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SOME MODERN BELGIAN POETS
"For you, O Lord, I have left my flowers and the lustre of my jewels; I have sung the purest strains, to please you, O Lord. And with the mere waving of Your hands You have withered the roses of Illusion."
Following the example set by Verhaeren, Albert Mockel adopted the vers libre, a metre that, with its loose texture and shifting stresses, its changing recurrence of rhymes answering to each other at variable intervals and its arbitrary length of strophe, lends itself to countless effects of harmony. In Verhaeren, however, we observe the strength of a rhythm moulded on the pulse of violent passion, in Mockel the soft undulation of a reverie, pausing in light cadences, dying into faint chords. Here we have not the vehement etchings of a Brangwyn, but the vaporous drawings of a Donnay. His poems reflect the impressions of a person not yet fully awakened from a dream, the fluctuation of images agreeing with the waving pattern of the lines. A striking similarity to Lerberghe's visionary art is noticeable in Mockel's ethereal transfiguration of reality, in the serenity of his poetical world, where all things are shaded to pearl and mauve, encircled by a nimbus. Among the trees raising their foliage like a bluish filigree against the dawn, heavenly beings are visible to his inward eye.
"His hair is spread as a billow of light; his closed hand holds a flower unknown; and all his unearthly whiteness is like clouds mirrored in water;—but what is the strange coruscation wrapping him in its folds as a sparkling snowy raiment? It is a wing,—and behold, the immortal shape of an Angel is unveiled to our eyes. In the crystalline morning, amongst the shadows of holm-oaks, the divine wanderer of the Azure has folded his mystic pinions; an Angel lies here asleep.—Yet when he awakes, soaring at once with an irresistible rush, his flight resounding through heaven, his virginal beauty shall vanish, with a clear, superhuman cry, into the sunrise, like the incandescent dream that crosses the ether when a meteor flashes through the interstellar spaces."[1]—Walking on the woodland path, under the leaves, that, touched with morning gold, shine as green fire, he looks at the lovely intricacies of the boughs. Like clasped hands, they are interlaced into a harmonious dome; Love's whisperings fill the thick forest, and a hymn breaks out of a myriad of elated voices."[2]—In the light playing on a flower of glass he discerns the vestige of the exulting blaze by which the crystal petals were fashioned. "Are you not the Daughter of the Fire? Is not your scintillating chalice sprung