Cythera

As a poem of happy intimacy, Verlaine's "Cythera" unfolds four quatrains of alexandrines with enclosed rhymes, yet with a deliberate irregularity that gives the stanza the air of a suspended confidence. From the opening, the "pavilion with open latticework" shelters "our joys": the space is less a setting than a jewel case, a refuge where the couple stays apart from the world.

The second quatrain lets the outside in through the slightest of things: the scent of roses, "faint," blends with the perfumes already present. The summer wind does not disturb the intimacy; it prolongs it. Verlaine thus suggests that happiness needs no brilliance; it is made of light, almost impalpable sensations, in which fragrance becomes memory and promise.

With the third quatrain, the poem slips from place to bodies. "As her eyes had promised," the beloved's courage is verified in reality, and her lip "Communicates an exquisite fever." Passion here is not tragic: it is a gentle contagion, an exchange, a transmission. The line makes the woman not an object of contemplation but an active source of life.

The final quatrain introduces a touch of irony: Love fills everything "except / Hunger." Sorbets and jams preserve them from aches and pains. The gallant register takes on a smiling realism: the amorous ideal does not abolish the body's needs; it keeps company with them. Cythera, the mythical island of Venus, becomes here a domestic and pleasure-loving place, where hunger itself has its place.

In this poem, Verlaine makes love an experience of lightness and sharing, in which lyricism is lightened by humor. The brief form, the enclosed rhymes, and the supple rhythm accompany this intimacy without emphasis: paradise is not lost; it is inhabited, with its fragrances, its fevers, and its jams.