Rimbaud . Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud
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ARTHUR RIMBAUD POETRY |
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Vagabonds Pitiful “I have not put enough ardor into this enterprise. I have trifled with his infirmity. My fault should we go back to exile, and to slavery.” He implied I was unlucky and of a very strange innocence, and would add disquieting reasons. For reply, I would jeer at this Satanic doctor and, in the end, going over to the window, I would create, beyond the countryside crossed by bands of rare music, phantoms of nocturnal extravagance to come. After this vaguely hygienic diversion, I would lie down on my pallet and no sooner asleep than, almost every night, the poor brother would rise, his mouth foul, eyes starting from his head, — just as he had dreamed he looked! and would drag me into the room, howling his dream of imbecilic sorrow. I had, in truth, pledged myself to restore him to his primitive state of child of the Sun,– and, nourished by the wine of caverns and the biscuit of the road, we wandered, I impatient to find the place and the formula. |
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Rimbaud . Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud
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ARTHUR RIMBAUD POETRY |
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Drunken Oh, Hideous fanfare where yet I do not stumble! Oh, rack of enchantments! For the first time, hurrah for the unheard-of work, For the marvelous body! For the first time! It began with the laughter of children, and there it will end. This poison will stay in our veins even when, as the fanfares depart, We return to our former disharmony. Oh, now, we who are so worthy of these tortures! Let us re-create ourselves after that superhuman promise Made to our souls and our bodies at their creation: That promise, that madness! Elegance, silence, violence! They promised to bury in shadows the tree of good and evil, To banish tyrannical honesty, So that we might flourish in our very pure love. It began with a certain disgust, and it ended– Since we could not immediately seize upon eternity– It ended in a scattering of perfumes. Laughter of children, discretion of slaves, austerity of virgins, Horror of faces and objects here below, Be scared in the memory of the evening past. It began in utter boorishness, and now it ends In angels of fire and ice. Little drunken vigil, blessed! If only for the mask you have left us! Method, we believe in you! We never forgot that yesterday You glorified all our ages. We have faith in poison. We will give our lives completely, everyday. For this is the assassin’s hour. |
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Rimbaud . Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud
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ARTHUR RIMBAUD POETRY |
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Brussels Boulevard July The pleasant palace of Jupiter. – I know it is Thou, who is this place, Minglest thine almost Saharan Blue ! Then, since rose and fir-tree of the sun And tropical creeper have their play enclosed here, The little widow’s cage !… What, Flocks of birds, o iaio, iaio !… – Calm houses, old passions ! Summerhouse of the Lady who ran mad for love. After the buttocks of the rosebushes, the balcony Of Juliet, shadowy and very low. – La Juliette, that reminds me of l’Henriette, A charming railway station, At the heart of a mountain, as if the bottom of an orchard Where a thousand blue devils dance in the air ! Green bench where in stormy paradise, The white Irish girl sings to the guitar. Then, from the Guianian dining-room, Chatter of children and of cages. The duke’s window which makes me think Of the poison of snails and of boxwood Sleeping down here in the sun. And then, It is too beautiful ! too ! Let us maintain our silence. – Boulevard without movement or business, Dumb, every drama and every comedy, Unending concentration of scenes, I know you and I admire you in silence. *** Is she an Almeh ?… in the first blue hours Will she destroy herself like flowers of fire… In front of the splendid sweep where one may smell The enormous flowering city’s breath ! It’s too beautiful ! It’s too beautiful ! but it is necessary – For the Fisherwoman* and the Corsair’s song, And also because the last masqueraders still believed In nocturnal festivities on the pure sea ! June |
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Rimbaud . Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud
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ARTHUR RIMBAUD POETRY |
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The Skies A strange design of bridges, some straight, some arched, others descending at oblique angles to the first; and these figures recurring in other lighted circuits of the canal, but all so long and light that the banks, laden with domes, sink and shrink. A few of these bridges are still covered with hovels, others support polls, signals, frail parapets. Minor chords cross each other and disappear; ropes rise from the shore. One can make out a red coat, possibly other costumes and musical instruments. Are these popular tunes, snatches of seigniorial concerts, remnants of public hymns? The water is gray and blue, wide as an arm of the sea. A white ray falling from high in the sky destroys this comedy. |
