Arthur Rimbaud

O cowards, there she is! Pile out into the stations!
The sun with its fiery lungs blew clear
The boulevards that one evening the Barbarians filled.
Here is the holy City, seated in the West!

Come! we’ll stave off the return of the fires,
Here are the quays, here are the boulevards, here
Are the houses against the pale,
Radiant blue-starred, one evening, by the red flashes of bombs!

Hide the dead palaces with forests of planks!
Affrighted,

Perhaps an Evening awaits me
when I shall drink I peace in some old Town,
and die the happier: since I am patient!
If my pain submits, if I ever have any gold,
shall I choose the North or the Country of Vines? …
– Oh! It is shameful to dream – since it is pure loss!
And if I become once more the old traveler,
never can the green inn be open to me

When the boy’s head, full of raw torment,
Longs for hazy dreams to swarm in white,
Two charming older sisters come to his bed
With slender fingers and silvery nails.

They sit him at a casement window, thrown
Open on a mass of flowers basking in blue air,
And run the fine, intimidating witchcraft
Of their fingers through his dew-dank hair.

He listens to their diffident, sing-song breath,
Smelling of elongated honey off the rose,
Broken now and then

And so the Mother, shutting up the duty book,
Went, proud and satisfied.
She did not see the look
In the blue eyes, or how with secret loathing wild,
Beneath the prominent brow, a soul raged in her child.
All the day long he sweated with obedient zeal;
a clever boy; and yet appearing to reveal,
By various dark kinks, a sour hypocrisy.
In corridors bedecked with musty tapestry
He wouls stick out his tongue, clenching hid two

It is a high, carved sideboard made of oak.
The dark old wood, like old folks, seems kind;
Its drawers are open, and its odours soak
The darkness with the scent of strong old wine.
Its drawers are full, a final resting place
For scented, yellowed linens, scraps of clothes
Foe wives or children, worn and faded bows,
Grandmothers’ collars made of figured lace;
There you will find old medals, locks of grey
Or yellow hair, and portraits,

That bright-eyed and brown-skinned youth,
The fine twenty-year body that should go naked,
That, brow circled with copper, under the moon,
An unknown Persian Genie would have worshipped;
Impetuous with virginal sweetnesses,
And dark, proud of his first obstinacies,
Like tears of the summer night’s distresses,
That turn on beds of diamond, young seas;
The youth, faced with this world’s ugliness,
Shudders in his heart, wounded deeply,
And, full of profound eternal emptiness,
Begins to long for his sister of

It is a green hollow where a stream gurgles,
Crazily catching silver rags of itself on the grasses;
Where the sun shines from the proud mountain:
It is a little valley bubbling over with light.

A young soldier, open-mouthed, bare-headed,
With the nape of his neck bathed in cool blue cresses,
Sleeps; he is stretched out on the grass, under the sky,
Pale on his green bed where the light falls like rain.

His feet in the

In the brown dining-room,
which was perfumed
with the scent of polish and fruit,
I was shoveling up at my ease
a plateful of some Belgian dish
or other, and sprawling in my enormous chair.
While I ate, I listened, happy and silent, to the clock.
The kitchen door opened with a gust,
and the servant girl came in,
I don’t know what for,
neckerchief loose, hair dressed impishly.
And, passing her little finger tremblingly across her cheek,
a pink and

Eternal Undines, split the pure water.
Venus, sister of azure, stir up the clear wave.
Wandering Jews of Norway, tell me of snow;
old beloved exiles tell me of the sea.
Myself: No, no more of these pure drinks,
these water-flowers for glasses;
neither legends nor faces quench my thirst;
singer, your god-child is my thirst so mad,
a mouthless intimate hydra
which consumes and ravages.

The star has wept rose-colour in the heart of your ears,
The infinite rolled white from your nape to the small of your back
The sea has broken russet at your vermilion nipples,
And Man bled black at your royal side.
-Arthur Rimbaud

The sun has wept rose in the shell of your ears,
The world has rolled white from your back,
Your thighs:
The sea has stained rust at the crimson of your breasts,
And Man had bled black at your sovereign side.
-Arthur Rimbaud

Black in the snow and fog,
at the great lighted airshaft, their bums rounded,
on their knees, five little ones – what anguish! –
watch the baker making the heavy white bread.
They see the strong white arm that shapes
the grey dough and sets it to bake in a bright hole.
They listen to the good bread cooking.
The Baker with his fat smile hums an old tune.
They are huddled together, not one of them

Dark with knobbed growths, peppered with pock-marks like hail, their
eyes ringed with Green, warty fingers clenched on their thigh-bones
Their skulls stained with indeterminate blotches
Like the leprous discolorations of ancient walls;

In amorous seizures they have grafted
Their weird bone structures to the great dark skeletons
Of their chairs; their feet are entwined
Morning and evening, on the rickety rails!

