Paul Verlaine’s Poem “Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit, …”: A Practical Reading

Abstract

This article examines “Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit, ...”, the poem composed by Paul Verlaine, the late 19th-century French

poet, which is included in Wisdom, one of his well-known collection of poetry.    

In its analysis of the poem, the article applies the theory of Roman Jakobson, the 20th-century linguist who explains literary texts through the lenses of linguistic theory. This article’s theoretical approach is based on the notions of the functions of language, syntagmatic relations and paradigmatic relations at the syntactic level, and parallelism. This part also includes tonality analysis. These approaches lead to the understanding of the poem’s message, i.e. the addresser’s melancholia.

This approach could also be applied in language teaching for beginners with some basic knowledge of the French language. It could help them learn to apply their knowledge in language in the analytical reading of literature, thereby providing them with concrete tools and making them feel that French literature reading is not incomprehensible.