fragments shored against Pierrot's ruins; and yet finally: an undermining of the whole enterprise by self-mockery and irony, calling the high creative project (and the motives of the artist indulging in it) in doubt. Verse form, style, and structure Each of Giraud's poems is a rondel, a form he admired in the work of the Parnassians, especially of Théodore de Banville. (It is a "bergamask" rondel, not only because the jagged progress of the poems recalls the eponymous rustic dance, but also because 19th-century admirers of the Commedia dell'Arte characters [or "masks"] often associated them with the Italian town of Bergamo, from which Harlequin is said to have hailed.) Unlike many of the Symbolist poets (though certainly not all: Verlaine, Mallarmé, even the early Rimbaud and Laforgue, worked comfortably within strict forms), Giraud was committed to traditional techniques and structures as opposed to the comparatively amorphous constraints of free verse. He exclaimed to his friend Emile Verhaeren, after reading the latter's Les Moines (The Monks), "What I disapprove of with horror, what angers and irritates me is your improvising disdain for verse form, your profound and vertiginous ignorance of prosody and language." Such an attitude leads the critic Robert Vilain to conclude that, while Giraud shared "the Symbolists' concern for the careful, suggestive use of language and the power of the imagination to penetrate beyond the surface tension of the here-and-now", he was equally committed to a Parnassian aesthetic. He adheres to the sparer of the rondel forms, concluding each poem with a quintet rather than a sestet and working within rather strictly observed eight-syllable lines. As is customary, each poem is restricted to two rhymes alone, one masculine, the other feminine, resulting in a scheme of ABba abAB abbaA, in which the capital letters represent the refrains, or repeated lines. Within this austere structure, however, the language is—to use Vilain's words—"suggestive" and the imaginative penetration beneath the "here-and-now" daring and provocative. Like Laforgue after him, Giraud uses neologisms ("Bourrèle!" ["Executioner!" or "Torturer!"]), unusual word choices ("patte" [which usually means "paw"] for Pierrot's foot), and ambiguities ("Arlequin porte un arc-en-ciel", meaning "Harlequin bears [or carries or wears] a rainbow") to enrich the fantastic atmosphere of the poems. His syntax is sometimes elliptical or fractured, as in the first line of the cycle: "Je rêve un théâtre de chambre" ("I dream a chamber theater"), instead of the usual "Je rêve d'un