But soon the unanimous hammers will penetrate them, ancient walls, yet sacred as the flesh.”
One senses through his depiction of this architectural execution the helplessness of the ancient dwellings, where once “youthfulness and love laughed from their windows” as they await their fate. The Enclosed Lives and The Mirror of the Native Sky continue the tone of reclusion and analogy, where images enhance the sense of imprisonment and the allegorical representation of the subconscious. In the poem ‘Evening in the Windows’, as the golden glow of sunset fades, gathering shadows give rise to an atmosphere of foreboding, and the dwelling and its occupants are suddenly put at risk: “something poisonous germinates there, threatening this house on the edge of sleep;”
Such images of bewitchment recall Huysmans and his accounts of Satanism in Bruges. In the poem ‘The Lines of the Hand’ an uncharacteristically wry and playful Rodenbach is evident, yet still the tone is overwhelmingly melancholy as we observe the hand succumb to its fate. At first, the youthful and naïve hand plays unconcernedly in the air “like a bird taunting the ocean’s spume” but, having matured, the hand becomes a bejewelled, purse-dipping creature unaware that the myriad lines forming across it signify that “Death is already spinning his spider’s web”. A year after the publication of The Mirror of the Native Sky and the novel Le Carillioneur, Rodenbach was gone. Following his death
Commemorative plaque on George Rodenbach’s house at rue Berckmans 93, Saint Gilles, Brussels
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