Les petits pieds sous la chemise Se sauvèrent: "Veux-tu finir!" --La première audace permise, Le rire feignait de punir!
--Pauvrets palpitant sous ma lèvre, Je baisai doucement ses yeux: --Elle jeta sa tête mièvre En arrière: "Oh! c'est encor mieux!...
"Monsieur, j'ai deux mots à te dire...." --Je lui jetai le reste au sein Dans un baiser, qui la fit rire D'un bon rire qui voulait bien....
--Elle était fort déshabillée Et de grands arbres indiscrets, Aux vitres penchaient leur feuillée Malinement, tout près, tout près.
The subject matter is older than Ovid, and how many poems has it led to every silliness, every vulgarity! One has no instant of doubt here, nor, I think, in any line of any poem of Rimbaud's. How much I might have learned from the printed page that I have learned slowly from actualities. Or perhaps we never do learn from the page; but are only capable of recognizing the page after we have learned from actuality.
I do not know whether or no Rimbaud "started" the furniture poetry with "Le Buffet"; it probably comes, most of it, from the beginning of Gautier's "Albertus." I cannot see that the "Bateau Ivre" rises above the general level of his work, though many people seem to know of this poem (and of the sonnet on the vowels) who do not know the rest of his work. Both of these poems are in Van Bever and Léautaud. I wonder in what other poet will we find such firmness of coloring and such certitude.
Laforgue 1860-1887; published 1885 Corbière 1840-1875; published 1873 and 1891 Rimbaud 1854-1891; published 1873 Remy de Gourmont 1858-1915 Merril 1868-1915 Tailhade 1854-1919 Verhaeren 1855-1916 Moréas 1856-1911 _Living_: Vielé-Griffin 1864 Jammes 1868 De Régnier 1864 Spire 1868 _Younger Men_: Klingsor, Romains, Vildrac _Other Dates_: Verlaine 1844-1896 Mallarmé 1842-1898 Samain 1858-1900 Elskamp, born 1862
As in prose, Remy de Gourmont found his own form, so also in poetry, influenced presumably by the medieval sequaires and particularly by Goddeschalk's quoted in his (de Gourmont's) work on "Le Latin Mystique," he recreated the "litanies." It was one of the great gifts of "symbolisme," of the doctrine that one should "suggest" not "present"; it is, in his hand, an effective indirectness. The procession of all beautiful women moves before one in the "Litanies de la Rose"; and the rhythm is incomparable. It is not a poem to lie on the page, it must come to life in audition, or in the finer audition which one may have in imagining sound. One must "hear" it, in one way or another, and out of that intoxication comes beauty. One does no injustice to De Gourmont by giving this poem alone. The "Litany of the Trees" is of equal or almost equal beauty. The Sonnets in prose are different; they rise out of natural speech, out of conversation. Paul Fort perhaps began or rebegan the use of conversational speech in rhyming prose paragraphs, at times charmingly.