A Season in Hell & Illuminations

by Rimbaud, Arthur

  Henrika had on a brown-and-white-checkered cotton skirt straight out of the last century, a ribboned bonnet, and a silk scarf. It looked sadder than mourning. We took a walk in the suburbs. It was overcast, and the South wind stirred rank smells of ravaged gardens and starched fields.

  All this couldn’t have wearied my wife as much as it did me. Along a high path, in a puddle left by the previous month’s flood, she pointed to some tiny fish.

  The city, its smoke and noise, pursued us down the roads. O better world, a habitation blessed only by sky and shade! The South only reminds me of miserable childhood moments, summer despairs, the awful glut of strength and knowledge that fate has always denied me. No: we won’t spend summer in this cheap country where we’ll be little more than orphans betrothed. I won’t let these hardened arms drag a beloved image after them.

  BRIDGES

  Crystal gray skies. A strange pattern of bridges, some straight, some arched, others falling at oblique angles to the first, their shapes repeating in the illuminated curves of the canal, all of them so long and light that the banks, heavily canopied, sink and shrink. A few of these bridges are still freighted with hovels. Others sport masts, flags, fragile parapets. Minor chords crisscross as ropes rise from shore. You can make out a red coat, maybe some other outfits, and musical instruments. Are the tunes familiar, bits of chamber music, remnants of national anthems? The water is gray and blue, broad as an arm of the sea. —Falling from the top of the sky, a white beam of light obliterates this comedy.

  CITY

  I am a transient, and not altogether unhappy, citizen of a metropolis considered modern, given every conceivable standard of taste has been avoided, in both interior decoration and exterior architecture, and even in the plan of the city itself. You’d be hard-pressed to find the barest trace of a monument to superstition here. Morality and Language have finally been refined to their purest forms! These millions of people who have no need to know one another conduct their educations, professions, and retirements with such similarity as to suppose that the length of their lives must be several times shorter than statistics would indicate for continentals. Moreover, from my window, I see new ghosts rolling through unwaveringly thick coal-smoke—our dark woods, our summer night! —a new batch of Furies approaching a cottage that is both my country and my fullest heart, as everything resembles it here. Death without tears, a diligent servant girl, a desperate Love, and a perfect Crime, whimpering in the muddy street.

  RUTS

  On the right, the summer dawn stirs the leaves and mists and noises of this corner of the park, while on the left, embankments keep the wet road’s thousand little ruts in violet shadow. A stream of enchantments: Wagons filled with gilded wooden animals, poles, and motley tenting, drawn at full gallop by twenty dappled circus horses, and children and men riding amazing beasts: twenty gilded conveyances, flagged and flowered like ancient coaches, like something from a fairy tale, filled with children dressed for a country fair. There are even coffins, sporting ebony plumes, beneath night-dark canopies, behind the trot of massive blue-black mares.

  CITIES [I]

  Such cities! Alleghenies and Lebanons out of a dream, staged and scaled for a people their equal. Chalets of crystal and wood move on invisible pulleys and rails. Bordered by colossi and copper palms, ancient craters bellow melodiously through flames. Feasts of love ring out across canals strung behind the chalets. A pack of pealing bells calls from the gorges. Guilds of gigantic singers gather, wearing clothes and bearing banners as dazzling as light from the summits. On platforms in passes, Rolands sound their valor. On footbridges spanning abysses and rooftops of inns, the ardent sky ignites flagpoles. The collapse of old apotheoses joins heaven to earth, fields where seraphic centauresses gambol and dance between avalanches. A sea freighted with orphic fleets and rumbling pearls and precious conches unfolds above the highest peaks, disturbed by Venus’ perpetual birth—a sea that sometimes darkens with fatal flashes. Harvested flowers as big as guns and goblets are lowing on the hillsides. Parades of Mabs climb the ravine in red and opaline dresses. Up above, their feet in the falls and brambles, stags suckle Diana’s breasts. Suburban Bacchantes sob, the moon burns and bawls. Venus visits the caves of blacksmiths and hermits. Groups of belfries sing the people’s ideas. Unfamiliar music escapes from castles of bone. All the old mythologies gambol and dance, and urges, like elk, stampede through the streets. The Paradise of storms collapses. Savages dance ceaselessly at the feast of night. And, once, I even descended into the flow of a Baghdad boulevard where groups were singing joyously of new work, blown by a thick breeze, moving around but unable to elude the fabulous ghosts of the mountains where we must have met.

  What fine arms and hour will return this region to me, whence my slumbers and slightest movements come?

  VAGABONDS

  Pathetic brother! What wretched sleepless nights he caused! “I had little passion for this undertaking. I played to his weaknesses. If we returned to exile, to slavery, I would be to blame.” He believed, strangely, I was both jinxed and innocent. His reasons were disturbing.

  I responded by snickering at this satanic doctor, and fleeing out the window. Beyond a countryside singing with strains of singular music, I created ghosts of future, nocturnal luxury.

  After this vaguely hygienic distraction, I would relax on my pallet. And, nearly every night, just as I had fallen asleep, this poor brother would rise, mouth dry, eyes bulging—just as he’d dreamed—and drag me into the next room while screaming his idiotic sorrowful dream.

