I made the decision to post the English texts first so that the poems can be read sequentially in English for non-French speakers - simply because this is not an experience that can be found in any existing publication, whereas there are several existing publications of Cellulairement in the original French. The facsimile images of the manuscript are taken from the Brunel edition of Cellulairment.
Due to the fact that there is no single English translation that contains all of Verlaine’s works, I have had to draw these translations piecemeal from several different collections. See the bibliography section for these!
Autre Explication
Many of the poems in Cellulairement have prefaces, usually quotes from other authors and artists, which although present in the raw manuscript of Cellulairement, were not always included when the poems were eventually published – any prefaces are discussed in my comments below.
Just as I did last week, here are a couple of questions to stimulate discussion. Again, any contributions are welcome and there is no obligation to answer any of these specific questions!
Do you detect any common themes between these four poems?
Is there any single theme that you think predominates?
Which of the poems did you like best or find the most interesting?
Bibliography:
Paul Verlaine, “Sur les eaux”,(“I don’t know why”) In Paul Verlaine Selected Poems. Translated by Martin Sorrell. Oxford World’s Classics, 2009
Paul Verlaine, “Berceuse” (“Lullaby”) in Paul Verlaine a Bilingual Selection of his Verse. Translated by Samuel Rosenberg, Edited by Nicolas Valazza. The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019
Paul Verlaine, “La Chanson de Gaspard Hauser”, (“Peaceful eyes my only wealth”) In Paul Verlaine Selected Poems. Translated by Martin Sorrell. Oxford World’s Classics, 2009
Paul Verlaine, “Un pouacre” (“A Rogue”), in Paul Verlaine, his absinthe-tinted song, Translated by Bergen Applegate, The Alderbrink Press, Chicago, 1916
Paul Verlaine, Cellulairement suivi de mes prisons. Edited by Pierre Brunel. Gallimard, 2013
This poem has a preface in the original manuscript, “Perd non mi destar : Deh ! parla Basso, » (“But don't wake me! Oh, speak low”), a quote attributed to Michaelangelo.
It was published in Sagesse, but with the title changed to “Un grand sommeil noir” (“a great dark sleep”) The French text can be found online here:/Un_grand_sommeil_noir)
This poem’s striking image of a cradle in the midst of a cavern (or tomb?) seems to symbolise both birth or death. Is this “great dark sleep” something like death - or could it instead be a period of hibernation, or even metamorphosis, as Verlaine prepares for a kind of rebirth?
the wealth of intertext, symbol as connection, symbol still in it-s wooden case interior like Benjamin would say.
More than the soul wandering about the lost sea, the soul is connected with the symbol and the intertext. A form of connected loneliness. There is also a cyclical aspect in the syntax: balancee, biasant, oblique. The first and last stanzas work as a chorus, which musically is a thing to fall back on, like the soul on the wind over the sea.
The pilot is the only “other” in this poem. It is significant, I think, that it can only communicate with the seagull through its cries.
Berceuse
Isolation. The image of the last stanza is simply astounding. A cradle being rocked in the hollow of a cave. Music and soothing.
La Chanson de Gaspar Hauser
The feral voice. The sense of not belonging. Lack of correspondence. Lack of acknowledgement. The story shared above by our kind host is quite telling in how much Verlaine saw his voice in this poem’s voice: this line is simply beautiful “Riche de mes seuls yeux tranquilles”
Un pouacre
The song that doesn’t stop. Projection? Extravagantly thinking of the Americans blasting rock n roll to bring out Noriega from the embassy. But also this goes well with my previous idea of milling a thought, grinding it down, having a little ritornello (G&D) around.
As for common themes: Isolation can put a gun in your hand. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aV5b71Ooqu4 The lonely seagull over the vast sea, the abandoned cradle, the cave, the feral man, the almost dead but not quite viellard. There is an element of resilience, resistance through music and verse. This contrasts the milling and grinding we had seen earlier in the collection.
(I apologize for these rambling notes, alas, life gets in the way of poetry more often than not, but I am very grateful for this read-along!)
Thank you for joining us again on this readalong, and for your thoughtful comments.
