what have you done

James Joyce is supposed to have said that certain of Verlaine’s poems, among them the short best-loved ones, were the greatest poems ever written. The haunting sensitivity and disarming simplicity of Il pleut dans mon coeur, La lune blanche, Chason d’automne, Colloque sentimental, Le ceil est par-dessus le toit, etc., are to me unequaled.

I have before me two photos of Verlaine at the Café Francois 1er. From one I have done several drawings and paintings. In that photo Verlaine is leaning back with his head against the edge of the top of the bench on which he is sitting. He is staring upward into space, dreaming. No one else is visible in the café. He looks relaxed, not wanting for anything. Whatever was going to happen has happened.

Qu’a-tu fait ô toi que voilà
Pleurant sans cesse
Dis, qu’as-tu fait, toi que voilà,
De ta jeunesse?*

—Robert De Niro, “Corot, Verlaine and Greta Garbo, or The Melancholy Syndrome,” Tracks, a journal of artists’ writings, Vol. 1, No. 3, Fall 1975, edited by Herbert George.

* "What have you done, you, weeping there
            Your endless tears?
Tell me, what have you done, you there,
            With youth’s best years?"

—Paul Verlaine, “Above the roof the sky is fair…” translated by Norman R. Shapiro, One Hundred and One Poems by Paul Verlaine (U. of Chicago Press, 1999).