CLAIR de LUNE
Your soul is a chosen landscape
Where charming masqueraders and bergamaskers go Playing the lute and dancing and almost Sad beneath their fanciful disguises. All sing in a minor key Of victorious love and the opportune life, They do not seem to believe in their happiness And their song mingles with the moonlight, With the still moonlight, sad and beautiful, That sets the birds dreaming in the trees And the fountains sobbing in ecstasy, The tall slender fountains among marble statues.
~ Paul Verlaine
In this beautiful poem of twelve lines the sad attempt to be joyful when they are not,
yet the majesty of the courtyard, lit by the moon, is a constant symbol of eternal joy.
Verlaine was a master poet, and the haunting musicality of his verse needs no attending
instrumentation. The meter is very liberal, yet in its completed text it is chiseled as a
statue is chiseled. The first line contains only eight syllables. The second contains twelve.
Yet with Verlaine they are compatible musically, and such changes in metrical relationships
actually add to, rather than distract or subtract from the music of his verse.
John Lars Zwerenz
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