Abstract: This article deals with the orientation of Verlaine’s poetics toward the future, the latent, that is to say, an attention paid to everything that emerges or, more precisely, is about to emerge (absence on the cusp of disappearing, presence poised to happen). More specifically, it focuses on the use and functions of a quite emblematic punctuation mark that embodies a large share of Verlaine’s predilections, though relatively little used in the early collections: the ellipsis.
