Rimbaud
Selected Poems
A. S.
Kline © 2002, 2008 All Rights Reserved
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Contents
The
Famous Victory of Saarbrucken
(Première Soirée)
And the great indiscreet trees
Touched the glass with their leaves,
In malice, quite close, quite close.
Sitting in my deep chair,
Half-naked, hands clasped together,
On the floor, little feet, so fine,
So fine, shivered with pleasure.
I watched, the beeswax colour
Of a truant ray of sun-glow
Flit about her smile, and over
Her breast – a fly on the rose.
– I kissed her delicate ankle.
She gave an abrupt sweet giggle
Chiming in clear trills,
A pretty laugh of crystal.
Her little feet under her slip
Sped away: ‘Will you desist!’
Allowing that first bold act,
Her laugh pretended to punish!
– Trembling under my lips,
Poor things, I gently kissed her lids.
– She threw her vapid head back.
‘Oh! That’s worse, that is!’…
‘Sir, I’ve two words to say to you...’
– I planted the rest on her breast
In a kiss that made her laugh
With a laugh of readiness….
– She was barely dressed though,
And the great indiscreet trees
Touched the glass with their leaves
In malice, quite close, quite close.
1870
(Sensation)
Pricked by the ears of maize, trampling the dew:
A dreamer, I will gaze, as underfoot the coolness plays.
I’ll let the evening breeze drench my head anew.
I shall say – not a thing: I shall think – not a thing:
But an infinite love will swell in my soul,
And far off I shall go, a bohemian,
Through Nature – as happy, as if I had a girl.
March 1870
(Roman)
I
– One fine evening, tired of beers and lemonade,
The noisy cafés with their dazzling gleam!
– You walk the lime-trees’ green on the Parade.
The lime-trees smell so fine on fine June evenings!
The air’s so sweet sometimes you close your eyes:
The wind is full of sounds – the town’s nearby –
Blows the smell of beer, and the scent of vines…
II
– Then you make out a little tiny tatter
Of sombre azure framed by a twig of night,
Pierced by a fatal star, it melts, after
Soft tremblings, tiny and perfectly white…
June night! And Seventeen! – You get tipsy.
The sap’s champagne and blurs every feature…
You wander: you feel a kiss on your lips
That quivers there, like some tiny creature….
III
Your mad heart goes Crusoeing the romances,
– Where in the pale lamp’s glare your eyes follow
A young girl going by with sweet little glances
Below the gloom of her father’s stiffened collar…
And because she finds you immensely naïve
As by, in her little ankle boots, she trips
She turns away alertly with a quick shrug…
– And cavatinas die away on your lips….
You’re in love. Taken till the month of August.
You’re in love. –Your sonnets make her smile.
All your friends have gone: you’re in bad taste.
– Then the adored, one evening, deigns to write!
That evening…. you return to the cafés gleam,
You call out for beer or lemonade…
– You’re not serious, when you’re seventeen
And the lime-trees are green on the Parade.
(Morts de Quatre-Vingt-Douze)
“ …….Frenchmen of ‘70, Bonapartists,
Republicans, remember your forefathers of ’92….”
Paul de Cassagnac (Le Pays)
Who, pale from the
great kiss of
Crushed, calm, beneath your wooden shoes
That yoke that weighs on human brows and souls:
Men exalted, great in agony,
You whose hearts raged with love, in misery,
O soldiers that Death, noble Lover, has sown
In all the old furrows, so they’ll be reborn:
You whose blood washed every soiled grandeur,
Dead of Valmy, Dead of Fleurus, Dead of
O millions of Christs with eyes gentle and sombre:
We’ve let you fall asleep with the Republic,
We, cowering under kings as if under blows.
– They’re telling tales of you so we’ll remember!
Done at Mazas,
(Napoleon III after
(Rages Des Césars)
Dressed in black, a cigar between his teeth:
The pale Man thinks of the flowers of the Tuileries
And sometimes his fishlike-eye grows keen…
The Emperor’s drunk with his twenty-year orgy!
He said to himself:
‘I’ll snuff out
As if it were a candle, and so delicately!”
He’s in prison. – Oh! What name is it that trembles
On his mute lips? What relentless regret does he feel?
No one will ever know. The Emperor’s eye’s dark.
He recalls the ‘Accomplice’, perhaps, in spectacles…
Watching a thin wreathe of smoke steal,
As on those Saint-Cloud evenings, from his cigar.
