Jesus used to walk on troubled waters. The lantern revealed him to us, standing, pale with long brownish hair, on the crest of an emerald wave. I'm going to unveil all the mysteries: religious mysteries or natural, death, birth, future, past, cosmogony, nothingness. I'm a master of hal— lucinations.
I've got all the talents! Do you want me to disappear, to dive down for the ring? Do you want that? I'm going to make gold. Then have faith in me, faith is soothing, it guides, it cures. Come, all of you—even the little children—and I'll comfort you, I'll spill out my heart for you,—the marvelous heart!
I don't ask for your prayers. With your trust alone, I'll be happy. All of this doesn't make me miss the world much. I'm lucky not to suffer more.
My life was nothing but lovely mistakes, it's too bad. We're out of the world, for sure. Not even a sound. My touch has disappeared. Ah, my castle, my Saxony, my willow woods. Evenings, mornings, nights, days. I'm worn out! I should have my hell for anger, my hell for conceit—and the hell of caresses: a concert of hells.
I'm dying of tiredness. It's the grave, horror of horrors, I'm going to the worms! Satan, you joker, you want to melt me down with your charms. I demand it, I demand it! Ah, to come back to life again! To feast my eyes on our deformities. And that poison, that kiss a thousand times damned! My weakness, the world's cruelty! My God, mercy, hide me, I always misbehave!
National Poetry Month. Materials for Teachers Teach This Poem. Poems for Kids. Poetry for Teens. Lesson Plans. Resources for Teachers. Academy of American Poets. American Poets Magazine. Poems Find and share the perfect poems. A Season in Hell. One night, I sat Beauty down on my lap.
I armed myself against justice. I ran away. O witches, O misery, O hatred, my treasure's been turned over to you! And Spring brought me the frightening laugh of the idiot. Charity is that key. The Seekers of Lice 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 by a hiss: saliva sucked Back from the lip, or a longing to be kissed. He hears their dark eyelashes start in the sweet- Smelling silence and, through his grey listlessness, The crackle of small lice dying, beneath The imperious nails of their soft, electric fingers.
The wine of Torpor wells up in him then — Near on trance, a harmonica-sigh — And in their slow caress he feels The endless ebb and flow of a desire to cry. Arthur Rimbaud Novel I. No one's serious at seventeen. Lindens smell fine on fine June nights! Sometimes the air is so sweet that you close your eyes; The wind brings sounds—the town is near— And carries scents of vineyards and beer.
June nights! Sap is champagne, it goes to your head. The mind wanders, you feel a kiss On your lips, quivering like a living thing. The wild heart Crusoes through a thousand novels —And when a young girl walks alluringly Through a streetlamp's pale light, beneath the ominous shadow Of her father's starched collar.
Because as she passes by, boot heels tapping, She turns on a dime, eyes wide, Finding you too sweet to resist. You're in love. Off the market till August. Your friends are gone, you're bad news. That night. Hellish Night I've swallowed a terrific mouthful of poison. Noble ambitions! And Seventeen! You wander: you feel a kiss on your lips That quivers there, like some tiny creature Taken till the month of August. That evening He feels himself exhausted!
What name is it that trembles On his mute lips? What relentless regret does he feel? No one will ever know. Watching a thin wreathe of smoke steal, As on those Saint-Cloud evenings, from his cigar. One puts his tunic back on, And, turns to the Chief, stunned by the big name! A shako rises, like a black sun A nest of mad kisses waits In each corner too.
A little kiss, like a maddened spider, Will run over your neck In summer, among the rushes, In your joy, sacred Nature, who created them! I was yours: Oh! What miraculous loves I dreamed! My only pair of pants was a big hole. My inn the Sign of the Great Bear. 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.
The Sly Girl La Maline In the brown dining-room, its perfumed air 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. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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!
All fine. At seven he was making novels about life In the great desert, where ravished Freedom shines, Forests, suns, riverbanks, savannahs! 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.
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!
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. 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 Peninsulas sliding by me 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!
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!
Downfalls of water among tranquilities, Distances showering into the abyss. Nacreous waves, silver suns, glaciers, ember skies! Gaunt wrecks deep in the brown vacuities Where the giant eels riddled with parasites Fall, with dark perfumes, from the twisted trees!
I would have liked to show children dolphins Of the blue wave, the golden singing fish. Sometimes, a martyr tired of poles and zones, The sea whose sobs made my roilings sweet Showed me its shadow flowers with yellow mouths And I rested like a woman on her knees Almost an isle, blowing across my sands, quarrels And droppings of pale-eyed clamorous gulls, And I scudded on while, over my frayed lines, Drowned men sank back in sleep beneath my hull!
Now I, a boat lost in the hair of bays, Hurled by the hurricane through bird-less ether, I, whose carcass, sodden with salt-sea water, No Monitor or Hanseatic vessel could recover: Freed, in smoke, risen from the violet fog, I, who pierced the red skies like a wall, Bearing the sweets that delight true poets, Lichens of sunlight, gobbets of azure: Who ran, stained with electric moonlets, A crazed plank, companied by black sea-horses, When Julys were crushing with cudgel blows Skies of ultramarine in burning funnels: I, who trembled to hear those agonies Of rutting Behemoths and dark Maelstroms, Eternal spinner of blue immobilities, I regret the ancient parapets of Europe!
And isles Whose maddened skies open for the sailor: — Is it in depths of night you sleep, exiled, Million birds of gold, O future Vigour?
The Dawns Are heart-breaking, each moon hell, each sun bitter: Fierce love has swallowed me in drunken torpors. O let my keel break! Tides draw me down! Bathed in your languor, waves, I can no longer Cut across the wakes of cotton ships, Or sail against the pride of flags, ensigns, Or swim the dreadful gaze of prison ships.
On nature, deflowered, old, Falling from the open sky Let the lovely rooks sweep by. Strange army with your stern calls, Cold winds attack your nests! In thousands, over the fields of France, Where sleep the dead of yesteryear, Wheel, then, in the wintry air, So each traveller, at a glance Remembers! Be the call to duty, O our black funereal beauty!
0コメント