Rimbaud

Dawn

I embraced the summer dawn.

Still nothing was stirred on front of palaces. Water was dead. Shadow camps didn't leave the woodland road. I walked, waking vivid and warm breaths; and precious stones looked on; and wings rose without a sound.

The first venture was, in a path already filled with fresh and pale gleams, a flower who told me her name.

I laughed at the blond wasserfall dishevelling through fir trees: at the silver summit, I recognized the goddess.

I then lifted up the veils, one by one. In the lane, waving my arms. Across the plain, where I denounced her to the cock. In the city, she fled among steeples and domes, and running like a beggar on marble quays, I chased her.

Above the road, near a laurels wood, I wrapped her with gathered veils, and I felt a little her immense body. Dawn and child fell down at wood bottom.

On waking up, it was noon.

This text is extracted from the poems collection entitled Illuminations, composed probably between April 1874 and March 2, 1875. It was considered as lost for a decade. In 1886, in his preface, Verlaine emphasized:

“Illuminations is an English word meaning coloured plates, — coloured plates: it's even the subtitle that Mr. Rimbaud has given to his manuscript.”
(Verlaine to Delahaye, 1875)

Verlaine is probably the poet who has understood better than anyone Rimbaud's words. That is why, we ask him to conclude:

“He roamed through all the Continents, on all the oceans, poorly, proudly (rich moreover, if he had wanted it, of a family and a position), after having wrote, still in prose, a collection of superb fragments, the Illuminations, lost forever, we are afraid of it.

He said in his Season in Hell: “My day is done. I leave Europe. Sea air will burn my lungs; lost climates will tan me.”

All this is very well, and the man has kept his word. The man in Rimbaud is free, this is too clear and we admitted it at the beginning, with a well legitimate reserve that we will emphasize to conclude. But weren't we right, us, crazy of the poet, to take him, this eagle, and to hold him in this cage, under this label? And couldn't we, moreover by supererogation (if Literary should see consumed such a lost) cry out, along with Corbiere, his elder son, not his big brother ironically? No melancholically? O! Yes! Furiously? Ah! Such a yes!:

It is faded
This holy oil,
He is faded
The sacristan!”
(Paul Verlaine, Les Poètes maudits, [The Accursed Poets] 1884)

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