Category: Poetry

Pensionnaires, par Paul Verlaine

Albert Marquet - Les deux amies
Albert Marquet – Les deux amies (1912) – de Pierre Tribhou pour Wikimedia Commons

L’écrivain et poète Paul Verlaine, né à Metz le 30 mars 1844 et mort à Paris le 8 janvier 1896, est un archétype du ‘poète maudit,’ et le principal représentant en France de la tendance ‘décadente’ ou ‘fin de siècle.’ Sa vie fut émaillée par un mariage raté, la fréquentation de prostituées, des amours homosexuelles, dont une liaison tumultueuse avec Arthur Rimbaud, enfin l’excès d’alcool, qui le conduisait souvent à des comportements violents. Sa conversion au catholicisme ne freina pas sa débauche, il assumait cette contradiction, il avait sa foi, mais celle-ci ne pouvait pas l’empêcher de pécher. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

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L’Heure des enfants, par Jean Aicard

Timoléon Marie Lobrichon - illustration pour L'Heure des Enfants
Timoléon Marie Lobrichon – illustration pour L’Heure des Enfants de Jean Aicard

“L’Heure des enfants” est une adaptation française par Jean Aicard du poème “The Children’s Hour” de Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Il fait partie du recueil La Chanson de l’Enfant. Trois petites filles assaillent leur père, lui grimpent dessus pour le couvrir de baisers et de caresses. Il ne peut que capituler sans conditions. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

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The Children’s Hour, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's daughters Alice Mary (top), Edith (left) and Anne Allegra (right)
Print after a portrait by Thomas Buchanan Read – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s daughters Alice Mary (top), Edith (left) and Anne Allegra (right) (c.1860) – from the New York Public Library’s digital collections

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (born February 27, 1807; died March 24, 1882) was one of the most widely known and best-loved American poets of the 19th century. In July 1843 he married his second wife Frances Appleton, and the couple had six children: Charles Appleton (1844–1893), Ernest Wadsworth (1845–1921), Fanny (1847–1848), Alice Mary (1850–1928), Edith (1853–1915), and Anne Allegra (1855–1934).

One of his most famous poems is The Children’s Hour, first published in the September 1860 edition of The Atlantic Monthly. The poet’s three small daughters, “grave Alice,” “laughing Allegra,” and “Edith with golden hair,” assault him by surprise; then “They almost devour me with kisses, / Their arms about me entwine,” and like a besieged citadel, he must surrender. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

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The Village Street, attributed to Edgar Allan Poe

Michael G. Laster - Birthright
Michael G. Laster – Birthright

This poem is attributed to Poe, however it does not appear in the list given by The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, so a doubt remains about its authorship. According to the Classic Literature Library, it was written or published around October 26, 1831. This site includes it in the category “Edgar Allan Poe Doubtful Poems.” CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

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Femmes damnées, by Aleister Crowley

Aleister Crowley
Aleister Crowley, New York (1906)

My third selection from Crowley’s collection Rodin in Rime (1907) belongs to the second section “Sonnets and Quatorzains,” whose poems have all 14 lines. Its French title “Femmes damnées” (translating as ‘doomed women’) comes from two poems in Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire, one of which (subtitled “Delphine et Hippolyte”) was banned by the French censorship between 1857 and 1949. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

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