Paul Verlaine Poetry

Cythera
(Fêtes Galants)

A summer-house’s lattices sweetly cover our caress, joy the roses cool, our friends: perfume of roses, faint and sweet, blowing on the summer breeze, with her own fragrance blends: as the promise her eyes gave her courage is complete, and her lips yield an exquisite fever: and Love fulfilling all things save Appetite, jams and sorbets here protect us from the ache of hunger.

To Clymène
(Fêtes Galants)

Mystical singing-birds, romances without words, dear, because your eyes the shade of skies, because your voice, strange vision that will derange, troubling the horizon of my reason, because the rare perfume of your swanlike paleness, because the innocence of your fragrance, ah, because all your being, music so piercing, clouds of lost angels, tones and scents, has by soft cadences with its correspondences, lured my subtle heart, oh let it be so!

Sentimental Conversation
(Fêtes Galants)

In the old lonely park’s frozen glass two dark shadows lately passed. Their lips were slack, their eyes were blurred, the words they spoke were scarcely heard. In the old lonely park’s frozen glass two spectral forms invoked the past. ‘Do you remember our former ecstasies?’ ‘Why would you have me rake up memories?’ ‘Does your heart still beat at my name alone?’ ‘Is it always my soul you see in dream?’ – ‘Ah, no’. ‘Oh the lovely days of unspeakable mystery, when our mouths met!’ – ‘Ah yes, maybe.’ ‘How blue it was, the sky, how high our hopes!’ ‘Hope fled, conquered, along the dark slopes.’ So they walked there, among the wild herbs, and the night alone listened to their words.

In Her Dress….
(La Bonne Chanson: III)

In her dress of grey-green frills, one day in June, I was feeling anxious, she appeared, smiling at my glances, the one I admired without fear of ill. She came, went, returned, spoke, and sat, serious, light, ironic, tender, and I felt, deep in my soul, so sombre, like some joyous image of all that: her voice, its subtle music’s tone, delightfully accompanying the artless wit of sweet chattering where a kind heart’s joy was shown. I was as quickly, once the semblance of my rebellion was over, wholly in the power of that little fairy, as since I’ve beseeched to be, trembling.

The Moon, White…
(La Bonne Chanson: VI)

The moon, white, shines in the trees: from each bright branch a voice flees under the leaves that move, O well-beloved. The pools reflect a mirror’s depth, the silhouette of willows’ wet black where the wind weeps… let us dream, time sleeps. It seems a vast, soothing, tender balm is falling from heaven’s calm empurpled by a star… it’s the exquisite hour.

The Noise From Bars….
(La Bonne Chanson: XVI)

The noise from bars, the pavement’s mire, ruined sycamores leafing black air: the bus, a typhoon of mud and metal, bouncing, between wheels, with its rattle, rolling its red and green eyes slowly, workers off to the club, pipes smoking, under the noses of policemen, those drones, roofs dripping, walls sweating, slippery stones, broken asphalt, gutters where sewers blend, behold, my road – with paradise at the end.

It Rains In My Heart…
(Romances Sans Paroles: Arriettes Oubliées I)

‘It rains softly on the town.’
- Rimbaud

It rains in my heart as it rains on the town, what is this art that soaks to my heart? Oh sweet sound of the rain on the earth and the roofs! For a heart dulled again, oh the song of the rain! It rains for no reason in this heart without heart. What? And no treason? A grief without reason? It’s pain’s darkest state not to know why, my heart feels such weight without love, without hate.

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