The first things that come to minds and lips, when thinking about Paul Verlaine s poetry, are music and nuance. It is through his heightened employment simultaneously and regularly of those two attributes, of those two mesmerizing attributes of his often absinthe-like poetry, that Paul Verlaine, the poet, really shines, - brightly, not incandescently, but fluorescently, like the greenish-blue polestar on a winter s night. But the poetry found in Songs for Her (1891) and Odes in Her Honor (1893) is somewhat contrary to ...
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The first things that come to minds and lips, when thinking about Paul Verlaine s poetry, are music and nuance. It is through his heightened employment simultaneously and regularly of those two attributes, of those two mesmerizing attributes of his often absinthe-like poetry, that Paul Verlaine, the poet, really shines, - brightly, not incandescently, but fluorescently, like the greenish-blue polestar on a winter s night. But the poetry found in Songs for Her (1891) and Odes in Her Honor (1893) is somewhat contrary to the commonly held ideas of what Paul Verlaine s poetry is or "should be," in terms of nuance; it is just as musically virtuosic or experimental as his earlier poetry was, which we all know and love. Because these are poems of mostly physical love, but also emotional love, between a middle-aged man and a woman (two women actually, just not ??? trois ) - there is arguably little need for, and little use of, nuance. They are paeans to physical love. Paul Verlaine didn t set out to be Petrarch in these two books of poetry. And neither Philom???ne, the tantalizing tart at least twenty years his junior, the "her" in Odes in Her Honor ; nor Eug???nie, his practical and good-hearted if not somewhat ugly and thick-necked bed partner, the "her" in Songs for Her , - neither of them, those two muses, are like Laura.
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