Poèmes saturniens Reading Order

Why are the Poèmes saturniens called 'Saturnine' and what does this mean for the collection?

The title Poèmes saturniens refers to the astrological influence of Saturn — the planet traditionally associated with melancholy, slowness, contemplation, and artistic temperament. The saturnine individual is characterized by a heaviness of spirit, a tendency toward introspection and sadness, a sensitivity to the passage of time and the insubstantiality of pleasure, and an artistic vocation that is both the consequence and the compensation of this temperament. Verlaine is placing himself in the tradition of the melancholic artist — the tradition of Dürer's Melencolia, of the Romantic Mal du siècle, of the Baudelairean Spleen — but the way he develops this tradition is already distinctively his own. Where Baudelaire's Spleen is intense, confrontational, and precise in its articulations, Verlaine's saturnine melancholy is vague, suggestive, and musical. The opening poem, 'Mon rêve familier,' is a good example: it describes a recurring dream of a woman who is never precisely identified — she is 'ni tout à fait la même / Ni tout à fait une autre' (neither quite the same nor quite another) — and the poem's power comes from the refusal to be more precise, the insistence on the dream's essentially vague quality. This vagueness, this preference for the suggestive over the stated, is what makes Verlaine a proto-Symbolist rather than a late Romanticist.