The Ars Poetica of Paul Verlaine

 

Ars Poetica

Music first and foremost! In your verse

Choose those meters odd of syllable,

Supple in the air, vague, flexible,

Free of pounding beat, heavy or terse.

 

Choose the words you use--now right, now wrong--

With abandon: when the poet's vision

Couples the Precise with Imprecision,

Best the giddy shadows of his song:

 

Eyes veiled, dark with mystery,

Sunshine trembling in the noonday glare,

Starlight, in the tepid autumn air,

Shimmering in the night-blue filigree!

 

For nuance, not Color absolute,

Is your goal; subtle and shaded hue!

Nuance! It alone is what lets you

Marry dream to dream, and horn to flute!

 

Shun all cruel and ruthless Railleries;

Hurtful Quip, lewd Laughter, that appall

Heaven, Azure-eyed, to tears; and all

Garlic-stench scullery recipes!

 

Take vain Eloquence and wring its neck!

Best you keep your Rhyme sober and sound,

Lest it wander, reinless and unbound--

How far? Who can say?--if not in check!

 

Rhyme! Who will its infamies revile?

What deaf child, what Black of little wit

Forged with the worthless bauble, fashioned it

False and hollow-sounding to the file?

 

Music first and foremost, and forever!

Let your verse be what goes soaring, sighing,

Set free, fleeing from the soul gone flying

Off to other skies and loves, wherever.

 

Let your verse be aimless chance, delighting

In good-omened fortune, sprinkled over

Dawn's wind, bristling scents of mint, thyme, clover...

All the rest is nothing more than writing.

 

-Paul Verlaine (tr. Norman R. Shapiro)

 

 

I've been reading Richard Hell's novel Godlike, which retells the romance of Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, but setting the story in New York City in the 1970s instead of Paris of the 1870s. Pick your drug of choice: absinthe or something more modern. The novel is told from the point of view of the Verlaine character after the death of Rimbaud, with flashbacks to when the affair was at its hottest.

I didn't really know the poetry of Paul Verlaine at all, so I looked up some poems on-line to see what they were like. 

Richard Hell is coming to the main Toronto library to discuss the book. Will he sing a few bars from Blank Generation? Probably not, alas, he's supposed to be retired from performing music.