Rimbaud
Selected Poems
Illuminations
A. S.
Kline © 2002 All Rights Reserved
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Contents
(Illuminations I: Après le Déluge)
As soon as the idea of the Flood was finished, a hare halted in the clover and the trembling flower bells, and said its prayer to the rainbow through the spider’s web.
Oh! The precious stones that hid, - the flowers that gazed around them.
In the soiled main street stalls were set, they hauled the boats down to the sea rising in layers as in the old prints.
Blood flowed, at Blue-beard’s house - in the abattoirs in the circuses where God’s promise whitened the windows. Blood and milk flowed.
The beavers built. The coffee cups steamed in the bars.
In the big greenhouse that was still streaming, the children in mourning looked at the marvellous pictures.
A door banged, and, on the village-green, the child waved his arms, understood by the cocks and weathervanes of bell-towers everywhere, under the bursting shower.
Madame *** installed a piano in the
Caravans departed. And the Hotel Splendide was built in the chaos of ice and polar night.
Since then, the Moon heard jackals howling among the deserts of thyme – and pastoral poems in wooden shoes grumbling in the orchard. Then, in the burgeoning violet forest, Eucharis told me it was spring.
Rise, pond: - Foam, roll over the bridge and under the trees: - black drapes and organs - thunder and lightning rise and roll: - Waters and sadnesses, rise and raise the Floods again.
Because since they abated - oh! the precious stones burying themselves and the opened flowers! - it’s wearisome! And the Queen, the Sorceress who lights her fire in the pot of earth, will never tell us what she knows, and what we are ignorant of.
(Illuminations II: Enfance)
I
That idol without ancestors or court, black-eyed and yellow-haired, nobler than legend, Mexican and Flemish: his land insolent azure and green, skirts beaches named by the waves without shipping with names ferociously Greek, Slav, Celtic.
At the edge of the forest – flowers of dream chime, burst flare – the girl with orange lips, knees crossed in the clear flood that rises from the meadows, nudity shadowed, traversed and clothed by rainbows, flowers, the sea.
Ladies who stroll on terraces by the sea: girl-child and giantess, superb blacks in the verdigris moss, jewels arrayed on the rich soil of groves and the little thawed-out gardens -young mothers and elder sisters with looks full of pilgrimage, Sultanas, princesses with tyrannical costumes, little foreign girls and gently unhappy people.
What tedium, the hour of the ‘beloved body’ and ‘dear heart’!
II
It’s her, the little dead girl, behind the
roses. - The young mother, deceased, descends the steps. - The cousin’s
carriage squeaks over the sand. - The little brother - (he’s in
The swarm of golden leaves surrounds the General’s house. They are in the south. – You follow the red road to reach the empty inn. The chateau’s for sale: the shutters are loose. – The priest will have carried off the key to the church. – Around the park the keepers’ cottages are untenanted. The fences are so high you can see nothing but rustling treetops. Besides, there’s nothing there to be seen.
The meadows rise to hamlets without cockerels, without anvils. The sluice gate is raised. O the crosses and windmills of the wild, the isles and the stacks.
Magic flowers buzzed. The slopes cradled him. Creatures of fabulous elegance circled round. Clouds gathered over the open sea made of an eternity of warm tears.
III
There’s a bird in the woods, its song makes you stop and blush.
There’s a clock that never chimes.
There’s a hollow with a nest of white creatures.
There’s a cathedral that descends, and a lake that rises.
There’s a little carriage abandoned in the copse, or running down the lane, beribboned.
There’s a troupe of little players in costume, glimpsed on the road through the edge of the woods.
There’s someone, at last, when you’re hungry and thirsty, who drives you away.
IV
I’m the saint, praying on the terrace – as
the peaceful beasts graze down to the
I’m the scholar in the dark armchair. Branches and rain fling themselves at the library casement.
I’m the traveller on the high road through the stunted woods: the roar of the sluices drowns out my steps. I watch for hours the melancholy golden wash of the sunset.
I might well be the child left on the jetty washed to the open sea, the little farm-boy following the lane whose crest touches the sky.
The paths are rough. The little hills are covered with broom. The air is motionless. How far away the birds and the fountains are! That can only be the world’s end ahead.
V
Let them rent me this tomb at the last, whitewashed, with the lines of cement in relief - very deep underground.
I lean on the table, the lamp lights brightly those magazines I’m a fool to re-read, those books without interest.
At a vast distance above my subterranean room houses root, fogs gather. The mud is red or black. Monstrous city, night without end!
Lower down there are sewers. At the sides only the thickness of the globe. Perhaps gulfs of azure, wells of fire Perhaps on these levels moons and comets, seas and fables meet.
In hours of bitterness I imagine balls of sapphire, of metal. I am master of silence. Why should a semblance of skylight pale in the corner of the vault?
(Illuminations VIII:Départ)
Enough had. Sounds of cities, evening, and in the light, and always.
Enough known. The decisions of life. - O Sounds and Visions!
Departure into new affection and noise!
