Verlaine – Borderless

By Jared Carter

In the last section of that book with the most beautiful of titles, Per Amica Silentia Lunae,[1] the Irish poet Yeats, addressing Iseult Gonne, refers to those moments when he becomes happy – when poetry over brims on the page, and things turn luminous, and time seems to “burn up” in the sense of no longer mattering, no longer having the power to detract or diminish.

He is writing about lyric poetry, of course, and about those special moments that may come upon us at any age or at any time, but which become more recognisable to the poet as he or she grows older, and more experienced and knowledgeable – although they are also becoming, in actuarial terms, more rare.

But perhaps not. Perhaps, with wisdom and insight and acceptance, they actually increase in frequency. Recently I told an old friend, a visitor to my home, that after all these years I have finally begun to understand how to write poems. Put simply, I have gotten better at being patient, and at waiting until they appear. I have learned the necessity of silencing my own thoughts in order to hear the brushing of their wings as they pass overhead.

Or, to change the metaphor – only when the wind dies down can the bee or the butterfly land on the blossom. Genuine lyricism comes only after the self has been quieted. Not put to sleep, or – least of all – “put on hold,” in that ugly modern phrase.

Rather, shifted into neutral. Allowed to drift, and possibly to become something rich and strange.

“It may be an hour before the mood passes,” Yeats writes, in a completely disarming, unexpected passage, “but latterly I seem to understand that I enter upon it the moment I cease to hate.” He goes on to say, “I think the common condition of our life is hatred – I know that this is so with me – irritation with public or private events or persons.”

He attempts to define what he means by not hating, and it is not necessarily loving. Rather, “in those brief intense visions of sleep, I have something about me that, though it makes me love, is more like innocence. I am in the place where the Daimon is, but I do not think he is with me until I begin to make a new personality.”

This new personality is a paradox. Recognisably human – fragile, perishable, transient – it lacks the negative aspects of selfhood. It is no longer selfish or greedy or hateful. It has accepted its present state of being and its eventual death and dissolution.

We are speaking, then, of neither comedy or tragedy, nor their dramatic manifestations in verse, but of the lyric temper in poetry, and of the manner in which the poem is its abode – just as the moth or butterfly, as it seeks to gather up the pollen, finds its momentary resting place in the flower. But there is a dark side to this metaphor, and in any such discussion it cannot be avoided. Even the purest lyric voice is, by its very nature, transitory and perishable.

Honeybees, too, gather up pollen, but these are worker bees, who venture far from the hive, and who overcome all manner of risk in doing so. Within the hive itself, the drones partake of the bounty, but they do nothing to earn their keep. Only one of them will bed the queen. The others, whether they know it or not, are doomed. By autumn, as part of the very nature of things, the workers, understanding that only a finite amount of food is available to see them through the winter, push the drones out of the hive, where they perish amid the thorns and brambles.

The works of many a lyric poet, who has dined the summer long on the ambrosia of the imagination, will eventually be subject to sheer circumstance, and drop away from the hive. Sappho[2]’s main works are lost; Keats[3]’s productive years were pitiably few. Madness overtook Smart[4], Hölderlin[5], Clare[6], and dozens more. We know this, and thus each lyric poem we have managed to preserve from past centuries speaks to us in an especially poignant way. However lovely, however evocative, we know it will not last.

The philosopher and poet George Santayana[7] has summed up the situation: “Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.”

This is why lyric poetry retains its power to speak to us, down through the ages: because it is perishing before our very eyes, even as our own eyes are perishing. And yet it does not matter. “I am in the place,” Yeats explains, “where the Daimon is.”

And what might that be – the presence of “the Daimon”? Such a term can mystify, but surely this refers to some fundamental antinomy of human existence, some intuition of paradox that lies at the heart of being. Keats called it “negative capability”; F. Scott Fitzgerald[8] praised “that ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

The two ideas? The notion that art itself, in all its fragility, strives to endure. Perhaps another poet, Edwin Arlington Robinson[9], best described the paradox, in his tribute to Walt Whitman[10]: “When we write / Men’s letters on proud marble or on sand,/ We write them there forever.”

To be with the Daimon, to participate in timeless awareness, is why we write lyric poems, why we return to them – and why we revere the great periods of lyric achievement. Undoubtedly there have been many, in different cultures around the world, but we have managed to record only a few.

