These songs are nearly unique among Faure's writings, for having no dedication, probably due to the nature of the first work. Prison is a setting of a poem that Paul Verlaine wrote while himself in prison after having attempted to kill his friend and fellow poet, Arthur Rimbaud. Faure, who set several of Verlaine's poems (Clair de lune, Spleen, Cinq melodies de Venise, and La bonne chanson) during the late 1880s, made his setting of this poem one of his most dramatic and emotional, each note tied especially closely to the moods of the text, from the first quiet contemplation of the serenity in the world outside the prison, to the agonized and desperate unanswerable questions of the ending, sinking into a quiet sense of loss and grief.

While Faure rarely tried to link the songs gathered together into the various opuses, except, of course, when writing a song cycle, in "Soir" he did choose a text expressing a certain level of sadness, though here alleviated by love and by thoughts of compassion, in contrast to the first work. The first two stanzas are marked by his typical sensual lyricism, the last becoming more intense as the poem declares, "C'est la pitie," the emotion that Faure must have felt and certainly expressed in his setting of "Prison."



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