Arthur Rimbaud

"The flag goes with the foul landscape, and our jargon muffles the drum." In the great centers we'll nurture the most cynical prostitution.
We'll massacre logical revolts.
In spicy and drenched lands!-- at the service of the…

When a child,
certain skies sharpened my vision:
all their characters were reflected in my face.
The Phenomena were roused.—At present

I am an ephemeral 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…

It is a high, carved sideboard made of oak.
The dark old wood, like old folks, seems kind;
Its drawers are open, and its odours
The darkness with the scent of strong old wine.

In the bright lime-tree
Dies a fainting mort.
But lively
Flutters among the currant bushes.

These are cities!
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…

I spend my life sitting - like an angel in the hands of a barber - a deeply fluted beer mug in my fist, belly and neck curved, a Gambier pipe in my teeth, under the air swelling with impalpable veils of smoke.
Like the warm excrements in an…

Oh, my Beautiful!
Oh, my Good!
Hideous fanfare where yet I do not stumble!
Oh, rack of enchantments!

Cap of silk moiré, little wand of ivory,
Clothes very dark.
Paul watches the cupboard, sticks out little tongue at pear,
Prepares, gives a poke, and squitters.

Black in the snow and fog, at the great lighted airshaft, their bums rounded, on their knees, five little ones - what anguish! - watch the baker making the heavy white bread.
They see the strong white arm that shapes the grey dough and sets…

My hunger,
Anne,
Anne, flee on your donkey.
If I have any taste, it s for hardly anything but earth and stones.

As soon as the idea of the Deluge had subsided,
A hare stopped in the clover and swaying flowerbells, and said a prayer to the rainbow, through the spider's web.
Oh! the precious stones that began to hide,-- and the flowers that already…

On the blue summer evenings,
I shall go down the paths,
Getting pricked by the corn, crushing the short grass :
In a dream I shall feel its coolness on my feet.

A tearful tincture
Cabbage-green skies;
Beneath the dribbling
Your raincoats lie;

For Helen, in the virgin shadows and the impassive radiance in astral silence, ornamental saps conspired.
Summer's ardour was confided to silent birds and due indolence to a priceless mourning boat through gulfs of dead loves and fallen…

It has been found again.
What ? - Eternity.
It is the sea fled away With the sun.
Sentinel soul

Reality being too thorny for my great personality. --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…

As I drifted on a river I could not control,
No longer guided by the bargemen's ropes.
They were captured by howling
Who nailed them naked to coloured posts.

In the brown dining-room, which was perfumed with the scent of polish and fruit,
I was shoveling up at my ease a plateful of some Belgian dish or other, and sprawling in my enormous chair.
While I ate,
I listened, happy and silent,…

Blackcurrant river rolls unknown in strange valleys; 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…

Dark, wrinkled as a purple pink,
It breathes, it nestles in that bed of moss,
Still damp from love, which hugs the slope,
The white thighs' slope, to crater's heart.

I went off with my hands in my torn coat pockets;
my overcoat too was becoming ideal;
I travelled beneath the sky,
Muse! and I was your vassal;

The sun has wept rose in the shell of your ears,
The world has rolled white from your back,
Your thighs:
The sea has stained rust at the crimson of your breasts,

HE - Your breast on my breast,
Eh ?
We could go,
With our nostrils full of air