James and Mary Ford, eds. Every Day in the Year. 1902.
January 8
Verlaine
By Bliss Carman (1861–1929)
A modern French poet whose life was passed in alternate stages of religious ecstasy and deplorable excesses. His genius was undoubted and he has been called “the nineteenth-century Villon.” He died Jan. 8, 1896.
AVID of life and love, insatiate vagabond,
With quest too furious for the grail he would have won,
He flung himself at the eternal sky, as one
Wrenching his chains but impotent to burst the bond.
