Paul Verlaine Quotations

Tears fall in my heart like the rain on the town.

The poet is a madman lost in adventure.

I am the Empire at the end of the decadence.

Here are fruits, flowers, leaves, and branches, And here is my heart which beats only for you.

A vast black sleep falls over my life sleep, all hope sleep, all desire.

A flat black bug, that is London.

I like this word decadent; all shimmering and purple and gold.

Prends l'e loquence et tords-lui son cou! Take eloquence and break its neck!

London, black as crows and noisy as ducks, prudish with all the vices in evidence, everlastingly drunk, in spite of ridiculous laws about drunkenness, immense, though it is really basically only a collection of scandal-mongering boroughs, vying with each other, ugly and dull, without any monuments except interminable docks.

Take eloquence and wring its neck.

The rosy hearth, the lamplight's narrow beam, The meditation that is rather dream, With looks that lose themselves in cherished looks; The hour of steaming tea and banished books; The sweetness of the evening at an end, The dear fatigue, and right to rest attained, And worshipped expectation of the night,— Oh, all these things, in unrelenting flight, My dream pursues through all the vain delays, Impatient of the weeks, mad at the days!

Sap which mounts, and flowers which thrust, Your childhood is a bower: Let my fingers wander in the moss Where glows the rosebud Let me among the clean grasses Drink the drops of dew Which sprinkle the tender flower

La musique avant toute chose.

Your soul is a chosen landscape Where charming masked and costumed figures go Playing the lute and dancing and almost Sad beneath their fantastic disguises. All sing in a minor key Of all-conquering love and careless fortune They do not seem to believe in their happiness And their song mingles with the moonlight. The still moonlight, sad and beautiful, Which gives the birds to dream in the trees And makes the fountain sprays sob in ecstasy, The tall, slender fountain sprays among the marble statues.

Music before all else, and for that choose the irregular, which is vaguer and melts better into the air...

Here are fruits, flowers, leaves and branches, and here is my heart which beats only for you.

A poem is really a kind of machine for producing the poetic state by means of words.

I love this word decadence, all shimmering in purple and gold. It suggests the subtle thoughts of ultimate civilization, a high literary culture, a soul capable of intense pleasures. It throws off bursts of fire and the sparkle of precious stones. It is redolent of the rouge of courtesans, the games of the circus, the panting of the gladiators, the spring of wild beasts, the consuming in flames of races exhausted by their capacity for sensation, as the tramp of an invading army sounds.