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Rimbaud . Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud
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ARTHUR RIMBAUD POETRY |
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Bottom Reality –I found myself nevertheless at my lady’s, an enormous gray-blue bird soaring toward the moldings of the ceiling and trailing my wings through the shadows of the evening. At the foot of the canopy supporting her adored gems and her physical masterpieces, I was a great bear with violet gums, fur hoary with sorrow, eyes on the silver and crystal of the consoles. Everything became shadow and ardent aquarium. In the morning,– bellicose dawn of June,– a donkey, I rushed into the fields, braying and brandishing my grievance, until the Sabine women of the suburbs came and threw themselves on my neck. |
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Rimbaud . Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud
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ARTHUR RIMBAUD POETRY |
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My Bohemian Existence
I went off my overcoat too was becoming ideal; I travelled beneath the sky, Muse! and I was your vassal; Oh dear me! what marvellous loves I dreamed of! My only pair of breeches had a big hole in them. — Stragazing Tom Thumb, I sowed my rhymes along the way. My tavern was at the Sign of the Great Bear. — My stars in the sky rustled softly. And I listened to them, sitting on the road-sides on those pleasant September evenings while I felt drops of dew on my forehead like vigorous wine; and while, rhyming among the fantastical shadows, I plucked the strings of a lyre the elastics of my tattered boots, one foot close to my heart! |
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Rimbaud . Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud
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ARTHUR RIMBAUD POETRY |
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Cities These And this is the people for whom these Alleghenys and Lebanons of dream have been raised! Castles of wood and crystal move on tracks and invisible winches. Old craters ringed with mammoth statues and coppery palms roar melodiously in flames. Festivals of love reverberate from the canals suspended behind the castles. Chimes echo through the gorges like a chase. Corporations of giant singers assemble, their vestments and oriflames brilliant as the mountain-peaks. On platforms in the midst of gulfs, Rolands brazen their bravuras. From abysmal catwalks and the rooftops of inns, a The collapse of apotheosis unites the heights to the depths where seraphic shecentaurs wind among the avalanches. Above the plateaus of the highest reaches, the sea, troubled by the perpetual birth of Venus and loaded with choral fleets amid an uproar of pearls and precious conches, grows dark at times with mortal thunder. On the slopes, harvests of flowers as big as our weapons and goblets are bellowing. Processions of Mabs in red-opaline scale the ravines. On high, their feet in the waterfalls and briars, stags give suck to Diana. Bacchantes of the suburbs weep, and the moon burns and howls. Venus enters the caves of the black-smiths and hermits. Clusters of belfries repeat the ideas of the people. Issues from castles of bone an unknown music. In the boroughs legends are born and enthusiasm germinate. A paradise of storms collapses. Savages dance without stopping the festival of night. And, for one hour, I descended into the swarm of a boulevard of Baghdad where groups of peple were singing the joy of the new work, circulating under a heavy wind without being able to escape those fabulous phantoms of the mountains to which one must return. What good arms, what wondrous hour will restore to me that region whence come my slumbers and least movements? |
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Rimbaud . Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud
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ARTHUR RIMBAUD POETRY |
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Cities The indescribable is the unpolished daylight the sky produces, the immovable the imperial radiance of buildings under the sun’s eternal snow. With a singular flair for the enormous, all the classical marvels of and I visit expositions of painting in galleries twenty times as huge And what painting! a Norwegian Nebuchadnezzar had built ministerial the mere clerks were prouder than Brennuses and I trembled before the guards and superintendents. The very arrangement courtyards and terraces made the cab-drivers drunk. The parks indicate worked over with consummate art, the upper quarter having inexplicable an arm of the sea, without ships, rolling its sheet of sleet between A short bridge leads to a postern directly under the dome of the Sainte-chapelle. This dome has an armature of wrought steel about 15,000 feet in diameter. At certain points, from copper footbridges, from platforms, from stairways winding about the halls and piers, I thought I might be able to judge the depth of the city. But it is prodigious what are the levels of those other quarters lying above or below the For a stranger of our times, reconnaissance is impossible. The commercial quarter is a circus in one style, with arcaded galleries. no shops are to be seen, but the snow on the causeway is beaten down; a few nabobs, as rare as pedestrians on a Sunday morning in London, amble toward a diligence of diamonds. Divans in red velvet; iced beverages are sold at prices ranging from 800 to 1,000 rupees. At the very thought of looking for theatres in this circus, I remind myself that the shops should contain dramas sufficiently gloomy. I suppose there is a police force; but the law must be so strange that abandon any idea of imagining what sort of adventures are local. The residential quarter, as elegant as the smartest street in Paris, is favored with an aura of light; the democratic element numbers a few There again, the houses are not in country, or rather ‘county’, which fills the west endlessly with forests and vast plantations where unsociable gentlemen search for their family-trees by rays of |
