Arthur rimbaud poems translated english
Rimbaud
Selected Poems
Translated by A. S. Kline © Copyright 2003, 2008 All Rights Reserved
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Contents
First Evening
(Première Soirée)
She was barely dressed though,
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
‘The Temple of Love, Petit Trianon (1902)’
Eugène Atget (French, 1857 - 1927), Getty Open Content Program
Sensation
(Sensation)
Through the blue summer days, I shall travel all the ways,
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
Arthur Rimbaud
Arthur Rimbaud Quotes
The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessences.
I saw that all beings are fated to happiness: action is not life, but a way of wasting some force, an ennervation. Morality is the weakness of the brain.
But, truly, I have wept too much! The dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter.
Life is the farce which everyone has to perform.
Only divine love bestows the keys of knowledge.
I am the slave of my baptism. Parents, you have caused my misfortune, and you have caused your own.
When you are seventeen you aren't really serious.
The Sun, the hearth of affection and life, pours burning love on the delighted earth.
Idle youth, enslaved to everything; by being too sensitive I have wasted my life.
One evening I sat Beauty on my knees—And I found her bitter—And I reviled her.
I believe that I am in hell, therefore I am there.
I invented the colors of the vowels!—A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green—I made rules for the form and movement of each consonant, and, and with instinctive rhythms, I flattered myself that I had created a poetic language accessible, some day, to all the senses.
What a life! True life is elsewhere. We are not in the world.
Eternity. It is the sea mingled with the sun. ... L'éternité.
Rimbaud
Selected Works in Translation
Selected Poems
Further Selected Poems
'The Illuminations' complete
'Une Saison en Enfer' complete, and an extract from the 'Voyant' Letter
About This Work
Rimbaud’s poetry developed and extended the symbolist legacy of Baudelaire, who with apolitical intensity had responded to the challenge of modernity in verse embodying a new and darker vision. Rimbaud in his early verse expresses a lyrical and sensuous relationship with his subject matter, using conventional verse forms as Baudelaire had, to explore unconventional, modernist patterns of thought and behaviour. While seemingly adolescent in some respects, the poetry is also astoundingly mature, both as poetry and in exposing his underlying discontent with French provincial life and culture.
In his later work, Rimbaud used prose as a poetic medium to express a mounting disgust with conventional existence and the deadened spiritual state of nineteenth-century Europe, in an extremist, semi-incantatory mode of literature, aimed at deranging the senses while provoking the intellect. It is a form of writing that strongly influenced the Dadaist and Surrealist movements, which further challenged common sense and extolled the dislocation of perception.
The energy that produced the poetry was then directed elsewhere. Through disgust with his previous existence and the artificiality of literature, through an inability perhaps to take the content of his poetry any further creatively, Rimbaud abandoned his writing, in symbolic renunciation, and effectively submerged himself in the practical world of trade and in alien cultures, an inner move towards the greater immediacy and emotional simplicity of those cultures paralleled in the arts by Baudelaire earlier and Gaugin later.
About the Author
‘CHARLEVILLE - Place Ducale (N°2)’
Post Card by J. Winling, Editor, Charleville. Scanned by Claude Villetaneuse
Wikimedia Commons
Arthur Rimbaud was born in Char
.