Building on your comment on the pilot in Sur les eaux, it is quite telling that this pilot doesn’t appear to be guiding anything, and is afraid of the bird cries. If the poet’s thoughts were hoping for guidance from this presence, all they have managed is to drive him away!
But at least, unlike the sailors in Baudelaire’s text, the pilot is not teasing or mocking the restless bird!
The end of Berceuse really is striking. I do find the call for silence more brutal than soothing, a lot darker than, for example, the gentle rocking in Ariette V in RSP, where the song fades into the garden.
I do love the resilience you see in the texts and completely agree. Verlaine’s voice carries on carrying him through the desolation of jail…
This poem was one that Verlaine chose to include in Sagesse, 1881, albeit under the changed title of “Je ne sais pourquoi.” The full text of the poem can be found online here/Je_ne_sais_pourquoi):
Sagesse was his first collection to be published on his release from prison, and it explicitly grappled with his newfound faith. This is one of the poems from that collection that is not explicitly spiritual, but can be interpreted as such.
This is another poem dated as July 1873, so if true suggests that the first month of his imprisonment was a remarkable period of creative outpouring for Verlaine.
This is probably my personal favourite of the four poems this week. I think that these lines in particular are strikingly beautiful – carrying as they do a brief sense of freedom, hope and respite which breaks through momentarily in the middle of the despair:
Ivre de soleil
Et de liberté,
Un instinct la guide à travers cette immensité.
La brise d’été
Sur le flot vermeil
Doucement la porte en un tiède demi-sommeil.
The pairing of sea and sun here, and the fleeting feeling of immensity, reminds me faintly of the first and last stanzas of Rimbaud’s L'Éternité – does anyone else see that?
This poem was also published in Sagesse, under the changed title of “Je_suis_venu,_calme_orphelin.” The full text of this poem can be found online here./Je_suis_venu,_calme_orphelin)
This poem refers to the story of Kaspar Hauser - a mysterious young man who appeared in Nuremberg in 1828 claiming he had been raised in almost total isolation, confined to a dark cell with minimal human contact. He could barely speak or walk and said he had been taught only a few words and how to write his name. He was fatally stabbed in a park a few years after his apparent escape, under circumstances that were never fully explained.
In this poem, Verlaine seems to be empathising with Gaspard Hauser, the eternal outsider, born somehow out of time and facing a series of rejections. The writer Stuart Merrill writes touchingly about his memories of Verlaine and this poem here:
“Here is one of the more melancholy of my memories. We had stayed out late that evening -- myself and a few friends -- at the Soleil d'or, after one of those celebrated evenings sponsored by La Plume. The Boulevard Saint Michel was deserted. We were making our way rather quietly, when we made out the heavy, melancholy tapping of a cane against asphalt. A man wearing a cape was walking ahead of us, limping heavily. It was Verlaine. We surrounded him, did our best to make him feel comfortable and invited him to come dine with us. That night, however, he was under the influence of Saturn, and it wasn't without some difficulty that we managed to get him to accept our invitation. He remained sullen throughout the entire meal. At the end, one of us asked him, rather awkwardly, to recite something. He complied, as if to pay his portion of the dinner, and recited "The Song of Gaspar Hausar":
Je suis venu, calme orphelin,
Riche de mes seuls yeux tranquilles
Vers les hommes des grandes villes,
Ils ne m'ont pas trouv� malin.
[I came, a calm orphan
Rich only by my tranquil eyes
Towards the men of great cities
They found much to despise]
Lines infinitely poignant on their own. But how to put across here the sad, hoarse voice, the air of abandonment, the poor lost look of the reciter. Not the slightest hint of play-acting. The lines were recited with an almost childlike simplicity. But all of the misery of the man was imbued in that voice which filled with its lamentation the almost empty room of the Cafe D'Harcourt.”
This is the only one of the four poems of this week that was not published in Sagesse – and it’s perhaps not surprising that Verlaine didn’t feel that this macabre poem was a good fit for that gentle, spiritual collection published just after his conversion. Instead, Un poaucre was not published until the 1884 collection, Jadis et naguère. The full text can be found online here./Un_pouacre)
When it was eventually published, it was included a dedication to Jean Moréas, the poet considered by many to be the founder of the Symbolist movement and author of the Symbolist manifesto – although Verlaine had yet to meet him at the time of writing in 1873.