These old men have always been one flesh with their seats,
Feeling bright suns drying

We have found it again.
What? Time without end.
‘Tis the ocean gone
For a walk with the sun.
Soul, you sentinel,
Murmur and confess,
Day is fiery hell,
Night is nothingness.
From the common urges,
From the human highest
Far thy path diverges:
Following thou fliest…

No expectancy,
No orietur,
Science patiently;
Punishment is sure.
From your blaze alone,
Satin flames of force,
Duty’s breath is blown;
No one says : of course.
We have found it again.
What? Time without end.
‘Tis the ocean gone
For a walk with the

A rap of your finger on the drum
fires all the sounds
and starts a new harmony.
A step of yours: the levy of new men
and their marching on.
Your head turns away:
O the new love!
Your head turns back:
O the new love!
“Change our lots, confound the plagues,
beginning with time,”
to you these children sing.
“Raise no matter where the substance
of our fortune and our desires,”
they beg you.
Arrival of all time,
who will go everywhere.

Place de la Gare, in Charleville.

On the square which is chopped into mean little plots of grass,
The square where all is just so, both the trees and the flowers,
All the wheezy townsfolk whom the heat chokes bring
Each Thursday evening, their envious silliness.

– The military band, in the middle of the gardens,
Swing their shakos in the Waltz of the Fifes:
Round about, near the front rows, the town dandy struts;
– The

I

Thus continually towards the dark azure,
Where the sea of topazes shimmers,
Will function in your evening
The Lilies, those pessaries of ectasy!

In our own age sago,
When Plants work for their living,
The Lily will dring blue loathings
From you religious Proses!

– Monsieur de Kerdrel’s fleur-de-lys,
The Sonnet of eighteen-thirty,
The Lily they bestow on the Bard
Together with the pink and the amaranth!

Lilies! lilies! None to be seen!
Yet in your Verse, like the sleeves
Of the soft-footed

As from a green zinc coffin, a woman’s
Head with brown hair heavily pomaded
Emerges slowly and stupidly from an old bathtub,
With bald patches rather badly hidden;

Then the fat gray neck, broad shoulder-blades
Sticking out; a short back which curves in and bulges;
Then the roundness of the buttocks seems to take off;
The fat under the skin appears in slabs:

The spine is a bit red; and the whole thing has a smell
Strangely horrible;

I.
It is a repose in the light,
neither fever nor languor,
on a bed or on a meadow.
It is the friend neither violent nor weak.
The friend.
It is the beloved neither
tormenting nor tormented.
The beloved.
Air and the world not sought.
Life. –Was it really this?
–And the dream grew cold.

II.
The lighting comes round
to the crown post again.
From the two extremities of the room
— decorations negligible
— harmonic elevations join.
The wall opposite the watcher
is a psychological succession
of

A Black, E white, I red, U green, O blue : vowels,
I shall tell, one day, of your mysterious origins:
A, black velvety jacket of brilliant flies
Which buzz around cruel smells,

Gulfs of shadow; E, whiteness of vapours and of tents,
Lances of proud glaciers, white kings, shivers of cow-parsley;
I, purples, spat blood, smile of beautiful lips
In anger or in the raptures of penitence;

U, waves, divine shudderings of viridian seas,
The peace of

A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles,
Je dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes:
A, noir corset velu des mouches éclatantes
Qui bombinent autour des puanteurs cruelles,

Golfes d’ombre ; E, candeur des vapeurs et des tentes,
Lances des glaciers fiers, rois blancs, frissons d’ombelles;
I, pourpres, sang craché, rire des lèvres belles
Dans la colère ou les ivresses pénitentes;

U, cycles, vibrements divins des mers virides,
Paix des pâtis semés d’animaux, paix des

When a child,
certain skies sharpened my vision:
all their characters were reflected in my face.
The Phenomena were roused.-
At present,
the eternal inflection of moments
and the infinity of mathematics
drives me through this world where
I meet with every civil honor,
respected by strange children
and prodigious affections.-
I dream of a War
of right and of might,
of unlooked-for logic.
It is as simple as a musical phrase.
Original French
Guerre
Enfant, certains ciels ont affiné mon optique :
tous les caractères

The cascade resounds behind operetta huts.
Fireworks prolong, through the orchards
and avenues near the Meander,
the greens and reds of the setting sun.
Horace nymphs with First Empire headdresses,
Siberian rounds and Boucher’s Chinese ladies.
-Winter Festival by Arthur Rimbaud

O that warm February morning!
The untimely south came
to stir up our absurd paupers’ memories,
our young distress.
Henrika had on a brown
and white checked cotton skirt
which must have been worn in the last century,
a bonnet with ribbons and a silk scarf.
It was much sadder than any mourning.
We were taking a stroll in the suburbs.
The weather was overcast
and that wind from the south
excited all the evil odors of the desolate
garden and the

The room is open to the turquoise blue sky;
no room here: boxes and bins!
Outside the wall is overgrown with birthwort
where the brownies’ gums buzz.
How truly there are the plots of genii
this expense and this foolish untidiness!
It is the African fairy who supplies
the mulberry and the hairnets in the corners.
Several, cross godmothers [dressed] in skirts of light,
go into the cupboards, and stay there!
The people of the house are out,
they