Poems of Paul Verlaine

This is the debut collection that announced Paul Verlaine as one of French poetry's most startling voices, written when he was just twenty-two. Here already is the mastery of sound that would make his verses sing themselves aloud: verses where rhythm and rhyme become indistinguishable from meaning, where a phrase can ache like a bell struck in an empty room. The collection moves between mythological landscapes and the gritty streets of mid-nineteenth-century Paris, between sensual love poems and portraits of alienation, between classical learning and raw, earthy desire. Saturn hangs over it all that melancholy, brooding heaviness that would become Verlaine's signature. Debussy would set "Clair de Lune" to music; generations of singers would interpret his verses. These are poems for anyone who believes that poetry should be heard as much as read, that beauty and sadness are not opposites but partners in the same dance.