Abstract
In the early 1890s, both John Addington Symonds and Arthur Symons were fascinated by Paul Verlaine's sonnet “Parsifal” (1886)—in particular, by its final line, which dwells on the voices of singing children. Symonds enthused to Symons that it was “a line [to] treasure forever,” while, nevertheless, noting his reservations to Horatio Forbes Brown that “fine as it is, [it] looks like it […] must be rather of the sickly school.” In an article on Verlaine, Symons praised the poem as a “triumph [of] amazing virtuosity,” echoing the sentiments of his friend George Moore, who inConfessions of a Young Man(1886) exclaimed that he “kn[ew] of no more perfect thing than this sonnet.” With its repetition of assonant vowel sounds, Verlaine's closing line captures the gentle rise heavenward of the ethereal voices of Richard Wagner's offstage choristers, resounding above the stage at the conclusion of the opera. The hiatus with which the line opens functions as a sigh of renunciation, as the listeners abandon themselves to the inexpressible force of the transcendent. In Verlaine's sonnet, these children's voices become the epitome of the “disembodied voice” that Symons sees as so characteristic of Decadent poetics. They sing of the delicate immateriality of spiritual experience, the transient fragility of existence.
Highlights
When Symonds first recalled the line—in the letter to Horatio Forbes Brown cited above—he misremembered it, so that the children do not sing out of sight, in the dome of a cathedral (“dans la coupole”), but are rendered more immediately present “in the chorus”
Symonds’s mistake is a significant one because it points to a broader tension in his own writings, and in Victorian culture more generally, between the child’s singing voice as a disembodied emblem of idealized beauty and the bodily materiality of a singing voice that becomes the object of “sickly” desire
Verlaine’s final line awakens in Symonds the memory of his own experiences as a young man, in which the voice of a chorister—singing before him “dans la chœur”—first prompted the stirrings of his queer sexual desire
Summary
Roland Barthes’s essay “The Grain of the Voice” has been instrumental in drawing attention to the singing voice as an object of desire. A number of critics have explored the manner in which the religious and aesthetic discourses developed within such High Church and Anglo-Catholic traditions allowed for the articulation of queer desire.17 Outside this narrow religious context, the development of the chorister’s voice can be better understood as a product of the wider Victorian fetishization of childhood innocence. He is observed (and listened to) voyeuristically from the “curtain-shielded corner of the pew” by his grandfather, who “forgot himself a little” in “his pleasure in it.” Despite the prevalence of the trope of vocal innocence, accounts of Victorian childhood have generally overlooked the significance of the singing voice as a key site in the construction of childhood innocence more broadly This ethereal voice is the product of a mode of bodily training that often seeks to conceal the embodied origins of vocal production. It attains a state of what is resolutely referred to as “purity”—a vocal tone that implicitly connotes sexual innocence
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