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Rimbaud . Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud
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Absinthe is an addictive, intoxicating drink most popular during the 18th century. Artists, poets, painters, writers of the time were indulged to this drink of purpose enhancing imagination and creativity. Rimbaud being one of them was highly familiar to absinthe, together with lover Verlaine who was drawn to the absurdity of drinking and died of debauchery. “For me, my glory is but a humble ephemeral absinthe drunk on the sly, with fear of treason and if I drink no longer, it is for good reason!” – Paul Verlaine “After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, which is the most horrible thing in the world.” – Oscar Wilde |
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Absinthe takes its name from Artemisia absinthium, the botanical name for the bitter herb wormwood and one of its ingredients, thujone, a natural chemical compound that is the supposed source of absinthe?s alleged mind altering properties. Wormwood was first used to flavor alcoholic drinks as far back as 1792, when a potion was created by Pierre Ordinaire, a French doctor living in Switzerland. Ordinaire’s elixir also contained anise, hyssop, Melissa, coriander and various other local herbs, and at 68% alcohol presumably packed quite a punch. Ordinaire allegedly left his recipe to two sisters, and they in turn passed it on to a Major Dubied whose son-in-law was one Henri-Louis Pernod. Whatever the truth behind its origins, absinthe stopped being a local curiosity and started on its route to becoming a national phenomenon in 1797 with the foundation of a distillery by Major Dubied, his son and his son-in-law. By the mid 19th century there were at least half a dozen producers operating in the region, with Pernod alone producing 20,000 liters a day from 26 stills. The success of Pernod as a brand brought many imitators and the company went to court to prevent these trading on their hard-earned reputation. It was the introduction of these cheaper, adulterated imitations that may have been responsible for the reputation that absinthe gained for causing delirium and madness in those who drank it. From the mid 19th century onwards absinthe became associated with bohemian Paris and featured frequently in the paintings of such artists as Manet, Van Gogh and Picasso. When they were not painting it they were drinking it in large quantities, joined by contemporary poets such as Baudelaire and Verlaine (who practically made a career out of it). In fact it was not just popular among artists and poets ? Parisian café³ were full of gentlemen drinking absinthe, so much so that the time between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. became known as L’heure verte (?the green hour,? in reference to absinthe?s color) and absinthe was the most popular aperitif in France. So, if absinthe was so popular, why was it banned? There were a number of reasons. It got caught up in the temperance movement that was sweeping Europe at the beginning of the 20th century and became the scapegoat for all alcohol. Then, findings were published showing that thujone was a neurotoxin in large quantities that caused convulsions and death in laboratory animals. | There was also pressure from the wine producers who saw its popularity as a threat to their sales. The final nail was driven in the coffin with the lurid ?Absinthe Murder? that took place in Switzerland in 1905 when one Monsieur Lanfray shot his entire family after drinking absinthe. The fact that he had also consumed several liters of wine and a considerable amount of brandy was overlooked by the prohibitionists, and two years later absinthe was banned in Switzerland. By the start of the First World War, absinthe had been banned in the U.S. and every country in Europe except France, Spain and England. It is no exaggeration to compare the impact of banning absinthe to the effect that the banning of Scotch whisky would have on Scotland. What is modern absinthe like? Well, broadly speaking, if you like pastis you will like absinthe. Absinthe?s anise is not as heavy and a quality absinthe will be unsweetened (most are not), but there is a family resemblance. Remember that absinthe is not hallucinogenic and should not be drunk with any expectations of getting ?high.? It certainly has some effects that are secondary to the alcohol and these can best be described as a feeling of clarity and sharpness of perception. But do bear in mind that absinthe is far stronger than most spirits you will be used to ? if you overdo it, you will still be seeing the Green Fairy when you wake up the next day.
