Et quand elles auront, dans ma maison, Mis de l'ordre à mes torts, plié tous mes remords Et refermé, sur mes péchés, toute cloison, En leur pays d'or immobile, où le bonheur Descend, sur des rives de fleurs entr'accordées, Elles dresseront les hautes idées, En sainte-table, pour mon cœur.[6] This feeling of recovery grows more and more secure, more and more the mist parts before the approaching sun of health. Now the poet knows that he has been wandering in the dark galleries of mines, that he has been hammering a labyrinth through the hard rock of hatred instead of walking the same path as his fellow-men in the light. And at last, bright and exultant, high above the shy voices of hope and prayer, the sudden triumph of certainty rings out. For the first time Verhaeren finds the form of the poem of the future--the dithyramb. Where of old, confused and lonely, _le carillon noir_ of pain sounded, now all the strings of the heart vibrate and sing. Sonnez toutes mes voix d'espoir! Sonnez en moi; sonnez, sous les rameaux, En des routes claires et du soleil![7] And now the path proceeds in light 'vers les claires métamorphoses.'[8] This flight into the world was the great liberation. Not only has the body grown strong again and rejoices in the wandering and the way, but the soul too has become cheerful, the will has grown new wings that are stronger than the old, and the poet's art is filled with a fresh blood red with life. The deliverance is perceptible even in Verhaeren's verse, which with its delicate nerves reproduces all the phases of his soul. For his poetry, which at first in the indifference of its picturesque description preserved the cold form of the Alexandrine, and then, in the grim monotony of the crisis, tried to represent the void waste of feeling by a terrifying, gruesomely beautiful uniformity of rhythm, this poem of a sudden, as though out of a dream, starts into life, awakens like an animal from sleep, rears, prances, curvets; imitates all movements, threatens, exults, falls into ecstasy: in other words, all of a sudden, and independently of all influences and theories, he has won his way to the _vers libre,_ free verse. Just as the poet no longer shuts the I world up in himself, but bestows himself on the world, the poem too no longer seeks to lock the world up obstinately in its four-cornered prison, but surrenders itself to every feeling, every rhythm, every melody; it adapts itself, distends; with its foaming voluptuous joy it can fold in its embrace the illimitable length and breadth of cities, can contract to pick up the loveliness of one fallen blossom, can imitate the thundering voice of the street, the hammering of machines, and the whispering of lovers in a garden of spring. _The poem can now speak in all the languages of feeling, with all the voices of men; for the tortured, moaning cry of an individual has become the voice of the universe._