«The long sobs of the violins of autumn wound my heart with a monotonous languor.» Verlaine builds the poem almost from sound alone: very short lines, of four and three syllables, that imitate the sustained moan of a violin.
Stifled and pale when the hour strikes, the poet remembers the days gone by and weeps; and off he goes, on the ill wind that carries him here and there, «like a dead leaf». It is among the most musical of French poems, and its opening lines served as a coded signal to the French Resistance in 1944.
The verse is kept in French. Translating it in passing would replace the work with a paraphrase of it.