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All Rights Reserved on all Rimbaud Poetry
KEGSPOTTER 2002 No Rights Reserved on All images and information |
Rimbaud . Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud
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ARTHUR RIMBAUD POETRY |
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Common Nocturne A in the walls,– blurs the pivoting of crumbling roofs,– disperses the boundaries of hearths,– eclipses the windows. Along the vine, having rested my foot on a waterspout, I climbed down into this coach, its period indicated clearly enough by the convex panes of glass, the bulging panels, the contorted sofas. Isolated hearse of my sleep, shepherd’s house of my insanity, the vehicle veers on the grass of the obliterated highway: and in the defect at the top of the right-hand windowpane revolve pale lunar figures, leaves, and breasts. — A Unhitching near a spot of gravel. — Here will they whistle for the storm, and the Sodoms and Solymas, and (Postilion and animals of dream, will they begin again in the stifling forests to plunge me up to my eyes in the silken spring?) And, whipped through the splashing of waters and spilled drinks, send us rolling on the barking of bulldogs… –A breath disperses the boundaries of the hearth. |
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Rimbaud . Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud
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ARTHUR RIMBAUD POETRY |
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Clearance For what neither nobility nor crime have tasted, what is unknown to monstrous love and to the infernal probity of the masses! what neither time nor science need recognize: The Voices restored; fraternal awakening of all choral and orchestral energies and their instantaneous application; the opportunity, the only one, for the release of our senses! For sale Bodies without price, outside any race, any world, any sex, any lineage! Riches gushing at Uncontrolled sale of diamonds! For sale anarchy for the masses; irrepressible satisfaction for rare connoisseurs; agonizing death for the faithful and for lovers! For sale colonization and migrations, sports, fairylands and incomparable comforts, and the noise and the movement and the future they make! For sale the application of calculations and the incredible leaps of harmony. Discoveries and terms never dreamed of, — immediate possession. Wild and infinite flight toward invisible splendors, toward intangible delights– and its maddening secrets for every vice — and its terrifying gaiety for the mob. For sale, the bodies, the voices, the enormous and unquestionable wealth, that which will never be sold. Salesmen are not at the end of their stock! It will be some time before travelers have to turn in their accounts. |
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Rimbaud . Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud
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ARTHUR RIMBAUD POETRY |
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City I and a not too discontented citizen of a metropolis considered modern because all known taste has been evaded in the furnishings and the exterior of the houses as well as in the layout of the city. Here you will fail to detect the least trace of any monument of superstition. Morals and language are reduced to their simplest expression, at who do not even need to know each other, manage their education, business, and old age is so identical that the course of their lives must be several times less long than that which a mad statistics calculates for the people of the continent. And from my window I see new specters rolling through the thick eternal smoke– our woodland shade, our summer night!– new Eumenides in front of my cottage which is my country and all my heart since everything here resembles it,– Death without tears, our diligent daughter and servant, a desperate Love, and a pretty Crime howling in the mud in the street. |
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Rimbaud . Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud
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ARTHUR RIMBAUD POETRY |
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Blackcurrant Blackcurrant the voices of a hundred rooks go with it, the true benevolent voice of angles: with the wide movements of the fir woods when several winds sweep down. Everything flows with [the] horrible mysteries of ancient landscapes; of strongholds visited, of large estates: it is along these banks that you can hear the dead passions of errant knights: but how the wind is wholesome! Let the traveler look through these clerestories: he will journey on more bravely. Forest soldiers whom the Lord sends, dear delightful rooks! Drive away from here the crafty peasant, clinking glasses with his old stump of an arm. May |
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Rimbaud . Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud
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ARTHUR RIMBAUD POETRY |
