Verlaine was a Parnassian poet (that is, believing in art for art’s sake) in the sense that he was horrified at the idea of using poetry as a vehicle for preaching ideas or indulging in self-pity, as was often the case with the Romantics. He wrote to the poet Stéphane Mallarmé that his poetry was an effort to render sensations drawn from a personal world of memory and illusion. It is helpful to keep this purpose in mind when interpreting Verlaine’s work.
Many poets through the ages have dealt with the theme of the passage of time. “Kaleidoscope” looks to the future in using the repeated line “It will be . . .” (“Ce sera . . .”) and by the predominance of the future tense throughout the poem in French. Yet the dream is about the past “as if one had lived there.” The verbs “wakes” and “falls asleep” are in the present tense. By obscuring the division of time into past, present, and future, the poem presents time as an illusion, irrelevant, because it is subject to distortion by the senses.
Like Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), a poet of the preceding generation, Verlaine chose as his primary subject modern man, who must cope physically with the refinements of an excessive civilization, more specifically, the sentient creature confronted with the lure of the city, the vices of the social underworld. In “Kaleidoscope,” the city is London, but it is also Paris, Brussels, any city. The reader enters the poet’s...
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