Hothouses: Poems, 1889

by Maurice Maeterlinck, Richard Howard (Translator)

On May 31, 1889, a young Belgian lawyer from a wealthy bourgeois family in Ghent published a book of 33 poems in 155 copies. Maurice Maeterlinck's legal career was floundering but his road to literary greatness had just begun. Long overshadowed by the plays that later won him the Nobel Prize, Serres chaudes (Hothouses) nonetheless came to be widely regarded as one of the cornerstones of literary Modernism after Baudelaire. While Max Nordau soon seized upon Maeterlinck's--tumult of images--as symptomatic of a pervasive social malaise, decades later Antonin Artaud pronounced, "Maeterlinck was the first to introduce the multiple riches of the subconscious into literature."


Richard Howard's translation of this quietly radical work is the first to be published in nearly a century, and the first to accurately convey Maeterlinck's elusive visionary force. The poems, some of them in free verse (new to Belgium at the time), combine the decadent symbolism and the language of dislocation that Maeterlinck later perfected in his dramas. Hothouses reflects the influence not only of French poets including Verlaine and Rimbaud, but also of Whitman. As for the title, the author said it was "a natural choice, Ghent . . . abounding in greenhouses."


The poems, whose English translations appear opposite the French originals, are accompanied by reproductions of seven woodcuts by Georges Minne that appeared in the original volume, and by an early prose text by Maeterlinck imaginatively describing a painting by the sixteenth-century Flemish artist Pieter Brueghel.


A feat of daring power extraordinarily immediate and inventive, Hothouses will appeal to all lovers of poetry, and in particular to those interested in Modernism. Maeterlinck's enormous fame may have faded, but twentieth-century writers such as Beckett are still our masters who testify to its undying influence.

Genres: Poetry, Belgium, France

128 pages, Paperback

First published May 31, 1889

About the author

Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck (also called Count Maeterlinck from 1932) was a Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist who was a Fleming, but wrote in French.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911 "in appreciation of his many-sided literary activities, and especially of his dramatic works, which are distinguished by a wealth of imagination and by a poetic fancy, which reveals, sometimes in the guise of a fairy tale, a deep inspiration, while in a mysterious way they appeal to the readers' own feelings and stimulate their imaginations".

The main themes in his work are death and the meaning of life. His plays form an important part of the Symbolist movement.

Reviews

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Favourite poems -

Hothouse Ennui
Glass bell-Jars
Heart's Foliage
Winter Desires
Burning-Glass
Glances
Night Soul

WINTER DESIRES

Where kisses no longer glow
I mourn the faded lips,
the hungers now resigned
to melancholy gleanings.

Endless the sopping fields,
endless the icy beaches!
Wolves sprawled in the grass
on the verge of my dreams

stare with faltering eyes
at my weary soul's spoils:
all that squandered blood
of dead lambs in the snow;

and under it's despondent glare
that withers the autumn reeds
only the moon betrays
the famine of my desire

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

I evade the word symbol. So approach what I would say of Maeterlinck cautiously. Maeterlinck conceived of language as environmental: the poem's language, in particular, he tropes as a hothouse, a Bell Jar, a diving bell, a dream, an orison. These are all used metonymically to suggest the situation of getting out of, or closing, the poem. You may ask, what's up with Maeterlinck? The poems are all about how they feel the occasion, while saying nothing of what the occasion is.

[Missa · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a dark horse. He uses such juicy literation. The translation is brilliant

[VERTIGO dizzy · Rating 3 out of 5]

HOTHOUSE ENNUI

O this heart, perpetually blue!
even with the best vision,
lachrymose by moonlight,
of my indolent blue dreams;

bored heart, blue as the hothouse
showing everything blue
through blind glass, slick with moonlight
and hoarfrost, or is it

only the glass? Suffocating fronds
by night extend their shadows
motionlessly, as dreams do,
over passion's roses,

and very slowly the water rises,
compromising moon and sky
in one endless blue-green sob
monotonous as dreams.

🌀🌀🌀

REFLECTIONS
Under the rising tide of dreams, my soul
is suddenly afraid,
for in my heart a ruthless moon shows where
all such dreaming begins:

under the sullen sameness of the reeds,
only the reflections
of palms, lilies, roses all upside down-
weep into the waters.

One by one the flowers drop their petals
on the sky's reflection,
sinking eternally into the mirror
of dreams, into the moon!

[Eduardo Ramos · Rating 1 out of 5]

Early 20th Century French lyric poetry. Mountains, rivers, sunsets, glass caves and exclamation marks. I fail to see the point

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maeterlinck is not well known in the United States, and among those who have read his work, his poetry is even less well known. Even so, he is a master between worlds, an author who helped shepherd the style of literature in the 20th century. In the introduction, there is a quote by Antonin Artaud that “Maeterlinck was the first to introduce the multiple riches of the subconscious into literature.” This collection of poetry, although small, clearly reinforces Artaud’s observation. Seeped in symbolism, Maeterlinck’s poetry is not bound by strict form, but depends on reinforcing imagery to drive the power of the language. My favorite poems in the collection are Hothouse, Lassitude, Burning-Glass, and the closing stanza of Prayer.

“Hothouse”:
A hothouse deep in the woods,
doors forever sealed. Analogies:
everything under that glass dome,
everything under my soul.

Thoughts of a starving princess,
a sailor marooned in the desert,
fanfares at hospital windows.

Seek out the warmest corners!
Think of a woman fainting on harvest-day;
postillions ride into the hospital courtyard;
a soldier passes, he is a sick-nurse now.

Look at it all by moonlight
(nothing is where it belongs).
Think of a madwoman haled before judges,
a man-of-war in full sail on the canal,
nightbirds perched among the lilies,
a knell at noon
(out there under those glass bell-jars),
cripples halted in the fields
on a day of sunshine, the smell of ether.

My God, when will the rain come,
and the snow, and the wind, to this glass house! (3)

“Lassitude”
They have forgotten kisses that can make
Cold eyes warm and blind eyes see again;
Henceforth surrendered to complacent dreams,
They torpidly watch, like hounds in tall grass,
The flock of gray lambs on the horizon
Cropping the moonlight spread across a field
Caressed by skies as vague as their own life;
Indifferent and not once envying
The happy roses blooming underfoot—
Long green peace they cannot understand. (29)

“Burning-Glass”
When I gaze at bygone days
through the burning-glass of regret,
strange flowers are ignited
from the blue ash of their mysteries.

Through the glass, my desires!
My desires through the lens of my soul!
and at memory’s approach
even the dead grass bursts into flame! “

I hold the glass to my thoughts
and see in that crystal labyrinth
the petals of old pain bloom
as if they were not things of the past. . .

I see those faraway nights
so long dead to memory that their
gradually focused return
withers the green soul of hopes to come. (63)

Closing stanza from “Prayer”
Show me the way, Lord, and shed
light on my dim soul,
for so grievous is my joy it seems
but grass beneath the ice. (69)

In each of these the reader is struck by the imagery. They evoke the poems of Lamentations. They reference loss and the malaise of the hopeless.

[Alex Siladi · Rating 3 out of 5]

beautiful