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Being Beauteous Against of snow, a Being Beauiful, and very tall. Whistlings of death and circles of faint music Make this adored body, swelling and trembling Like a specter, rise… Black The true colors of life grow dark, Shimmering and sperate. In the scaffolding, around the Vision. Shiverings mutter and rise, And the furious taste of these effects is charged With deadly whistlings and the raucous music That the world, far behind us, hurls at our mother of beauty… She retreats, she rises up… Oh! Our bones have put on new flesh, for love. Oh ash-white face. Oh tousled hair. O crystal arms! On this cannot I mean to destroy myself In a swirling of trees and soft air! |
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Rimbaud . Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud
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Anguish Is that an affluent end will make up for the ages of indigence,– that a day of success will lull us to sleep on the shame of our fatal (O palms! diamond!– Love! strength!– higher than all joys and all in any case, everywhere– demon, god,– Youth of this being: myself!) That the accidents of scientific wonders and the movements of social will be cherished as the progressive restitution of our original freedom?… But the Vampire who makes us behave orders us to enjoy ourselves with what she leaves us, or in other words to be more amusing. Rolled in our wounds through the wearing air and the sea; in torments through the silence of the murderous waters and air; in tortures that laugh in the terrible surge of their silence. |
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Rimbaud . Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud
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ARTHUR RIMBAUD POETRY |
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Antique Gracious crowned with flowerets and with laurel, restlessly roll those precious balls, your eyes. Spotted with brown lees, your cheeks are hollow. Your fangs gleam. Your breast is like a lyre, tinklings circulate through your pale arms. Your heart beats in that belly where sleeps the double sex. Walk through the night, gently moving that thigh, that second thigh, and that left leg. |
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Rimbaud . Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud
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ARTHUR RIMBAUD POETRY |
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Bad From The Gauls were the most stupid hide-flayers and hay-burners of their From them I inherit: idolatry, and love of sacrilege– oh, all sorts I have a horror of all trades and crafts. Bosses and workers, all of But who has made my tongue so treacherous, that until now it has counseled If only I had a link to some point in the history of France! But instead, nothing. I am well aware that I have always been of an inferior race. I cannot I remember the history of France, the Eldest Daughter of the Church. Ah! one thing more: I dance the Sabbath in a scarlet clearing, with I don’t remember much beyond this land, and Christianity. I will see Ah, Science! Everything is taken from the past. For the body and the Science, the new nobility! Progress! The world moves!… And why shouldn’t We have visions of numbers. We are moving toward the Spirit. What I Pagan blood returns! The Spirit is at hand… why does Christ not help I wait glutinously for God. I have been of an inferior race for ever And now I am on the beaches of Brittany…. Let cities light their lamps I will come back with limbs of iron, with dark skin, and angry eyes; Now I am accursed, I detest my native land. The best thing is a drunken But no one leaves. Let us set out once more on our native roads, burdened Ultimate innocence, final timidity. All’s said. Carry no more my loathing Come on! Marching, burdens, the desert, boredom and anger. Hire myself to whom? What beasts adore? What sacred images destroy? Better to keep away from justice. A hard life, outright stupor– with –Ah! I am so forsaken I will offer at any shrine impulses toward perfection. Oh, my self-denial, my marvelous Charity, my Selfless love! And still De profundis, Domine… what an ass I am! When I was still a little child, I admired the hardened convict on whom Along the open road on winter nights, homeless, cold, and hungry, one In cities, mud went suddenly red and black, like a mirror when a lamp But orgies and the companionship of women were impossible for me. Not Yes, my eyes are closed to your light. I am an animal, a nigger. But Do I understand nature? Do I understand myself? No more words! I shroud Thirst and hunger, shouts, dance, dance, dance! The white men are landing! Cannons! Now we must be baptized, get dressed, My heart has been stabbed by grace. Ah! I hadn’t thought this would But I haven’t done anything wrong. My days will be easy, and I will Quick! Are there any other lives? Sleep for the rich is impossible. The reasonable song of angels rises from the rescue ship: it is divine Save them! I am reborn in reason. The world is good. I will bless life. I will Boredom is no longer my love. Rage, perversion, madness, whose every I am no prisoner of my own reason. I have said: God. I want freedom, As for settled happiness, domestic or not… no, I can’t. I am too dissipated, What an old maid I’m turning into, to lack the courage to love death! If only God would grant me that celestial calm, ethereal calm, and prayer– Does this farce have no end? My innocence is enough to make me cry. Stop it! This is your punishment…. Forward march! Ah! my lungs burn, Where are we going? To battle? I am weak! the others go on ahead… Fire! Fire at me! Here! or I’ll give myself up! –Cowards! –I’ll kill Ah!…–I’ll get used to it. That would be the French way, the path |
