where cries of pain and cries of joy are cast amidst a childhood rarely wasted, often tortuous, and always poor.

If these verses should seem obvious and ordinary, rarely touching the kingdom of heaven, then you may blame my position in life, which has had nothing heavenly about it.

Reality ever lends me its hand, poverty ever keeps my feet upon the earth whenever I am inclined toward the enthusiasms of higher flights.

I am neither a cynic nor a prude: to drag from me some breast-beaten poem, my wound must be great: I am never merely the moaning patient stricken with consumption.

If I seem to have enjoyed showing off my poverty, it is because I am nauseated by our poets of the present age, whose so-called verse, whose barbarous luxury, whose aristocratic bent, whose ecclesiastical flummeries and sonnets-in-chains are like listening to hair-shirted hacks bum-branded with their armorials, clutching a rosary or a rattle in their fists.

Behold the stuck-up daughters of their dreams, their Countesses… their Duchesses!… rather their washerwomen!

If I have remained apart from them, obscure and unknown; if no one has ever beaten the drum for me; if I have never been called ‘The Eagle!’ or ‘The Swan!’ – then, upon the other hand, I have never played the puppet or the clown, or called a crowd to me to hear me as a Master with beating on a tambourine. And no man may say that I have been his apprentice.

Of course, the bourgeoisie will not be alarmed by the names of those to whom I dedicate the poems of this volume: they are simply young men like myself, men with heart and courage whom I grew up with, and whom I love entirely!

It is they who banish from my thoughts the dullness of life. They are honest all, friends, comrades of brotherhoods and tight-knit bands – not the paste-boarded gaggle of M. Henri delaTouche… who could never understand. Should I desist

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