Note: This is
Napoleon III, in 1870, imprisoned and ill, at Wilhelmshoehe
in
(L’Éclatante Victoire de Sarrebrück)
(Belgian
print, brilliantly tinted,
sold at
Gallops off, ramrod straight, on his fine gee-gee,
Very happy – since everything he sees is rosy,
Fierce as Zeus, and as gentle as a Daddy is:
The brave Infantrymen taking a nap, in vain,
Under the gilded drums and scarlet cannon,
Rise politely. One puts his tunic back on,
And, turns to the Chief, stunned by the big name!
On the right, another, leaning on his rifle butt,
Feeling the hair rise at the back of his neck,
Shouts: ‘Vive L’Empereur!!” – his neighbour’s mute…
A shako rises, like a black sun…– In the midst
The last, a simpleton in red and blue, lying on his gut
Gets up, and, – showing his arse – asks: “On what?”
(Rêvé pour l’Hiver)
To
… Her
With cushions of blue.
We’ll be fine. A nest of mad kisses waits
In each corner too.
You’ll shut your eyes, not to see, through the glass,
Grimacing shadows of evening,
Those snarling monsters, a crowd going past
Of black wolves and black demons.
Then you’ll feel your cheek tickled quite hard…
A little kiss, like a maddened spider,
Will run over your neck…
And you’ll say: “Catch it!” bowing your head,
– And we’ll take our time finding that creature
– Who travels so far…
In the railway
carriage,
(Le Mal)
Whistles all day in the infinite blue sky:
While the battalions, scarlet or green, fly,
By the King who jeers, en masse, into the pot:
While the terrible stupidity grinds and crushes,
And makes a smoking heap of a thousand men:
– Poor Dead! In summer, among the rushes,
In your joy, sacred Nature, who created them!…
– There’s a God, who laughs at altar-cloths
Of damask, incense, and great gold chalices:
Who dozes to Hosannas for lullaby,
And wakes when mothers, gathered in their grief,
Weeping under their old black bonnets, sigh
And yield Him the coin knotted in their handkerchief.
(Ma Bohème: Fantaisie)
Even my overcoat was becoming Ideal:
I went under the sky, Muse! I was yours:
Oh! What miraculous loves I dreamed!
My only pair of pants was a big hole.
– Tom Thumb the dreamer, sowing the roads there
With rhymes. My inn the Sign of the Great Bear.
– My stars in the sky rustling to and fro.
I heard them, squatting by the wayside,
In September twilights, there I felt the dew
Drip on my forehead, like a fierce coarse wine.
Where, rhyming into the fantastic dark,
I plucked, like lyre strings, the elastics
Of my tattered shoes, a foot pressed to my heart.
(Au Cabaret-Vert)
On
the road stones. I’d made
– At the Green Inn: I ordered bread
Buttered, along with half-cold ham.
Happy, I stretched my legs out under the table,
A green one: considering the naïve prints
On the walls. – And it was charming,
When the girl with big tits and lively eyes,
– That one, just a kiss wouldn’t scare her! –
Smiling, brought me slices of bread and butter,
With lukewarm ham on a coloured platter,
Ham, white and pink, a fragrant garlic clove,
– And filled a huge beer mug high, its foam
Turned by a ray of late sunlight to gold.
(La Maline)
Full of the smell of wax and fruit, at ease
I gathered a plate of who knows what Belgian
Dish, and marvelled in my enormous chair.
Eating I listened to the clock – silent, happy.
The kitchen door opened with a gust,
– And the serving girl came in, who knows why,
Shawl half-off, hair dressed cunningly.
And, touching her little finger tremblingly
To her cheek, a pink and white velvet-peach,
And making a childish pout with her lips,
She tidied the plates to put me at my ease:
– Then, just like that – to get a kiss, for certain –
Whispered: ‘Feel: It’s caught a cold, my cheek...’
(Le Dormeur du Val)
Madly catching white tatters in the grass.
Where the sun on the proud mountain rings:
It’s a little valley, foaming like light in a glass.
A conscript, open-mouthed, his bare head
And bare neck bathed in the cool blue cress,
Sleeps: stretched out, under the sky, on grass,
Pale where the light rains down on his green bed.
Feet in the yellow flags, he sleeps. Smiling
As a sick child might smile, he’s dozing.
Nature, rock him warmly: he is cold.
The scents no longer make his nostrils twitch:
He sleeps in the sunlight, one hand on his chest,
Tranquil. In his right side, there are two red holes.
(Les Poëtes de Sept Ans)
Went off, proud, satisfied, not seeing,
In the blue eyes, under the lumpy brow,
The soul of her child given over to loathing.
