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.

 

 

Classics Club Spin #44

 

Mr. Dickens ponders the possibilities of chance.

Yes! It's time for a Classics Club spin. You know the rules, but what are the books I'm ready to read based on the dictates of chance? Well, it's actually a pretty quiet time for me over the next month and a half, so I'm allowing a few of the longer choices on this list. I also prioritized ones that weren't on my last list. So here we go...

1.) Willa Cather/Lucy Gayheart

2.) Elizabeth Gaskell/Wives and Daughters

3.) Sinclair Lewis/Elmer Gantry

4.) Jack London/The Iron Heel

5.) Edgar Wallace/The Four Just Men

6.) Simone de Beauvoir/The Mandarins

7.) Joachim Machado de Assis/Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas

8.) Walter Pater/Imaginary Portraits

9.) Virginia Woolf/The Years

10.) Virginia Woolf/Between the Acts

11.) Andrei Bely/Petersburg

12.) Knut Hamsun/Hunger

13.) Halldor Laxness/Salka Valka

14.) Diogenes Laertius/Lives of the Eminent Philosophers

15.) W. E. B. Du Bois/The Autobiography

16.) Apollonius Rhodius/The Argonautica

17.) Nazami Ganjavi/Layli and Majnun

18.) Lucan/The Civil War

19.) Nikos Kazantzakis/Odyssey: A Modern Sequel

20.) John Ruskin/Unto This Last

 

I'm guessing the Kazantzakis and the Diogenes Laertius are the difficult ones on that list, but that's OK, I should have time. Which look good to you?

 

Sunday, May 17th, will reveal all. 

Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight

Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight

(in Springfield, Illinois)

 

It is portentous, and a thing of state

That here at midnight, in our little town

A mourning figure walks, and will not rest,

Near the old court-house pacing up and down, 

 

Or by his homestead, or in shadowed yards

He lingers where his children used to play,

Or through the market on the well-worn stones

He stalks until the dawn-stars burn away.

 

A bronzed, lank man! His suit of ancient black,

A famous high top-hat, and a plain worn shawl

Make him the quaint, great figure that men love,

The prairie-lawyer, master of us all.

 

He cannot sleep upon his hill-side now.

He is among us:--as in times before!

And we who toss and lie awake for long

Breathe deep, and start, to see him pass the door.

 

His head is bowed, he thinks on men and kings.

Yea, when the sick world cries, how can he sleep?

Too many peasants fight, they know not why,

Too many homesteads in black terror weep.

 

The sins of all the war-lords burn his heart.

He sees the dreadnoughts scouring every main.

He carries on his shawl-wrapped shoulders now

The bitterness, the folly and the pain.

He cannot rest until a spirit-dawn

Shall come;--the shining hope of Europe free:

The league of sober folk, the Worker's Earth,

Bringing long peace to Cornland, Alp, and Sea.

 

It breaks his heart that kings must murder still,

That all his hours of travail here for men

Seem yet in vain. And who will bring white peace

That he may sleep upon his hill again?

-Vachel Lindsay

 

Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931) was an American poet who was born and died in Springfield. This is from his book The Congo and Other Poems of 1914. 

 

One wonders if he's walking again. 

 

The young Abraham Lincoln reading by firelight (at midnight?) is a pen-and-ink drawing by my grandfather.