Few of us stop to imagine that the world we find so up-to-date will one day look like a museum piece. Rolfe Humphries' "Fin de Siècle" begins at the moment that realization lands. The speaker is strolling through a landscape of the fashionable and the new, then sees, "all of a sudden," that none of it is really his. It is "not my Now, but some one else's Then." The poem is about the way the present is always on loan from the future, which will pick it up, shrink it, and treat it as a charming curiosity.
The opening lines mimic the very smugness they are about to undermine. "So bright, so modern, / So quick with novelty, so very wise" is a breathless pile-up of "so," and the French catchphrases "dernier cri" and "ne plus ultra" are like the slogans of a department-store window, each claiming to be the last word. By the time we reach "this, / All this, all this," the repetition has begun to sound less like boasting than like a spell breaking. The line break after "this" gives the speaker a small stumble, a moment where confidence runs out.
What replaces it is a brilliant image of shrinkage. The speaker's world becomes "garish and glazed, of colored post-card size," something "so little that it goes from hand to hand." Humphries gets a great deal out of this one comparison. A postcard is a souvenir, flat and bright and easy to pass around, and it flattens a whole way of life into a single cheerful scene. The future's verdict arrives in a mocking little chorus: "How irresistible! How charming!" The exclamation marks do the work of condescension. Even better is the phrase "these lovers of the chromium antique." Chromium suggests the glossy, mechanical, up-to-the-minute, and pairing it with "antique" is a small collision of opposites, since the very thing we think of as sleek and forward-looking is about to become the thing others collect for its age.
Formally, the poem keeps one foot in tradition. Its lines run mostly in a loose iambic pentameter, and the rhymes are the sort that glide past almost unnoticed: "wise" and "realize," "Then" and "men," "small" and "all." There is a conversational ease to it, as if the speaker were thinking aloud, and that plainness helps the barbs land. The rhymes sometimes arrive in pairs and sometimes after a delay, so the poem never settles into a predictable chime, which suits an argument that keeps turning on itself.
The second stanza shifts from observation to something more generous, and then to something sharper. "Forgive their trespasses" borrows the language of prayer, which gives the request a dryly comic solemnity. The speaker's argument is that the people of the future will look down on us with a particular advantage: they know "how all the things that frightened us came out." Hindsight lets them "cast / The light of certainty around the past." The poem is quietly alert to what this certainty costs. These future observers "impute to others what they dare not claim, / The opposite of sorrow, guilt, and shame," which suggests that condescension is a way of sidestepping their own anxieties, projecting innocence onto the past so as to feel secure in the present.
The ending is the poem's neatest turn. The last "advantage" the future holds is simply being alive. They "will surely be, / Past any contradiction, still alive / In Nineteen ninety three, and four, and five." The year-by-year count, dropping into plain numerals after all the Gallic elegance, has a deadpan finality. The title tells us the speaker's own moment is the fin de siècle, the end of a century, and the poem's last lines are aware that a new century will leave this one behind. Humphries does not rage at this. The tone stays wry, almost companionable, and the real sting is that the speaker's own cleverness is already part of the postcard.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It catches a feeling most of us recognize, the shock of seeing old photographs of ourselves in clothes we were once proud of, and turns it into a lesson about humility. Every age thinks of itself as the finished product, and "Fin de Siècle" gently reminds us we are only somebody's "long ago."