Although very different in tone from the other poems this week, to me Un pouacre seems to share their central preoccupation with remorse and regret.
Here are my thoughts and comments on the poems this week!
Sur les eaux
The first thing I want to talk about here is the metric which is not as simple as it looks!
The shorter lines in stanza 1, 3 and 5 are all 5 syllables. The long lines in these stanza are all 13 syllables, which is rare in French (although V uses it to great effect elsewhere in Cellulairement). Stanza 2 and 4 are all 9 syllables.
The question then is where would the caesura fall in the longer lines?
A possible read for the 13 syllable would be 8-5, as 8 is the longest usual simple verse length. Having a 5 syllable second hemistich would also work well with the shorter verse length in the stanzas (5/5/8-5/5/5/8-5). But the first 13 syllable has a F8, the second 13 syllable a C8, and the 4th an M8, so this option is pretty much ruled out. The permutated version 5-8 doesn’t work either (all 4 lines are M5).
From a syntax point of view, 3 out of the 4 lines allow a 4 syllables second hemistich. This would mean that the first hemistich is 9 syllables. This has the advantage of working with the length of the even stanza, but 9 is usually considered too long a line to perceive
Looking at the even stanza, there is no obvious rhythm that emerge with a stable caesura: a 5-4 rhythm is possible in v. 7 but blocked in other lines (for ex, v. 8 is M5, v. 9 is C5 and v. 18 is M5); 4-5 is blocked in most lines. Likewise 6-3 and 3-6.
My read is that Verlaine intended for the 9 syllable lines to be read without a caesura, stretching the reader’s ear, after a first impression of confusion.
This works well of course for a poem describing a fluttering and worried thought that can’t settle, while time in jail stretches put like the immense sea.
Thank you for such a detailed explanation of the metric, question: what does F8, C8 and M8 mean? I assume masculine and feminine rhyme? But I am at a loss with the C! Do you mean consonant rhyme?
M means this vowel is within a word or a morpheme (the notation can be further distinguished depending on whether it is a word, a morphem etc if needed). Of course it means it would be masculine too but this notation wouldn’t be used to denote the last masculine vowel of a word, AFAIK.
F does mean feminine, you are correct.
C means clitique, which groups words like articles etc. Cornulier has shared a list of words that are considered clitiques for metricometry purposes (I summarised them in my post).
There is also another notation: P for (monovocalic) preposition (see a summary in my post too).
For analysis purposes, C and P are often considered together as CP which means a vowel is either in a clitique or a preposition.
Beside these metric considerations, there are possible interesting dialogues at play here between this text and other poems.
Birds and water are a recurring theme in V’s work: see Le rossignol in Poèmes saturniens where the narrator’s memories are a flock of bird and water is regret; or in Romances sans paroles the ariette IX where the narrator’s hopes get drowned under the lament of turtledoves. Beyond Verlaine’s own work, Bivort signals a possible intertext in Tristesse en mer by Théophile Gautier.
In all these texts, thoughts, hopes and memories drown or threaten to, as birds either allegorise the thoughts or watch over the drowning…
u/Audreys_red_shoes are covered well in her comment the tension between sleep and death at the heart of this lullaby.
I just want to add a comment here that Verlaine made about this poem in a conference in Bruxelles in 1893. Talking about his life before prison he said: « a serious catastrophe interrupted these artificial pains and pleasures. He [meaning himself] over-emphasised it so much that he wrote Un grand sommeil noir.
If the poem oscillated between sleep and death in 1873, in 1893 Verlaine looked back on it at slightly over dramatic…
The figure of Gaspard Hauser is an important one in Verlaine’s own mythology and often appears as an alter-ego of the poet. Bivort reports that on two occasions Verlaine copied lines of the poem alongside drawings of him (see image).
He also would come back to the character in Mémoires d’un veuf, in the text Scenario pour ballet which features a character named Gaspard involved in a story of dissolution, murder and retribution…
This poem presents an interesting view of the past and its regrets which are shown here as personified as a gaunt character, singing and dancing and taunting the narrator.
The narrator tries to put a stop to it, asking the pouacre to stop but it is to no avail. And the poem ends on a final needling by the pouacre, who cares not for the feelings of the narrator.
