SOURCE: An introduction to Four French Symbolist Poets: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé, translated by Enid Rhodes Peschel, Ohio University Press, 1981, pp. 1-65.

In the following excerpt, Peschel presents a detailed analysis of two of Verlaine 's poems, "Moonlight" and "Crimen Amoris," describing tensions that exist beneath the calm surface of the text.

"Your soul is a selected landscape," Verlaine begins "Moonlight," the first of the lovely and unsettling, happy and sad, populated and lonely poems of his Fêtes galantes. This poem, which sets the ambiguous scene for that entire book, is emblematic of much of Verlaine's other poetry as well:

Your soul is a selected landscape that maskers
 And bergamasche go about beguiling

Playing the lute and dancing and quasi
 Sad beneath their fantastical disguises.

While singing in the minor mood
 Triumphant love and life that is opportune,
 They do not seem to believe in their good...