Poetry
Gedichten
Not translated into English
Johan Michiel Dautzenberg · 1850
Opening lines
Waar 't voetpad langs de heining vlucht
Door beemd en weide heen,
Daar zit ik soms in de avondlucht
Gansch stillekens alleen.
Where the footpath runs along the hedge
Through meadow and pasture,
There I sometimes sit in the evening air
Quite quietly alone.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from dbnl.org
Synopsis
A first collection, published when the poet was forty-two and dedicated to his wife. It opens with nature and love, the dance of the gnats, the daisy, spring, domestic happiness; then come romances and ballads, including a sick lady in Antwerp under siege in 1581, then metrical poems, among them four odes to Flanders, miscellanies for the Flemish language and song, and a cycle of anecdotes about Charles V. The preface announces the programme: to prefer the ancient metres to the monotonous clatter of iambs and trochees.
Context
Nicolaas Beets, then foremost among Dutch men of letters, wrote laudatory reviews of them. The following year appeared the essay on prosody in which its author attempted to bring his fellow writers back to the ancient metres, writing Dutch according to the quantity of syllables. August Vermeylen saw in him the first consciously Flemish writer. The poet Frans de Cort became his son-in-law.
Who it is for
Poems of learned form, in Dutch of the mid-nineteenth century; no French or English translation has been found.
Prizes and reception
First collection by an author whom Vermeylen placed at the origin of a self-aware Flemish literature; praised by Nicolaas Beets.