Autumn Song by Verlaine: the full text, and why it sounds like music

The PoemChanson d'automne, the Complete Original Text

The poem appears in Poèmes saturniens, published in 1866, in the section Paysages tristes. Here it is exactly as Verlaine wrote it.

Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l'automne
Blessent mon cœur
D'une langueur
Monotone.

Tout suffocant
Et blême, quand
Sonne l'heure,
Je me souviens
Des jours anciens
Et je pleure ;

Et je m'en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m'emporte
Deçà, delà,
Pareil à la
Feuille morte.

Paul Verlaine, Poèmes saturniens, 1866.

A plain prose rendering, offered as a reading aid. The print itself keeps the original French.

The long sobs of the violins of autumn wound my heart with a monotonous languor.

All choking and pale, when the hour strikes, I remember the old days and I weep.

And I go off in the ill wind that carries me here and there, like a dead leaf.

What the Poem Is About

Almost nothing, and that is deliberate. A sound of autumn wounds the poet, an hour strikes, a memory rises, and he drifts off like a dead leaf. There is no story, no character and no place: only a state, caught in eighteen tiny lines.

Verlaine was twenty-two when Poèmes saturniens appeared. What he is after here he would later put into words in his Art poétique: music before all else. Chanson d'automne is the demonstration written before the theory, a poem where meaning arrives through the ear.

A Stanza-by-Stanza Reading

Three stanzas of six very short lines, mostly four syllables, with rhymes that return quickly. The poem is almost a song: the sound carries the feeling before the images do.

First Stanza: The Violins

Everything lies in the sound. The nasal vowels of sanglots longs, violons and automne stretch the line out and imitate a held note. Verlaine does not say that he is sad: he makes you hear a monotonous languor, and the word monotone, set alone on its line, starts to drag by itself.

Second Stanza: The Memory

The rhythm breaks: choking, pale, the hour striking. The poem leaves the landscape and enters the body. The memory of the old days is never told, it has no content at all, and that emptiness is what makes it universal: everyone fills it with their own.

Third Stanza: The Dead Leaf

The poet no longer decides anything, he is carried. Deçà, delà mimes the disorderly movement of the wind, and the closing comparison arrives cut in half by the line break, like a dead leaf, as though the sentence itself were letting go.

Et je m'en vais au vent mauvais qui m'emporte deçà, delà, pareil à la feuille morte. Chanson d'automne, final stanza

Why These Lines Became a War Signal

In June 1944 the BBC broadcast the opening lines of Chanson d'automne among the personal messages sent to the French Resistance, as a signal announcing the Normandy landings. A poem about the melancholy of a twenty-two year old thus became, eighty years later, one of the most historically charged sentences in the French language. No poet can plan a fate like that.

The Poem on Your Wall

At Heure d'été we set the full text of Chanson d'automne as a typographic art print, composed like the page of an old edition: the poem, the poet's name, nothing else. Printed to order on 170 g/m² matte paper, it finds its place in a reading corner, above a desk, or inside a gallery wall of literary prints.

A poem you love on a wall is a text you reread. That is the whole idea.

The Last Word

Chanson d'automne stays in the memory without effort and comes back on its own, every year, with the first bad weather. Read it, reread it, and if it is one of yours, give it a place where you can see it every day.