cruelly deceived. What future ages will think of the book as a criticism of events and motives cannot now be determined, but, as the expression of the tortured soul of one of the most remarkable men of his epoch, it can never lose its interest for other men in other times. At the outbreak of the war, Verhaeren moved to England, but by the spring of 1915 he was again in Saint-Cloud, where for some years he had been in the habit of passing his winters, returning to Belgium for the summers. It is a bitter thing to remember that after the war he never saw Belgium again. On the evening of November 28th, 1916, he went to Rouen to deliver a lecture. Arriving at the station after the lecture, he found that the last train for Paris was just starting; he attempted to board it, but fell, and was crushed under the wheels. It is said that death was mercifully instantaneous. Verhaeren's work is extremely individual. He had made his chief expression a series of irregular rhymed stanzas, no two of which were constructed in the same way. In fact, rhymed vers libre in stanzaic form or divided into parts so long as not properly to be considered stanzas at all, was his most characteristic medium, although he not infrequently wrote in the regular alexandrine. Les Flamandes,> (Les Moines,) and (Les Soirs series are all in alexandrines. Verhaeren united in a remarkable manner the two qualities of visual and audible sensation. No translation can do him justice because of his virtuosity in the latter effect. In La Pluie) there is a constant repetition of La pluie where the liquid, sweeping l's give the continuous sound of falling rain, and the mere repetition is handled so deftly by the addition of changing images: La longue pluie Fine et dense, comme la suie. La longue pluie, La pluie et ses fils identiques La pluie, La longue pluie, avec ses longs fils gris that the vision of interminable, gray lines of rain is indelibly printed upon the consciousness. His knowledge of the psychology of the Belgian peasant is keen and accurate. The growing fright of the gravedigger in (The Miller is most dramatically worked up to the climax. Although Verhaeren's plays are not among his greatest work, his poems are often intensely dramatic. (The Burning Hayricks is a remarkable example of this, but again the poem loses much of its sound in translation. We can get the picture of the great hayricks burning up like torches in the black night, and striking the whole countryside red with their glare, but we lose the sound of La flamme ronfle et casse et broie, S'enroule en chevelure ardente ou lente Puis s'apaise soudain et se détache Et ruse et se dérobe — ou rebondit encore: Et voici, clairs, de la boue et de l'or, Verhaeren's genius is so versatile, it seems to embrace every side of modern man's thought and activity. We have great paintings of the modern city like (The Stock Exchange); we have Monet-like color studies such as (London.) There is an almost numberless collection of weather-pieces of which The Rain, already quoted, is one. No one understands better the peculiar qualities of rain, snow, wind, and fog. But, besides, there are the symbolistic poems, the pictures of the town sucking in the country in (Les Villes Tentaculaires, or the neurasthenic vision of the flowing Thames, watched so long that reason seems flowing away with its waters, in (The Dead.) If we oppose these with the love poems of Les Soirs› series, and the clarion trumpet-calls of the Socialistic poems of which (Get You Gone) is an example, we shall gain some idea of his remarkable range of subject and manner. He was the first poet to see the beauty of the life of to-day the grandeur of mechanical invention, the social necessity which binds country to country, the superb epic which is modern industrialism. Before the war, it might very well be said that Verhaeren was better appreciated in the non-French speaking countries than any other poet writing in the French language. The reason is not far to seek, for Verhaeren, in spite of the tongue in which he wrote, is very far from French. He has a nebulous grandeur which is as remote as possible from French clarity and logical synthesis. Verhaeren's philosophy is idealistic and vague, not precise and logical. He luxuriates where a Frenchman would have carefully pruned. His success lies in the virtues of what might so easily have been faults. His excesses become an organ-point of deep sonority. Poem by poem, and volume by volume, he has built up a huge symphony of the life of man. Never didactic, yet his poems all point to a belief in an ultimate good, which makes the sorrowful reality of (La Belgique Sanglante) and (Les Ailes Rouges de la Guerre› even more poignant. Verhaeren, in his work, in himself, is the ideal which swayed the world before the war, and which he was largely responsible for making universal. His philosophy might be paraphrased by calling it «the beauty and ideality of the material world.»