All day he sweated obedience: very
Intelligent: yet dark habits, certain traits
Seemed to show bitter hypocrisies at work!
In the shadow of corridors with damp paper,
He stuck out his tongue in passing, two fists
In his groin, seeing specks under his shut lids.
A doorway open to evening: by the light
You’d see him, high up, groaning on the railing
Under a void of light hung from the roof. In summer,
Especially, vanquished, stupefied, stubborn,
He’d shut himself in the toilet’s coolness:
He could think in peace there, sacrificing his nostrils.
When the small garden cleansed of the smell of day,
Filled with light, behind the house, in winter,
Lying at the foot of a wall, buried in clay
Rubbing his dazzled eyes hard, for the visions,
He listened to the scabbed espaliers creaking.
Pity! His only companions were those children
Bare-headed and puny, eyes sunk in their cheeks,
Hiding thin fingers yellow and black with mud
Under old clothes soiled with excrement,
Who talked with the sweetness of the simple-minded!
And if his mother took fright, surprising him
At his vile compassions: the child’s deep
Tenderness overcame her astonishment.
All fine. She’d had the blue look, – that lies!
At seven he was making novels about life
In the great desert, where ravished Freedom shines,
Forests, suns, riverbanks, savannahs! – He used
Illustrated weeklies where he saw, blushing,
Smiling Italian girls, and Spanish women.
When the daughter of next door workers came by,
Eight years old – in Indian prints, brown-eyed,
A little brute, and jumped him from behind,
Shaking out her tresses, in a corner,
And he was under her, he bit her buttocks,
Since she never wore knickers:
– And, bruised by her fists and heels,
Carried the taste of her back to his room.
He feared the pallid December Sundays,
When, hair slicked back, at a mahogany table,
He read from a Bible with cabbage-green margins:
Dreams oppressed him each night in the alcove.
He didn’t love God: rather those men in the dusk,
Returning, black, in smocks, to the outer suburbs
Where the town-crier, with a triple drum beat,
Made the crowds laugh and murmur at the edicts.
– He dreamed of the amorous prairies, where
Luminous swells, pure odours, gold pubescences,
Stirred in the calm there, and then took flight!
And above all how he savoured sombre things,
When, in his bare room behind closed shutters,
High, and blue, and pierced with acrid damp,
He read his novel, mooned over endlessly,
Full of drowned forests, leaden ochre skies,
Flowers of flesh opening in star-filled woods,
Dizziness, epilepsies, defeats, compassion!
– While the street noises rumbled on below,
Lying alone on pieces of unbleached canvas,
With a violent presentiment of setting sail!
(Les Chercheuses de Poux)
Implores the white crowd of half-seen dreams,
Two charming sisters come close to his bed
Slender-fingered, with silver nails it seems.
They sit the child down in front of the window,
Wide open to where blue air bathes tangled flowers,
And through his thick hair full of dewfall,
Move their fine fingers, fearful, magical.
He hears the sighing of their cautious breath
That flows with long roseate vegetal honeys,
And is interrupted sometimes by a hiss,
Saliva caught on the lips or desire to kiss.
He hears their dark lashes beating in perfumed
Silence: and their fingers, electrified and sweet
Amidst his grey indolence, make the deaths
Of little lice crackle beneath their royal treat.
It’s now the wine of Sloth in him rises, the sigh
Of a child’s harmonica that can bring delerium:
Prompted by slow caresses, the child feels then
An endlessly surging and dying desire to cry.
(Le Bateau Ivre)
I felt myself no longer pulled by ropes:
The Redskins took my hauliers for targets,
And nailed them naked to their painted posts.
Carrying Flemish wheat or English cotton,
I was indifferent to all my crews.
The Rivers let me float down as I wished,
When the victims and the sounds were through.
Into the furious breakers of the sea,
Deafer than the ears of a child, last winter,
I ran! And the
Never heard a more triumphant clamour.
The tempest blessed my sea-borne arousals.
Lighter than a cork I danced those waves
They call the eternal churners of victims,
Ten nights, without regret for the lighted bays!
Sweeter than sour apples to the children
The green ooze spurting through my hull’s pine,
Washed me of vomit and the blue of wine,
Carried away my rudder and my anchor.
Then I bathed in the Poem of the Sea,
Infused with stars, the milk-white spume blends,
Grazing green azures: where ravished, bleached
Flotsam, a drowned man in dream descends.
Where, staining the blue, sudden deliriums
And slow tremors under the gleams of fire,
Stronger than alcohol, vaster than our rhythms,
Ferment the bitter reds of our desire!