"Attention! the shadow of great sailing-ships passes over the dahlias of submarine forests; And I am for a moment in the shadow of whales going to the pole!"
Whatever value the book may have as poetry, the rhymeless poems in it have, as we have seen, considerable importance as being attempts to reproduce Walt Whitman's manner. They are interesting, too, because they attempt to create a mood by the use of successive images.[7] Perhaps, elsewhere (Tancrède de Visan suggests the Song of Solomon) this method has been applied successfully. The poems in _Serres Chaudes_ are experiments.
[1] Cf. Rodenbach, _Le Règne du Silence_, p. 1:
"Mais les choses pourtant entre le cadre d'or Ont un air de souffrir de leur vie inactive; Le miroir qui les aime a borné leur essor En un recul de vie exigüe et captive..."
[2] Gérard Harry, p. 19. _Le Masque_, Série ii, No. 5: "jeune encore, il avait sollicité les fonctions de juge de paix, mais le gouvernement belge, prévoyant son destin de poète, les lui avait généreusement refusées, et pour reconnaître ce service, Maeterlinck ne lui rend que mépris et dédain et refuse même les distinctions honorifiques les plus hautes, celles qu'on n'accorde généralement qu'aux très grands industriels ou aux très vieux militaires ou politiciens."
"Chambres pleines de songe! Elles vivent vraiment En des rêves plus beaux que la vie ambiante, Grandissant toute chose au Symbole, voyant Dans chaque rideau pâle une Communiante Aux falbalas de mousseline s'éployant Qui communie au bord des vitres, de la Lune!" --_Le Règne du Silence_, p. 4.
[4] They make one think of what Novalis wrote: "poems unconnected, yet with associations, like dreams; poems, melodious merely and full of beautiful words, but absolutely without sense or connection--at most individual sentences intelligible--nothing but fragments, so to speak, of the most varied things."
[5] See Schlaf's _Maeterlinck_, p. 12; _ibid._, p. 30; and Monty Jacobs' _Maeterlinck_, p. 39. But Maeterlinck's brain was always as healthy as his body. At the time he wrote _Serres Chaudes_ disease was fashionable, that is all; and, beside the main influence of Baudelaire, there was the fear of death instilled by the Jesuits.