“Bonté, respect! car qu’est-ce qui nous accompagne,
Et vraiment, quand la mort viendra, que reste-t-il?”
From him, the convict poet, from this heart rotten with all the sins of fancy and of deed, bursts this plea—as naive as it is earnest, for the spiritual in love—for sentiment, the essence of the soul. Strange anomaly—stranger still that it should be he who has understood.
Three lines more, from an early poem called “Vœu,” of such condensed significance and biting truth as lacks a parallel.
“O la femme à l’amour câlin et rechauffant,
Douce, pensive et brune, et jamais étonnée,
Et qui parfois vous baise au front, comme un enfant.”
What a portrait, typical and individual—“jamais étonnée,” my sisters, what an accusation!
.....
Verlaine is dead. The last shred of that ruined soul which has for years been rotting away in chance Parisian brasseries, has loosened its hold upon life and slipped into the unknown; but the poetry he has left behind him, with its sighs and bitter sobbings, and its few gleams of beauty and of joy, contains the essence of his strange nature.