"La Mer choque ses blocs de flots contre les rocs,"
"Dites suis-je seul avec mon âme, Mon âme hélas maison d'ébène Où s'est fendu sans bruit un soir Le grand miroir de mon espoir?"
At times transcending the blank negativity of despair, the poet will coquet positively with his own madness, as he wanders "hallucinated in the forest of numbers," or wishes to march towards "madness and her suns, her white suns of moonlight in the great weird noon, and her distant echoes bitten by dins and barkings and full of vermilion hounds." Or abandoning the more specific formulation of his own emotions, he will give vent to his feelings by letting his brain dance upon the lurid boards of some _macabre_ theme. The little poem, _La Tête_, is dank with all the smooth bloodiness of the guillotine, while the _Dame en Noir_, with the ghastly rhymes and assurances of its refrain, is swathed in a black pathos, in comparison with which the most lurid horrors of Baudelaire appear the mere artificial extravagances of a perverse mind.
As we have already seen, the blackness of the trilogy which we have just considered was no mere dabbling in morbidity, but the genuine expression of a genuine unhappiness. In, however, _Les Apparus dans Mes Chemins, Les Vignes de Ma Muraille_ the storm gradually exhausts itself, and is replaced by a more serene and confident mood. Contrast, for instance, with the drastic violence of _Les Débâcles_ the jaded weariness of such a lyric as _Celui de la Fatigue_, where the poet sings of an "ardour broken on the whirling staircase of the infinite," or of such a passage as
"Je m'habille des loques de mes jours Et le bâton de mon orgueil il plie, Mes pieds dites comme ils sont lourds De me porter de me trainer toujours Au long de siècle de ma vie."
And as a complete antithesis, again, to the black bloodiness of such poems as _La Tête_ or _Un Meurtre,_ take the white suavity of _St. Georges_:
"Il vient un bel ambassadeur Du pays blanc illuminé de marbres Où dans les pares au bords des mers sur l'arbre De la bonté suavement croit la douceur."
But this serenity marked rather a respite in Verhaeren's development than a real abatement of his poetic fury. With the furnaces of his mind recharged to their maximum capacity with blazing health, he starts to race his muse over the main lines of the modern civilisation, which lead from _The Hallucinated Country-sides_ to _The Tentacular Towns_. Though written at different times, these two sets of poems constitute the contrasting halves of a complete whole, and were published together in 1895 with two prologues, _La Ville_ and _La Plaine_. The prologues, in particular, well illustrate the new rushing irregular prosody, specially forged for the purpose of hammering out that white-hot steel of the modern civilisation which enmeshes in its fabric all the helpless flotsam of the agricultural economy. The academic harmony of the alexandrine is here abandoned. The rhymes crash out at lesser and greater intervals as they march along on feet that range from the quick spasm of some dissyllabic line to the spondaic emphasis of a full-length alexandrine.