(Illuminations XVI:Ornières)
On the right the summer dawn wakes the leaves and mists and the noises of this corner of the park, and the banks on the left hold the thousand rapid ruts of the damp road in their violet shadow. Magical procession. Wagons, indeed, loaded with gilded wooden animals, poles and gaudily-coloured canvas, galloped past furiously by twenty dappled circus horses, and men and children on their truly astonishing beasts - twenty vehicles, carved, decked out and be-flowered like ancient carriages or in fairy-tales, full of children dressed for suburban pastoral: - coffins even, under their canopies of night, flourishing their ebony plumes, filing past to the trot of the great blue-black mares.
(Illuminations XXII:
Nothing was stirring yet on the fronts of the palaces. The water was dead. The crowds of shadows had not yet left the woodland road. I walked, waking vivid warm breaths, and the precious stones looked up, and wings rose without a sound.
The first adventure, on the path already full of cool pale gleams, was a flower that told me its name.
I smiled at the blond dishevelled waterfall among the fir trees: on the silvered peak I recognised the Goddess.
Then I lifted the veils one by one. In the lane, waving my arms. On the plain where I denounced her to the cockerel. In the city, she fled among bell-towers and domes, and, running like a beggar across the marble quays, I chased after her.
At the top of the road, near a laurel wood, I surrounded her with her gathered veils, and I felt her vast body a little. Dawn and the child fell down at the foot of the wood.
Waking, it was
(Illuminations XXIX:Barbare)
Long after the days and the seasons, the beings and countries,
The banner of bloodied meat on the silk of seas and of arctic flowers: (they do not exist.)
Having recovered from the old fanfares of heroism - that still attack our hearts and heads - far from the ancient assassins.
- Oh! The banner of bloodied meat on the silk of seas and of arctic flowers: (they do not exist.)
Ecstasies!
The blazes raining in gusts of frost. - Ecstasies! - fires in the rain from the wind of diamonds hurled out by the earthly heart, charred for us. - O world! -
(Far from the old retreats and the old flames, that you hear and feel,)
The blazes and foams. The music, churnings of gulfs and the shock of icicles on the stars.
O ecstasies, O world, O music! And here, forms, sweats, hair and eyes, floating. And the white tears, boiling - O ecstasies! - and the feminine voice reaching the depths of volcanoes and arctic caves.
The banner…
(Illuminations XXXVI:Dévotion)
To my Sister Louise Vanaen de Voringhem: -
her blue coif turned towards the
To my Sister Léonie Aubois d’Ashby. Baow! - the buzzing, stinking summer grass. - For the fevers of mothers and children.
To Lulu - demon - who has maintained her taste for the oratories of the age of Les Amies and her unfinished education. For men. - To Madame ***.
To the adolescent I was. To this old saint, hermitage or mission. To the spirit of the poor. And to a very high clergy. Also to every cult in such a place of memorial cults and among such events that one must give in, according to the aspirations of the moment or our own serious vices.
This evening, to Circeto of the icy heights, fat as a fish, and illuminated like the ten months of reddish light - (her heart amber and spunk) - my only prayer as silent as the regions of night and preceding acts of daring more violent than this polar chaos.
At any price and in every guise, even in metaphysical journeys. - But then no more.
(Illuminations XXXVII:Démocratie)
“ The flag goes with the foul landscape, and our dialect muffles the drum.
In the Interior we’ll nourish the most cynical prostitution. We’ll massacre the logical rebellions.
To the spiced and sodden countries! - in the service of the most monstrous exploitations, industrial or military. Farewell here, no matter where. Voluntary conscripts we’ll possess a fierce philosophy: ignorant of science, wily for our comforts: let the world go hang. That’s true progress. Forward – march!”
(Illuminations XL:Génie)
He is affection and the present because he has built the house open to the foaming winter and the sounds of summer, he who purified food and drink, he who is the charm of fugitive places and the superhuman delight of halts. He is affection and the future, the power and love that we, held in rage and boredom, watch as it passes by in the stormy sky among banners of ecstasy.
He is love, perfect and reinvented measure, marvellous and unexpected reason, and eternity: beloved machinery of the fatal forces. We have all known the terror of his surrender and our own: O pleasure in our health, impulse of our faculties, selfish affection and passion for him, him who loves us throughout his infinite life….. And we summon him again and he travels on…And if Adoration vanishes, it resounds, his promise resounds: “Away with these superstitions, these ancient bodies, these households and these ages. It is this époque that has darkened!”
He will not go, he will not descend from any heaven again, he will not achieve redemption of Woman’s anger and Man’s gaieties, and all that sin: because it’s finished, he exists, and he’s loved.
O his breaths, his heads, his running: the terrible swiftness of the perfection of forms and action!
O fecundity of the spirit and vastness of the universe!
His body! The redemption dreamed of, the shattering of grace meeting with new violence!
The sight of him, the sight of him! All the old kneelings and pains lifted at his passing.
His light! The abolition of all sonorous and moving suffering in a more intense music.
His step! Migrations more enormous than the old invasions.
O He and We! Pride more kindly than lost charities.
O world! And the clear song of new misfortunes!
He has known us all and loved us all. May we know on this winter night, from cape to cape, from tumultuous pole to chateau, from the crowd to the sands, from glance to glance, strength and feelings weary, how to hail him and to see him, and send him on his way again, and under the tides and over the deserts of snow, follow his visions, his breaths, his body, his light.