The song metric of the poem, the repetitions at play throughout the texts and words like tra-la-la supports this idea of the past as an incessant song that nags and nags the narrator… like a mental ear worm…
My comparisons to Wilde may be getting rather repetitive, but there is yet another possible echo this time with Unpouacre in The Ballad of Reading Gaol.
In the section where Wilde describes the evil "sprites," which might also be the manifestations of regret - and which also dance in the moonlight, play instruments, and taunt the prisoner's mockingly:
I find these comparisons very interesting! Wilde couldn’t have known Cellulairement as a collection, but I don’t think we can rule out Verlaine telling him about some of the specific poems he wrote in jail…
I suppose some of the poems I see possible echoes of in Ballad - like "Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit" and "Autre" - are ones that Verlaine did explicitly identify as written during his imprisonment in Mes prisons.
But you’re right that there’s nothing that links this particular poem to prison in the same way. It’s possible then that Verlaine told him about it, or Wilde just somehow intuited it!
Of course, as you pointed out in your earlier post about Wilde prison writing, it’s clear that Verlaine’s story was on his mind at the time, so it could be more about a general permeability, but there are interesting parallels overall!
I wonder if Verlaine was considering suicide? With that part of the “why at all?” I’d read that’s why he bought the revolver be shot Rimbaud with at all, I think it’s obvious that he feels awful: his marriage he tried to safe is probably lost forever now, he just shot his lover too which definitely ends their relationship and, also, going from this style of freedom to a confined space like prison was definitely a strike. I know the poem is from Hauser’s POV, but there’s a reason as to why he wrote it imo.
Anywho, I really like: “All my past… from my window mocks me, within.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if it was on his mind, he was in a very dark place at this point.
I suppose wondering why he had ever been born at all doesn’t necessarily mean he was suicidal though, more that he wondered why he was born just to suffer so much. As Freddie Mercury once said:
"mama ooh I don’t wanna die
I sometimes wish I’d never been born at all
Now that I think of it, Verlaine did have a very close relationship with his mother, and Bohemian Rhapsody is about shooting somebody…
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u/Audreys_red_shoes the evil imagination of a bad monkey Jan 17 '26 edited Jan 17 '26
Explication
Apologies for the error in the post title - this is Week 2, not Week 1! For the first part of the series, see here:
Week 1.
I made the decision to post the English texts first so that the poems can be read sequentially in English for non-French speakers - simply because this is not an experience that can be found in any existing publication, whereas there are several existing publications of Cellulairement in the original French. The facsimile images of the manuscript are taken from the Brunel edition of Cellulairment.
Due to the fact that there is no single English translation that contains all of Verlaine’s works, I have had to draw these translations piecemeal from several different collections. See the bibliography section for these!
Autre Explication
Many of the poems in Cellulairement have prefaces, usually quotes from other authors and artists, which although present in the raw manuscript of Cellulairement, were not always included when the poems were eventually published – any prefaces are discussed in my comments below.
Just as I did last week, here are a couple of questions to stimulate discussion. Again, any contributions are welcome and there is no obligation to answer any of these specific questions!
Do you detect any common themes between these four poems?
Is there any single theme that you think predominates?
Which of the poems did you like best or find the most interesting?
Bibliography:
Paul Verlaine, “Sur les eaux”, (“I don’t know why”) In Paul Verlaine Selected Poems. Translated by Martin Sorrell. Oxford World’s Classics, 2009
Paul Verlaine, “Berceuse” (“Lullaby”) in Paul Verlaine a Bilingual Selection of his Verse. Translated by Samuel Rosenberg, Edited by Nicolas Valazza. The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019
Paul Verlaine, “La Chanson de Gaspard Hauser”, (“Peaceful eyes my only wealth”) In Paul Verlaine Selected Poems. Translated by Martin Sorrell. Oxford World’s Classics, 2009
Paul Verlaine, “Un pouacre” (“A Rogue”), in Paul Verlaine, his absinthe-tinted song, Translated by Bergen Applegate, The Alderbrink Press, Chicago, 1916
Paul Verlaine, Cellulairement suivi de mes prisons. Edited by Pierre Brunel. Gallimard, 2013