Your soul is a chosen landscape Where charming masked and costumed figures go Playing the lute and dancing and almost Sad beneath their fantastic disguises. All sing in a minor key Of all-conquering love and careless fortune They do not seem to believe in their happiness And their song mingles with the moonlight. The still moonlight, sad and beautiful, Which gives the birds to dream in the trees And makes the fountain sprays sob in ecstasy, The tall, slender fountain sprays among the marble statues.

Verlaine's first publiPaul Verlained collection Poèmes saturniens (1866) though adversely commented upon by Sainte-Beuve establiPaul Verlained him as a poet of promise and originality. "
The New Zealand band The Verlaines are named for Paul Verlaine. As an indirect result of this incident Verlaine was arrested and imprisoned at Mons where he underwent a conversion to Roman Catholicism which again influenced his work and provoked Rimbaud's sharp criticism.

Paul-Marie Verlaine (French pronunciation: ​[vɛʁˈlɛn]; 30 March 1844 – 8 January 1896) was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry.