Songs for Her and Odes in Her Honor

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The first things that come to minds and lips, when thinking about Paul Verlaine?s poetry, are music and nuance. It is through his heightened employment simultaneously and regularly of those two attributes, of those two mesmerizing attributes of his often absinthe-like poetry, that Paul Verlaine, the poet, really shines, - brightly, not incandescently, but fluorescently, like the greenish-blue polestar on a winter?s night. But the poetry found in Songs for Her (1891) and Odes in Her Honor (1893) is somewhat contrary to the commonly held ideas of what Paul Verlaine?s poetry is or "should be," in terms of nuance; it is just as musically virtuosic or experimental as his earlier poetry was, which we all know and love. Because these are poems of mostly physical love, but also emotional love, between a middle-aged man and a woman (two women actually, just not a trois) - there is arguably little need for, and little use of, nuance. They are paeans to physical love.

Paul Verlaine didn?t set out to be Petrarch in these two books of poetry. And neither Philomene, the tantalizing tart at least twenty years his junior, the "her" in Odes in Her Honor; nor Eugenie, his practical and good-hearted if not somewhat ugly and thick-necked bed partner, the "her" in Songs for Her, - neither of them, those two muses, are like Laura.