Fixing the Fleeting: Metre and “disembodied voice” in Arthur Symons’s Silhouettes

In his influential essay The Decadent Movement in Literature (1893), Arthur Symons characterised his ideal of Decadence as a «disembodied voice». Despite its evident aural dimension, this concept of vocal disembodiment has been most frequently linked to the nature of the typical speaker in Symons’s early poetry, but has never been seen as related to its actual rhythms. In order to help to fill this gap, I will explore some of the most significant metrical traits of Symons’s second collection, Silhouettes (1892; 1896), a book that is much in tune with the Decadent Movement in Literature. I will analyse the most frequent stanzaic patterns of the collection, the use of inversions and syntactic subordination, some peculiarities of the dolnik, and the high incidence of repetitions. I will show how these (often-neglected) metrical features contribute to creating a very purified musicality that hovers between the cadences of speech and the jauntiness of song.