> His is the authentic voice of a period that is gone. [The following translations are by Miss Amy Lowell and are taken from the Appendix to her volume (Six French Poets, copyright by the Macmillan Co. The translations are reprinted by permission of Miss Lowell and of the Macmillan Co. THE THE KITCHEN HE threshold of the kitchen was old and split. The hearth shone like a red puddle, and its flames, incessantly gnawing at the back plate, had eaten into it an obscene subject in melted iron. The fire rejoiced under the mantelpiece which stretched over it like the penthouse roof over a booth, and the bright ornaments of wood, of copper, of lacquer upon it sparked less to the eyes than the writhing coals. Rays escaped from it like a spray of emeralds, and here - there - everywhere gave fillips of brilliance to the glass jugs and glazed platters. To see the sparks fall upon every raised surface, one would have said into such particles did the fire crumble itself— that the sun had been winnowed through a leaded window. A LONDON ND this London of brass and bronze, my soul, where iron plates clash under sheds, where sails go forth without Notre Dame for star go forth, away, toward unknown hazards. Sooty, smoky stations, where gas weeps its distant silver melancholies to roads of lightning; where bored animals yawn at the hour which, immensely mournful, tolls from Westminster. And these embankments, infinite with fatal lanterns Fates whose spindles plunge into darkness and these drowned sailors, under the petals of mud flowers where the flame throws its light. And these shawls and these gestures of drunken women, and these alcohols of golden letters up to the roofs, and all at once death in the midst of these crowds. --- O my soul of the evening, this black London which drags through you! THE THE WINDMILL HE windmill turns in the depths of the evening, very slowly it turns, against a sad and melancholy sky. It turns, and turns, and its wine-colored sail is infinitely sad, and feeble, and heavy, and tired. Since dawn its arms pleading, reproachful - have stretched out and fallen; and now again they fall, far off in the darkening air and absolute silence of extinguished nature. Sick with winter, the day drowses to sleep upon the villages; the clouds are weary of their gloomy travels; and along the copses where shadows are gathering, the wheel-tracks fade away to a dead horizon. Some cabins of beech logs squat miserably in a circle about a colorless pond; a copper lamp hangs from the ceiling and throws a patina of fire over wall and window. And in the immense plain, by the side of the sleeping stream-wretched, miserable hovels! — they fix, with the poor eyes of their ragged window-panes, the old windmill which turns, and weary - turns and dies. THE DEAD N its dress of the color of gall and poison, the corpse of my reason trails upon the Thames. IN Bronze bridges, where wagons clank with interminable noises of hinges, and sails of dark boats, let their shadows fall upon it. With no movement of hands over its clock face, a great belfry, masked with red, gazes at it as though at someone immensely sad and dead. My reason is dead from too much knowledge, from a too great desire to shape the motive of every being and every thing, and place it upon a black granite pedestal. It died atrociously, of a clever poisoning; it died also of a mad dream of an absurd and red empire. On the illuminated evening of a festival, when it felt this triumph float, like eagles, over its head, its nerves gave way. It died when it could no more feel ardor and aching desires. And it killed itself, infinitely exhausted. All down the length of mournful walls, the length of iron factories where hammers boom like thunder, it trails to the funeral. There are wharves and barracks, always wharves with lanterns -slow and motionless spinners of the dim gold of their lights. There are the drearinesses of stones, a brick house, a black jail, whose windows, like dull eyelids, open to the evening fog. There are great insane dockyards, full of dismantled ships and yards quartered against a sky of crucifixions. In its dress of dead jewels, which celebrates the hour of purple at the horizon, the corpse of my reason trails upon the Thames. It goes toward the perils in the depths of shadow and fog, to the long hollow sound of the tolling of heavy bells breaking their wings at the corners of towers. Leaving unsatisfied behind it the immense city of life, it goes toward the black unknown, to sleep in the graves of evening, far away, where the slow and powerful waves, opening their endless. caverns, swallow the dead forever. L THE RAIN ONG like threads without end, the long rain Interminably, across the gray day; Streaks the green window-panes with its long gray threads, Endlessly, the rain, The long rain, The rain. Since yesterday evening it has raveled itself so, Out of the rotten rags hanging From the solemn and black sky. It stretches itself, patiently slowly Upon the roads, Since yesterday evening Continually. Along the miles Which go from the fields to the suburbs, By ways interminably winding, Pass the teams with arching hoods Toiling, sweating, smoking Like a funeral train seen in profile; In the straight ruts, Parallel for such a distance that at night they seem to join the heavens, The water drips for hours; And the trees weep, and the houses, Soaked as they are by the long rain, Tenaciously, indefinitely. |