Slowly, but irresistible as a swelling tide, emerges an evil thought: the idea of the senselessness of life, the thought of death. As the last of yearnings soars up the prayer: Mourir! comme des fleurs trop énormes, mourir![6] For the poet's whole body is, as it were, sore from this contact with the outer world, from these little gnawing pains. Not a single great feeling can stand erect: everything is eaten away by this little, gnawing, twitching pain. But now the man in his torture springs up, as a beast, tormented by the stings of insects, tears its chains asunder and rushes madly and blindly along. The patient would fain flee from his bed of torture, but he cannot retrace his steps. No man can 'se recommencer enfant, avec calcul.'[7] Travels, dreams, do nothing but deaden the pain; and then the torment of the awakening sets in again with redoubled strength. Only one way is open: the road which leads forward, the road to annihilation. Out of a thousand petty pains, the will longs for one single pain that shall end all: the body that is being burnt piecemeal cries for the lightning. The sick man desires--as fever-patients will tear their wounds open--to make this pain, which tortures without destroying, so great and murderous that it will kill outright: to save his pride, he would fain be himself the cause of his destruction. Pain, he says to himself, shall not continue to be a series of pin-pricks; he refuses to 'pourrir, immensément emmailloté d'ennui';[8] he asks to be destroyed by a vast, fiery, savage pain; he demands a beautiful and tragic death. _The will to experience becomes here the will to suffer pain_ and even death. He will be glad to suffer any torture, but not this one low little thing; he can no longer endure to feel himself so contemptible, so wretched. N'entendre plus se taire, en sa maison d'ébène, Qu'un silence total dont auraient peur les morts.[9] And with a flagellant's pleasure the patient nurses this fire of fever, till it flames up in a bright blaze. The deepest secret of Verhaeren's art was from the first his joy in intemperance, the strength of his exaggeration. And so, too, he snatches up this pain, this neurasthenia to a wonderful, fiery, and grandiose ecstasy. A cry, a pleasure breaks out of this idea of liberation. For the first time the word 'joy' blazes again in the cry: Le joie enfin me vient, de souffrir par moi-même, Parce que je lé veux.[10] True, only a perverse joy, a sophism, the false triumph over life of the suicide, who believes he has conquered fate when, truth to tell, it has conquered him. But this self-deception is already sublime.