Puisqu’il me fut donné de t’entendre me dire
Les mots où se répand le cœur mystérieux;
Puisque j’ai vu pleurer, puisque j’ai vu sourire
Ta bouche sur ma bouche et tes yeux sur mes yeux;
Puisque j’ai vu briller sur ma tête ravie
Un rayon de ton astre, hélas! voilé toujours;
Puisque j’ai vu tomber dans l’onde de ma vie
Une feuille de rose arrachée à tes jours;
Since I placed my lips to your still brimming cup;
Since I rested my pale brow on your hands;
Since at times I breathed the sweet breath
Of your soul, perfume hidden in the shade;
Since I was blessed to hear you speak
Words that spill over from a mysterious heart;
Since I beheld tears, since I beheld smiles,
Your mouth on my mouth, and your eyes on my eyes;
Since I beheld, shining on my joyful head,
A ray of your star, alas! always veiled;
Since I beheld falling into the stream of my life
A rose leaf torn from your days;
The accumulation of dependent clauses strains the limits of the sentence, whetting the desire for closure.
The fourth stanza discharges this pent-up energy in a flurry of exclamatory sentences:
Je puis maintenant dire aux rapides années:
—Passez! passez toujours! je n’ai plus à vieillir!
Allez-vous en avec vos fleurs toutes fanées;
J’ai dans l’âme une fleur que nul ne peut cueillir!
I can now say to the rushing years:
—Pass on! pass on forever! I shall age no longer!
Go forth with your withered flowers;
I have a flower in my soul that none may pluck!
The long-awaited main clause introduces two imperatives—“Passez!” and “Allez-vous en!”—that call the syntax to order like twin trumpet blasts. (Note how Hugo has marked the turn by inverting “Puis-que” to “Je puis.”) The fourth stanza consists almost entirely of simple sentences, with only one subordinate clause. The fifth stanza, finally, concludes with a pair of sentences in which the subordinate clause follows the main clause. The poem thus ends by reversing the syntactic order of the sprawling opening sentence:
Votre aile en le heurtant ne fera rien répandre
Du vase où je m’abreuve et que j’ai bien rempli.
Mon âme a plus de feu que vous n’avez de cendre!
Mon cœur a plus d’amour que vous n’avez d’oubli!
The blow of your wings shall not dislodge it
From the vase where I drink and which I have filled up.
My soul has more fire than you have ashes!
My heart has more love than you have oblivion!
Hugo’s syntax complements the theme of the poem, the victory of love over time and mortality. The first three stanzas dwell on the beloved, lingering over her hands, her breath, her eyes, her mouth. The massive prolongation of the sentence immerses the reader in the lover’s experience of time, his sense of desire and unsatisfied longing. In the fourth stanza, the lover asserts his triumph over time as he issues commands to the passing years. Having tasted of the beloved, he no longer fears decay and oblivion, and the stabilized syntax reflects his newfound peace. The last lines of the poem, finally, encapsulate the entire progression of thought, reversing the structure of the opening sentence. Each antithesis begins with a main clause exalting immortal love and ends with a subordinate clause mocking Father Time.
Fauré’s setting shows little concern with the overall form of Hugo’s poem. The composer chose a da capo form that obscures the crucial turn between the third and fourth stanzas:
The modulation to A minor does not correspond to any break in Hugo’s text, and the turn to the fourth stanza is buried within the B section, marked only by a brief feint toward F major. The da capo form also imposes a symmetry at odds with Hugo’s dynamic trajectory. Fauré’s setting of “Puisque j’ai mis ma lèvre” makes a shapely lyric piece but disregards the larger form of Hugo’s poem.
Nevertheless, at the local level “Puisque j’ai mis ma lèvre” shows a keen awareness of Hugo’s syntax. Fauré’s vocal melody is an exercise in unfulfilled yearning worthy of Wagner (see example 1.3). The phrases rise insistently, crest on aching dissonances, then sink back to the starting point. The singer’s first eight bars press against the upper tonic and third, but fall back each time to the dominant. The following eight bars break through this ceiling with a leap to high A, but the melody again descends to the dominant, lingering deliciously over several dissonant passing tones. To enhance the upward surge of the melody, Fauré began each phrase of the song with an upbeat. This means that the vocalist sings “puis-que” eight times, an apparent gaffe that surpasses anything in “Le papillon et la fleur.” As in the previous song, however, Fauré’s concern lay with the larger shape of the line: by denying the natural trochaic rhythm (“puis-que”), he allowed the melody to flow restlessly toward its unattainable goals.
Fauré’s phrase structure projects the same sense of deferred resolution. The first sixteen bars form a sentence, as Arnold Schoenberg and Erwin Ratz dubbed this thematic type: after a pair of identical four-bar phrases, an eight-bar continuation leads to a half cadence.23 Unlike the period (ABABʹ), with its balanced antecedent and consequent, the AAB sentence creates a sense of propulsion and dynamic movement. Indeed, Fauré’s sentence perfectly matches Hugo’s first stanza, which also begins with two parallel clauses (lines 1 and 2) and continues with an expanded clause (3–4). Moreover, the sentence belongs to a larger compound form, functioning as the antecedent of a thirty-two-bar period that does not reach a full cadence until almost halfway through the song. This massive deferral of harmonic closure creates a sense of postponed desire that perfectly matches Hugo’s syntactic strategy, at least in his first three stanzas.
As in “Le papillon et la fleur,” Fauré left a clue to his reading in a short piano prelude that again seems to gloss Hugo’s poetic structure. The eight-bar prelude is a duet in imitative counterpoint supported by pizzicato chords in the left hand. The melody and harmony derive from the continuation of the singer’s melody (mm. 17–18), indicating that Fauré again composed the vocal strophes first and wrote the prelude as an afterthought. The harmony of the prelude is a model of hypotactic construction. Instead of beginning on the tonic,
