Kaleidoscope by Paul Verlaine

First published: 1883, as “Kaléidoscope”; collected in Jadis et naguère, 1884; English translation collected in Selected Poems, 1948

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

The twenty-eight lines of “Kaleidoscope” are divided into seven four-line stanzas of Alexandrine verse (twelve-syllable lines). The rhyme scheme (abba, cddc, and so on), with alternating masculine and feminine end rhymes, is traditional in French poetry. In these seven quatrains, fragments of diverse sensory impressions of the past are presented to the reader in juxtaposed images that change like bits of colored glass in a kaleidoscope.

Paul Verlaine composed the poem during his incarceration in Brussels, after being arrested for firing at and wounding his lover, the young poet Arthur Rimbaud. The two poets had returned from London, where they had spent several months. The poem recollects images from this period spent wandering the streets of London with Rimbaud, reality obscured by alcohol, time rendered timeless by love and pleasure.

In the first stanza, the locale of the poem is established: a city street. Neither the street nor the city is real, though: It is a dream city, yet one that evokes a sensation of past experience, of déjà vu characterized by vagueness and clarity at the same time. A single image, “sun shining through a fog,” appears in the first stanza and confirms the inspiration for the poem: The sun suggests physical desire, the fog suggests London.

The second stanza opens with two auditory images. There is a “voice in the woods” and a “cry on the sea.” These sounds are surprising, for they seem contradictory to the city street locale of the first stanza. The contradiction is resolved when one wakes up from these “metempsychoses” (transmigrations of the soul, used here in the sense of altered states, or dreams) only to find that things have not changed. Reality is, then, in a woods, near the sea. The city is the dream.

The third stanza plunges the reader back into the dream city streets where organ grinders and marching bands are heard, where cats sleep on tavern countertops. Two of these three images are musical ones and show the importance of music in Verlaine’s poetry. “Music above all,” he would write later in his “Art poétique.”

In the fourth stanza, a polarity of human emotions—joy and sadness, laughter and tears—are “invocations to death.” In the dream city, one experiences emotional extremes that are viewed as inevitable and fatal. Such was indeed the case of Verlaine’s relationship with Rimbaud. Verlaine claimed to have been born under the malignant influence of a dark star. His escapade with Rimbaud was both agony and ecstasy. Verlaine considered it his ineluctable fate.

The next two stanzas continue to present colorful sights, sounds, and smells of the city: Widows, peasant women, and prostitutes mingle with soldiers and dandruff-laden old men; dance-hall music and firecrackers are heard; the odor of urine is in the air.

The final quatrain is a return to the states of dreaming and waking mentioned in the second stanza. One wakes up and falls asleep again into the same dream, but this time the dream is not the city. It is the summer, the grass, and the buzz of a bee—the bucolic decor of woods and seashore in stanza 2. Reality and dream have changed places.

Forms and Devices

The poem is an example of poetic impressionism: Verlaine suggests with verbal imagery the same way Debussy suggests with music and Monet suggests with pastels. Verlaine veils his meaning, deliberately obscuring contours in order to create an enchanting vagueness in which there are elements of both the unknown and the familiar. “Kaleidoscope” is written in accordance with Verlaine’s personal system, which he developed around the time the poem was written (1873, ten years before publication). In this system, Verlaine sought to eliminate entirely the first person, the poet, the “moi,” from poetry. In this poem, the “I” is replaced by the more nebulous, nonspecific pronoun “one.”

Although the poem is set visually in quatrains, it is knit together verbally. Three stanzas are joined by the continuation of a sentence from the last line of one to the first line of the next without a syntactical pause. Others are joined by repeating first words (lines 4 and 5 begin “Oh this…!”), which allows Verlaine to blur the traditional boundaries of the poetic stanza.

Except for the word “metempsychoses,” the vocabulary of the poem is simple, almost childlike. The phrase “It will be as if . . .” (“Ce sera comme quand on . . .”) is a colloquialism Verlaine often used. In keeping with this puerile simplicity, he uses much repetition, especially at line beginnings (in French, “Où” begins lines 10 and 11 and “Des” opens lines 14, 15, 16, and 17). There are alliterations (a v sound in the first stanza and an f sound in the fifth); internal rhyme (the “on” and “or” of line 26: “Et que l’on se rendort et que l’on rêve encor”); consonances; and weak end rhymes that function primarily as assonance with a preponderance of “open” vowels. These devices create sonorities that enhance the suggestivity and musicality of the work.

Of all the figurative language in “Kaleidoscope,” the most striking are the two oxymorons in the fourth stanza. In line 14, the tears rolling down his cheeks are qualified in French as “douces” (“sweet”), the opposite of “salty.” The oxymoron in the next line is easily translated as “laughter sobbed.” The apparent contradiction in terms serves to heighten the degree of each emotion and, simultaneously, to cloud the reader’s perception of the causes for the extreme joy or sorrow. After all, “It will be as if one had forgotten the causes” (line 6).

Since music was extremely important to Verlaine, the rhythm of his verse is particularly interesting. His favorite rhythmic innovation was the displacement of the caesura. (In French poetry, this mid-line pause is after the sixth syllable.) It is displaced in most of the lines of “Kaleidoscope.” In several lines, there is no place at all for the caesura (notably in those lines beginning “It will be as if one . . .”). As the poem progresses, the number of pauses increases. By the final stanza, there is a caesura in the first three lines and two caesuras (reinforced by commas) in the last line. The effect is that of a musical ritardando, a slowing down of the rhythm for the conclusion.