Abstract: Before Les Amours jaunes, the young Corbière was still finding his way. He had not yet adopted the characteristic strategy of provocative diaeresis which he used to distort his lines of verse, but he was blurring the metre by mixing heptasyllables and octosyllables in “Le douanier de mer”. He was already experimenting with ways of eclipsing the caesura with unstable rhythms of 5+7 syllables, trying truncated rhymes and even including a postvocalic schwa, all present in “Rosalba”.