We treasure the lyric writings of the Sufis and the Elizabethans. We hark back to the time of Wordsworth and Hölderlin, to the T’ang Dynasty [618-906] and to that amazing stretch from Baudelaire to Mallarmé in the second half of the nineteenth century, a time that included Tennyson, Dickinson, Verlaine, Hopkins, Housman, Hardy, and Yeats himself.

Eventually, in the course of time, all these will slip away and be forgotten, which is why they now seem so lovely and memorable. They are that which has managed to survive and come down to us in spite of everything. Wang Wei knew this quite well. As the glories of the T’ang began to crumble and fall away, he paid tribute to that bittersweet awareness that we have come to know as the lyric temper:


Be not disquieted either by kindness or by insult –
          empty joy or sorrow.
Do not count on good or evil – you will only
          waste your time . . .
And why seek advice from the Yellow Emperor
          or Confucius?
Who knows but that we all live out our lives
          in the maze of a dream?

“Per amica silentia lunae” is a line from the Virgil[11]‘s Aeneid. Yeats translates it as “Through the friendly silences of the moon”. It is a most pregnant line. The moon never speaks; its very essence is change. And yet each of us considers it a friend, and we invariably greet it with our innermost being, each time we see it in the night sky. We have carried on this friendship since childhood. Lyric poetry deals with such verities.

The following is by Witter Bynner[12], taken from his masterful introduction to The Jade Mountain: A Chinese Anthology: “. . . if we will be honest with ourselves and with our appreciation of what is lastingly important, we shall find these very same poems to be momentous details in the immense patience of beauty. They are the heart of an intimate letter. They bring the true, the beautiful, the everlasting, into simple, easy touch with the human, the homely, and the immediate.”

A key phrase in this passage is worth repeating and remembering: “The immense patience of beauty.” Surely it is to this that the poet must surrender if the lyric temper is to be made manifest.

[1] Translates to ‘Through the Friendly Silences of Moon’, was written by Yeats (1865-1939) between January and May of 1917, and consists of a Prologue and an Epilogue for Iseult Gonne

[2] Greek poet (630 – 570 BCE)

[3] English poet (1795-1821)

[4] English poet (1722-1771)

[5] German poet and philosopher (1770-1843)

[6] English poet (1793-1864)

[7] American poet and philosopher (1863-1954)

[8] American novelist, essayist, and short story writer (1896-1940)

[9] American poet and playwright (1869-1935)

[10] American poet, essayist, and journalist (1819-1892)

[11] Roman Poet (29-19BCE)

[12] American poet and translator (1881-1968)

Jared Carter’s most recent collection, The Land Itself, is from Monongahela Books in West Virginia. His Darkened Rooms of Summer: New and Selected Poems, with an introduction by Ted Kooser, was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2014. A recipient of several literary awards and fellowships, Carter is from the state of Indiana in the U.S.

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By Sunil Sharma

Gustave Caillebotte. Paris Street, Rainy Day, 1877.

Modern Paris was discovered by Baudelaire in his avatar as the flaneur. And Walter Benjamin made this figure intellectually respectful as a field of study.

In a recent visit to Paris, I hovered between two allied states of being a flaneur and a gawking tourist. I had come as a sightseer from Mumbai, India, allured by the tales and well-crafted image of a mythic Paris, drinking in the street flavours on those May days, passively registering the wide monuments and boulevards and palaces and towers in one clean and clear sweep — almost like a wide-angle shot in a Stanley Kubrick film. Spring had set in and the Paris of May 2014 was full of eager tourists from nations as wide apart as China and the USA; Africa and Middle East and Latin America. A bouquet of the ethnicities strung together.

Then, I became a flaneur, making a neat switch, in a single instant.

I became Baudelaire.

Different terms can make you look differently at a similar set of things or a common setting.

Of course, I did not have the urge to write a new millennium version of The Flowers of Evil. At best, you can parody a sacred text but you cannot re-write it, howsoever Borges-like you might be.

I am neither of the two.

Like Mallarme and Verlaine, you can carry forward an idea by expanding it further but cannot imitate with complete fidelity to the original.

