Paul Verlaine Quotes & Sayings

Tears fall in my heart like the rain on the town. — Paul Verlaine

The poet is a madman lost in adventure. — Paul Verlaine

Il pleure dans mon coeur
Comme il pleut sur la ville.
Tears are shed in my heart like the rain on the town. — Paul Verlaine

Take eloquence and wring its neck. — Paul Verlaine

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

What we need, we, is fixedness intense, Unequalled effort, strife that shall not cease, — Paul Verlaine

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. — Paul Verlaine

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

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. — Paul Verlaine

An infinite
Resignedness
Rains where the white
Mists opalesce
In the moon-shower ... — Paul Verlaine

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 — Paul Verlaine

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

Of its persistent, artless strain: Naught so can soothe a soul's own pain, As making glad another soul! — Paul Verlaine

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

Night. Rain. A livid sky pierces the lacework
Of spires and towers, the silhouette of a Gothic
Town dim in the gray distance. — Paul Verlaine

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. — Paul Verlaine

I am the Empire at the end of the decadence. — Paul Verlaine

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

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

A flat black bug, that is London. — Paul Verlaine

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! — Paul Verlaine

Tired of life, afraid of death, not unlike
A lost brig, toy of ebb and flow on the ocean,
My soul weighs anchor for a frightful shipwreck. — Paul Verlaine