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Rimbaud . Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud
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ARTHUR RIMBAUD POETRY |
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SONG
And leave unto heaven , My fear and regret; A sick thirst Darkens my veins. Let it come, let it come, the season we can love! So the green field, To oblivion falls, Overgrown, flowering, With incense and weeds. And the cruel noise, Of dirty flies. Let it come, let it come, the season we can love! I loved the desert, burnt orchards, tired old shops, warm drinks. I |
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Rimbaud . Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud
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ARTHUR RIMBAUD POETRY |
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STUPRA
> The their glans encrusted with blood and excrement. Our forefathers displayed their members proudly by the fold of the sheath and the grain of the scrotum. In the middle ages, for a female, angel or sow, a fellow whose gear was substantial was needed; and even a Kleber, judging by his breeches – which exaggerate, perhaps, a little – can’t have lacked resources. Besides, man is equal to the proudest mammal; we are wrong to be surprised at the hugeness of their members; but a sterile hour has struck: the gelding and the ox have bridled their ardours, and no one will dare again to raise his genital pride in the copses teeming with comical children. |
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Rimbaud . Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud
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ARTHUR RIMBAUD POETRY |
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Alchemy SECOND My turn now. The story of one of my insanities. For a long time I boasted that I was master of all possible landscapes– I invented colors for the vowels! A black, E white, I red, O blue, U Far from flocks, from birds and country girls, What did I drink within that leafy screen Surrounded by tender hazelnut trees In the warm green mist of afternoon? What could I drink from this young Oise –Tongueless trees, flowerless grass, dark skies– Drink from these yellow gourds, far from the hut I loved? Some golden draught that made me sweat. I would have made a doubtful sign for an inn. Later, toward evening, the sky filled with clouds… Water from the woods runs out on virgin sands, And heavenly winds cast ice thick on the ponds; Then I saw gold, and wept, but could not drink. * * * At four in the morning, in summertime, Love’s drowsiness still lasts… The bushes blow away the odor Of the night’s feast. Beyond the bright Hesperides, Within the western workshop of the Sun, Carpenters scramble– in shirtsleeves– Work is begun. And in desolate, moss-grown isles They raise their precious panels Where the city Will paint a hollow sky. For these charming dabblers in the arts Who labor for a King in Babylon, Venus! Leave for a moment Lovers’ haloed hearts… O Queen of Shepherds! Carry the purest eau-de-vie To these workmen while they rest And take their bath at noonday, in the sea. The worn-out ideas of old-fashioned poetry played an important part I got used to elementary hallucination: I could very precisely see a |
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Rimbaud . Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud
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ARTHUR RIMBAUD POETRY |
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Barbarian Long The banner of raw meat against the silk of seas and arctic flowers; (they do not exist). Recovered from the old fanfares of heroism,– which still attack the heart and head,– far from the old assassins. — Oh! the banner of raw meat against the silk of seas and arctic flowers; (they do not exist).– Bliss! Live embers raining in gusts of frost.– Bliss!– fires in the rain of the wind of diamonds flung out by the earth’s heart eternally carbonized for us. — O world! (Far from the old retreats and the old flames, still heard, Fire and foam. Magic, veering of chasms and clash of icicles against O bliss, O world, O music! And forms, sweat, eyes and long hair floating there. And white tears boiling,– O bliss!– and the feminine voice reaching to the bottom of volcanoes and grottos of the arctic seas. The banner… |
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