So, not in a mood for a cheap replication of a master praised by Proust so profusely, I took on the stance of a flaneur and became a connoisseur of the street-life.

Was it possible?

Assuming the role of a figure long dead or supposed to be dead? Replaced by a tourist? Solo or in a group?

Armed with a camera or a cell phone, in casuals, the modern tourist — guided by brochures and online information and a city map — looks at the urban skyline vicariously familiarized by prior research. Or, could it be at a professional polyglot guide spewing bits and pieces of history like a typical street performer or an amateur actor? A mass tourist consuming the city, architecture, culture, food, arts and clothes — public life — in a predictable way and sequence largely decided by the tourist industry. A few breaks are possible in that routine.

But to resurrect the role and agency of the classic flaneur, you have to take on a different position and way of seeing.

And what was that?

I could not become a dandy—detached, arrogant, inheritor of a small fortune, an idler walking a tortoise on a Paris street of the nineteenth century. Even if I had the means, I could get arrested for an act of animal cruelty!

Those were different times!

So what can be done?

The clues lie in The Flowers of Evil, perhaps.

Will this title be acceptable today? With changing definitions of evil? With life becoming more liberal and open?

Baudelaire was a dandy and a cultivated flaneur—the painter of modern life; a gentleman stroller of the city streets. Part of, yet apart from, the crowds.

But then, not every dandy is a flaneur and every flaneur, a dandy?

Again, dandy is a historical invention, a social-engineering, manufacturing of a social type for a particular age.

Perhaps, a metro-sexual male, now no longer fashionable.

Is he a voyeur?

Perhaps, we all are, given the nature of our society.

Or, a keen participant, an acute observer, a chronicler?

For me, the answer lies in the personality of Charles Baudelaire who in turn was influenced by Edgar Allan Poe. But that would be complicating things further.

Let us stick to our central figure Baudelaire. His genius lies in radicalizing the trope of the French flaneur. A theme that fascinated Walter Benjamin who, in the twentieth century, tried to essay the same role performed so well by Baudelaire in the industrialized Paris of the nineteenth century. The former could not capture the underlying passion of Baudelaire in this unfinished project.

In fact, by the late 1990s and start of the 21^st century, author-flaneur proved an impossible figure.

Market forces, on global level, have incorporated author as a producer of kitsch or dystopia. Dissidents were slowly and subtly disenfranchised.

We are all sellers!

Baudelaire resisted this initial process in Paris. Beckett was next. Sartre and Camus too tried.

Then the flow stopped.

The Flowers of Evil mounts a challenge to the order and morality of the Second Republic.

The poems challenge the bourgeois morality and conception of order and beauty and aesthetics in a radical way. The book talks of evil and implies that the source of evil lies in its origins — capitalism.

In that simple gesture of observing, participating, recording of street life, Baudelaire liberates himself from his historical position and becomes a true artist. By talking of prostitutes and vampires, the poet shows the underbelly of capitalism. His creations provide the material basis for highlighting these themes and give credence to outcasts from the system that feed on the blood of the innocent and the gullible.

The Flowers of Evil is the greatest indictment of the French bourgeoisie by a person deeply embedded in it as a bourgeois but a radical one that unveils the brutal face of a system that once talked of revolutionary slogan of liberty, equality, fraternity!

An evil society can produce evil flowers!

Vampires are for real!

That Baudelaire had not died in 2014 was proven on a street near the Eiffel Tower on that memorable trip.

A Roma girl, bold and audacious, stole my son’s cell phone from his shirt pocket. She returned it after a cop intervened.

I could smell evil in the air. The disenfranchised and the ethnic Roma are still the threat — like the prostitute and the vampire, the perpetual outsiders.

The Paris of Baudelaire is not safe.

The shoot-out at the Charlie Hebdo proves that.

The vampires are out.

This time round, Baudelaire the flaneur has disappeared. There is no one to warn us of these sinister presences.

Sunil Sharma, an academic administrator and author-critic-poet–freelance journalist, is from suburban Mumbai, India. He has published 22 books so far, some solo and some joint, on prose, poetry and criticism. He edits the monthly, bilingual Setu: http://www.setumag.com/p/setu-home.html
For more details of publications, please visit the link below:
http://www.drsunilsharma.blogspot.in/. This story was first published in Scarlet Leaf Review.

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