  Essentially, sincerely, I had taken it upon myself to return him to his primitive, sun-worshipping state—and we wandered, sustained by wine from cellars and the road’s dry bread—as I impatiently sought means and ends.

  CITIES [II]

  The official acropolis surpasses our most colossal conceptions of modern barbarity. Impossible to adequately describe the flat daylight produced by this immutably gray sky, the imperial sheen of the edifices, and the eternal snow on the ground. With a singular taste for enormity, they reproduced all the marvels of classical architecture. I attend painting expositions in places twenty times larger than Hampton Court. And what paintings! A Norwegian Nebuchadnezzar built the staircases of the government buildings; the underlings I was able to see are already haughtier than Brahmins, and I trembled as guards and construction foremen passed outside the colossi. As the buildings were sited along squares, closed courtyards and terraces within, traffic has been shut out. The parks are displays of nature at its most primitive, artfully laid out. Some of the upper parts of town are inexplicable: a boatless arm of the sea unrolls its blue sleeve of delicate hail between piers loaded with giant candelabras. A short bridge leads to a postern directly beneath the dome of Sainte-Chapelle. This dome is an artistic steel frame roughly fifteen thousand feet wide.

  From certain points on the copper footbridges, platforms, and staircases that wind through the markets and around pillars, I thought I could judge the depth of the city! One marvel I couldn’t reconcile: are the city’s other regions above or beneath the level of the acropolis? Reconnaissance is impossible for the tourist of today. The commercial quarter is a circus in a single style: arcaded galleries. You can’t see shops, but the snow on sidewalks is trampled; a few nabobs—as rare as pedestrians on a London Sunday morning—make their way towards a diamond diligence. A few red velvet divans: ice cold drinks are served, running eight hundred to eight thousand rupees. I start to look for a theater in this circus, but I realize that the shops fill with dark dramas all their own. There must be a police presence. But the law must be sufficiently strange here that I abandon imagining what local adventurers are like.

  The suburb, as elegant as a beautiful Paris street, enjoys luminous light. The local democrats number a few hundred souls. Here, again, the houses aren’t in rows; the suburb loses itself strangely in the countryside, the “Country” that fills the eternal West with forests and endless plantations where savage gentlemen seek distrac
tion beneath the light they made.

  VIGILS

  I

  Enlightened leisure, neither fever nor languor, in a meadow or a bed.

  A friend neither ardent nor weak. A friend.

  A love neither tormenting nor tormented. A love.

  The air and the world, unsought. A life.

  —Was this it?

  —And the dream grows cool.

  II

  Lightning returns to the branches of the building. From opposite ends of the room, whatever the setting, harmonic elevations merge. The wall before the watcher is a psychological succession of parts of friezes, atmospheric sections, and geological strata. —A dream, intense and swift, of sentimental groups, people of every possible character amidst every possible appearance.

  III

  At night, the lamps and rugs of the vigil make the sounds of waves along keel and steerage.

  The sea of the vigil, like Amélie’s breasts.

  The tapestries hang halfway up, the doves of the vigil plunge into a thicket of emerald lace.

  · · · · · · · ·

  The back of black hearth, real suns from shorelines: Ah! magical wells; only a glimpse of dawn, this time.

  MYSTIC

  On the hillside, angels twirl their wool dresses through pastures of emerald and steel.

  Meadows of flame leap to the hillock’s crest. On the left, its humus has been trampled by murders and battles, disastrous noises etch a map of the terrain. Behind the crest to the right is a line leading to the Orient, to progress.

  And while the band running across the top of the image is made by the spinning and leaping sound heard in conches and human nights …

  The blossoming sweetness of stars and sky and all the rest falls in front of the hillside before us like a basket—and turns the abyss below to blossom and blue.

  DAWN

  I held the summer dawn in my arms.

  Nothing stirred in front of the palaces. The water was dead. Camps of shadows rested on the road through the woods. I walked, awakening live warm breaths as precious stones looked on and wings soundlessly rose.

  The first undertaking, in a path already filled with cool pale glimmers of light, was a flower that told me its name.

  I laughed at a blonde wasserfall whose tresses streamed between firs; at the silvered summit I recognized the goddess.

  So, one by one, I lifted her veils. In a lane, whirling my arms. In a field, shouting to a rooster. Into the city she fled, between steeples and domes, and I gave chase, running like a beggar on marble docks.

  At the crest of the road, near a stand of laurels, I enveloped her in her gathered veils, and felt something of her boundless shape. Dawn and the child fell to the forest floor.

  It was noon when I awoke.

  FLOWERS

  From a golden slope —among silk ropes, gray veils, green velvets, and crystal discs that blacken like the bronze of the sun—I watch the foxglove open on a carpet of silver filigree, eyes and hair.

  Pieces of yellow gold scattered over agate, mahogany pillars supporting an emerald dome, bouquets of white satin and delicate sprays of rubies surround the water-rose.

  Like some god’s enormous blue eyes staring from within a silhouette of snow, sea and sky attract a crowd of strong young roses to the marble steps.

