The tragic destiny of Paul VERLAINE – Signed autograph poem. “Literature”.
" With the right to famine, to abject poverty, and almost to vermin, that's what we call Glory! "
Sold
" With the right to famine, to abject poverty, and almost to vermin, that's what we call Glory! "
Sold
Paul Verlaine (1844.1896)
Signed autograph poem – Literature.
One page in-8°. Slnd.
" With the right to famine, to abject poverty, and almost to vermin, that's what we call Glory! "
A magnificent poem with testamentary overtones which summarizes, in twenty-five octosyllabic verses and under the auspices of the title "Literature", the tragic destiny of Paul Verlaine, simultaneously cradled in glory, admiration, abandonment and absolute misery.
________________________________________________________
Literature
Good comrades of the Press
, as well as of Poetry,
Flowers of boorishness and baseness,
Elite chosen by what God,
By what God of all baseness?
Brothers, unkind brothers of mine
, who almost buried me long ago
beneath all this silence—why?
—since the dreadful seventy.
Brothers, unkind brothers of mine.
Why this wicked silence, brother,
for so many long years,
and suddenly, as if in anger,
these cries, as if astonished,
why this wicked change, brother!
Ah, if only I could be smothered
under this pile of newspapers
where my name, which they pretend to find
like one encounters kernels
, swells up until it bursts!
That's what they call Glory!
— With the right to famine,
To great black misery
And almost to vermin —
That's what they call Glory!
________________________________________________________
Originally published in La Revue Blanche in November 1891, this poem was included in the collection Invectives, published posthumously by Léon Vanier in 1896.