the cities Verhaeren had laid hold on the universe as it lies around us to-day; he had snatched it to him and overcome it. In passionate visions he had shaped its image, achieved its form, and now it stood beside the actual world as his own. But a poet who would create the whole world for himself, the whole infinite vista of its possibilities by the side of its actualities, must give it everything: not only its form, not only its face, but its soul as well, its organism, its origin, and its evolution. He must not merely apprehend its pictorial aspect and its mechanical energy, he must give it an encyclopædic form. He must create a mythology for it, a new morality, a new history, a new system of dynamics, a new system of ethics. Above it or in it he must place a God who acts and transforms. He must fashion it in his poetry not only as something that is, not only as something in the present, but as something that has been and is becoming, something that is part and parcel of the past and of the future too. It must ring out the old and ring in the new. And this will to create a cosmic poem is to be found in Verhaeren's new and most precious books—Les Visages de la Vie, Les Forces Tumultueuses, La Multiple Splendeur, Les Rythmes Souverains—-books which by their mere title announce the effort to include the dome of heaven in their vast embrace. They are the pillars of a mighty structure, the great stanzas of the cosmic poem. They are no longer a conversation of the poet with himself and contemporary feeling; they are a pronouncement addressed to all the ages. S'élancer vers l'avenir is the longing they express: a turning away from all the pasts to speak to the future. The lyric element in them steps beyond the boundary-line of poetry. It kindles the neighbouring domains of philosophy and religion, kindles them to new possibilities. For not only æsthetically would Verhaeren come to an understanding with realities; not by poetry only would he overcome the new possibilities; he would fain master them morally and religiously as well. The task of these last and most important books of verse is no longer to apprehend the universe in individual phenomena, but to impress its new form on a new law. In Les Visages de la Vie Verhaeren has in individual poems glorified the eternal forces, gentleness, joy, strength, activity, enthusiasm; in Les Forces Tumultueuses the mysterious dynamics of union shining through all forms of the real; in La Multiple Splendeur the ethics of admiration, the joyous relationship of man with things and with himself; and in Les Rythmes Souverains he has celebrated the most illustrious heroes of his ideals. For life has long since ceased to be for him mere gazing and contemplation:
Car vivre, c'est prendre et donner avec liesse
...................avide et haletant
Devant la vie intense et sa rouge sagesse![1]
Description, poetic analysis, has gradually grown into a hymn, into 'laudi del cielo, del mare, del mondo,' into songs of the whole world and of the ego, and of the harmony of the world's beauty in its union with the ego. The lyrical has here become cosmic feeling, knowledge has become ecstasy. Over and above the knowledge that there cannot be anything isolated, that everything is arranged and obeys the last uniform law of the universe, over and above this knowledge rises something still higher—over the contemplation of the world rises faith in the feeling of the world. The glorious optimism of these works ends in the religious confidence that all contrasts will be harmonised; that man will more and more be conscious of the earth; that every individual must discover his own law of the world in himself, the law that makes it possible for him to apprehend everything lyrically, with enthusiasm, with joy.