About this poem (I think it can be useful to clarify it since even in French it can seem strange).
This text by Jules Laforgue is indeed fascinating. While it may appear abstruse at first glance, it invites the reader to join the poetic “dance” in order to uncover its deeper meanings.
To begin with, like much of Laforgue’s work, this text is relatively unknown here in France. As a reminder, Jules Laforgue died in 1886 of pulmonary phthisis, a disease that defined the end of the 19th century and persisted into the next. Frequently referenced in art, it reached its literary zenith in works such as Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.
In this poem, although Laforgue uses certain thematic elements drawn from medical vocabulary, he is not addressing the tuberculosis that would claim his life less than a year later.
Instead, he revisits a theme he had explored before: an invocation to the moon, treating it as a silent witness. I previously set another of his poems, Complaint of the Moon in the Provinces, to music, which also centered on this motif.
Here, the moon, once confided in for sorrows and heartbreaks in the earlier lament, becomes something much more unsettling: still silent, but now mocking, like stained glass in a church at night—soulless, dead, or languid in the chloroform haze of the clouds. It remains indifferent, even as the poet suffocates—perhaps from illness, love, or solitude.
The absurdity of the poet’s situation is stark. His bad romances (béquinades—a now-obsolete French word) provoke derisive laughter, highlighting how his “platonic” (idealized) loves are reduced to nothing more than the trivial musings of an ordinary man. His imagined grandeur is deflated, exposing the ridiculousness of his human condition.
This obsession builds into a chant-like rhythm, escalating into a true nightmare. The enigmatic phrase, “I want to - your sad paten, widowed dish of the chef of Saint John the Baptist”, takes center stage. This is where the poem becomes almost proto-expressionist. Mystical imagery permeates the poem, but here it becomes unnerving.
The paten refers to the dish that holds the Eucharistic host. In this vision, the moon is transformed into a dish—a plate in the sky—that once received the severed head of Saint John the Baptist. Now, it is an empty vessel, once an instrument of horror, reduced to a pale, lifeless object.
At first, I hesitated to set this part of the poem to music due to its strangeness. Similarly, the inclusion of Salve Regina seemed too overtly religious. Yet, it is precisely this disorientation that defines the poem. The saint being invoked is none other than the moon—the “white lady” of folklore, queen of the night, whom he wishes to pierce with his phalènes.
This, as you noted, is where the carnal implications are most evident. The phalènes, or moths, symbolize his poetic verses, which he uses to pierce the sanctified face of the moon. Yet, the phonetic similarity to phallus cannot be ignored. This could suggest a symbolic act of violation—taboo and transgressive.
In the closing lines, “I want to find a Lied that touches you to make you emigrate to my mouth”, the poet seeks words powerful enough to draw the moon, his beloved, saint, or muse, to him. He desires a Lied—a song, popular or stylized—to achieve this connection. Laforgue, who lived in Germany as a reader for a countess, was undoubtedly familiar with Schubert’s Lieder.
For me, the theme resonates with Der Lindenbaum from Winterreise, the epitome of Romanticism. That Lied inspired the musical motif I used here. Both poems share a similar springboard: an invocation to nature (the lime tree in one, the moon in the other) as a confidant and source of solace.
Laforgue’s melancholy mirrors Schubert’s: the consolation sought is ultimately unattainable. By the poem’s end, the observation is bitter. No rhymes remain, no words suffice—everything has been tried, all in vain. Yet, it is neither tragic nor pathetic, for tragedy is too sublime. Instead, it is simply futile, almost absurd.
In my musical setting, I chose to reflect this futility by paring down the music after the preceding deluge of sound.
Finally, a word on the poem’s rhythm, which I sought to capture musically. It is a decasyllable—a ten-syllable meter with a feminine rhyme at the end of each line. This form is rare, as more regular, symmetrical meters are usually preferred for their balance, particularly with clear caesurae.
Here, however, the rhythm feels obsessive, deliberately strange. Notably, Laforgue’s earlier moon poem (Complaint of the Moon in the Provinces) used strict seven-syllable lines—a metric that hints at unreason. For this setting, I used a 6/4 (or 12/8) time signature to accommodate the ten-syllable lines while emphasizing the rhythmic punctuation of each verse with two beats. The entire piece is driven by an ostinato of eight eighth notes and two quarter notes.
