Sentimental Stroll
by Paul Verlaine
Translated by Norman Shapiro
The sunset darted low its splendorous rays;
The wind cradled and swayed the pallid haze
Of waterlilies in the reeds beyond,
Glistening, sad and tranquil, on the pond.
And I, alone, roamed with my agonies,
Wandered the shore among the willow trees,
Where milk-white mist hung vaguely in the air,
Phantom-like form, bewailing its despair
And weeping with the voice of seabirds’ sputter,
Calling each other nestward, wings aflutter
Among the willow trees, where I, alone,
Roamed with my agonies; the shadows, sewn
Into a shroud, drowned deep the sunset’s rays,
Splendorous, sinking in the billows’ haze;
And waterlilies in the reeds beyond…
Great lilies, lying tranquil, on the pond.
One of the most purely lyrical of French poets, Verlaine was an initiator of modern word-music and marks a transition between the Romantic poets and the Symbolists. His best poetry broke with the sonorous rhetoric of most of his predecessors and showed that the French language, everyday clichés included, could communicate new shades of human feeling by suggestion and tremulous vagueness that capture the reader by disarming his intellect; words could be used merely for their sound to make a subtler music, an incantatory spell more potent than their everyday meaning. Explicit intellectual or philosophical content is absent from his best work
The title might suggest lovers walking side by side, but in fact there is only one speaker in this poem, remembering landscape with the kind of vividness that is only accessible to strong emotion, making it a kind of dreamscape too , the speaker says— "Me, I wandered alone"—but the romantic posture of isolation is undone by the strangeness of the landscape through which the speaker travels, and by the compulsiveness with which the speaker notices things. The voice keeps circling back to certain details—the rays of the setting sun, the huge pale water lilies, the calm water, the willows, the fact of wandering alone, the wound that is, presumably, a spiritual or emotional wound, rather than an actual one— and they are ingeniously incorporated into the rhyme scheme. But new details also accumulate, to develop a mood that is both beautiful and stifling.
The poem has a hypnotic sonic effect on the reader. Must be very musical in the original.