  COMMON NOCTURNE

  A breath of air opens operatic breaches in walls—rotten rooftops reel—hearths are sundered—casements covered. —One foot braced on a gargoyle, I cut through the vineyard in a carriage whose age is fixed by its convex mirrors, its curved woodwork, and contoured seats. A cloistered hearse of sleep, a cabin for my nonsense, the carriage veers onto the grass, away from the highway: and through an imperfection, high in the window on the right, spin pale lunar forms, leaves, breasts; —A deep green and blue invade the scene.

  Unharnessing by a gravel patch.

  —Here we’ll whistle for the storm, for Sodoms—for Solymas—for wild beasts and armies,

  (—Will coachmen and animals from some dream exit the airless woods to thrust me, up to my eyes, beneath the surface of a silken source?)

  —And send us off, whipped by lapping waters and spilled drinks, to the howls of mastiffs …

  —A breath of air, and hearths are sundered.

  SEASCAPE

  Chariots of silver and copper—

  Prows of silver and steel—

  Beat foam—

  Stirring stumps of bramble—

  Currents from the moor,

  And the vast ruts of the tidal ebb

  Flow eastward, circularly,

  Towards the pillars of the forest—

  Towards the pilings of the pier,

  Whose corner is struck

  By whirlwinds of light.

  WINTER CELEBRATED

  The waterfall sings behind opera-buffa shacks. Girandoles prolong sunset’s greens and reds across orchards and paths by the river Meander. Nymphs out of Horace with First Empire coifs—Siberian dances, Chinese ladies out of Boucher.

  ANGUISH

  Might it be She could forgive my eternally dashed ambitions; in the end, can wealth make up for ages of indigence; can a day of success absolve the shame of my fatal incompetence?

  (O palms and diamonds! —Love and strength! Greatest joys and glories! Of every type and place—demon, god—this being’s youth: myself!)

  Can accidents of scientific fantasy and organizations of social brotherhood be cherished as the progressive restitution of our earliest liberty?

  But the Vampire who keeps us in line decrees we must amuse ourselves with what she leaves—that or start telling jokes.

  So let me wallow in my wounds, in heavy air and sea; tormented by watery silence and murderous air; tortures that jeer at me, atrociously, in stormy silence.

  METROPOLITAN

  From indigo straights to Ossian seas, on pink and orange sands bathed by a wine-dark sky, crystal boulevards have sprung up and intersected, settled soon after by poor young families who buy food from street vendors. Nothing fancy.

  —Cities!

  Helmets, wheels, barges, buttocks—all flee the asphalt desert in a ragtag line, sheets of fog paper the sky with unbearable layers, curving, withdrawing, falling, made of the most sinister black smoke the mourning sea could muster.

  —Battles!

  Look up: the arched wooden bridge; Samaria’s last vegetable gardens; masks lit by the lantern whipped by the cold night; a stupid water nymph in an ugly dress, at the bottom of the river; luminous skulls in the rows of peas—other phantasmagoria.

  —Country.

  Roads lined with fences, and walls barely containing their copses, brutal flowers called hearts and sisters, Damascus languidly damned, property belonging to fairy-tale aristocracies straight out of the Rhineland, Japan, Guarani, still attuned to ancient musics—inns never to open again—and princesses, and if you aren’t too overcome, stars for you to study.

  —Sky.

  The morning when you struggled through the snow-glare with Her: green lips, ice, black flags, blue beams of light, purple perfumes of polar sun.

  —Your strength.

  BARBARIAN

  Long after the seasons and days, the living and land,

  A flag of flesh, bleeding over silken seas and arctic flowers (they do not exist).

  Surviving old heroic fanfares still assaulting hearts and heads, far from earlier assassins.

  A flag of flesh, bleeding over silken seas and arctic flowers (they do not exist).

  Such sweetness!

  Infernos hailing frosty gusts—such sweetness! Fires in a rain of diamond wind, tossed by an earthly heart, endlessly burned to black, for us. —O world!

  (Far from the old retreats and fires we hear and smell.) Infernos and seafoam. Music, drifting abysses, icicles clashing with stars.

  O Sweetness; O world; O music! And look: shapes; hair and eyes, floating. And white tears, boiling. O sweetness! And a feminine voice at volcanic depths, in arctic caves.
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  A flag …

  FAIRY

  In starry silence, virgin shadow, and impassive light, ornamental saps conspired for Hélène. Summer’s ardor was entrusted to songless birds, and the predictable languor to a priceless funeral barge adrift in coves of dead loves and sunken scents.

  —After the time when lumberwomen sang to the torrent’s rumblings under the forest’s ruins, after beastly bells rang, in valleys, and after cries from the steppes.

  Fur and shadow shook, for Hélène’s childhood—along with the breasts of the poor and the legends of the sky.

  And her eyes and her dancing were better still than bursts of precious light, convincing cold, and even the pleasure of the singular setting and time.

  Fairy: Rimbaud’s title for this poem was in English, as given.

  WAR

  As a child, certain skies sharpened my sight: their varied temperaments refined my face. Phenomena awoke. —Now, the endless rise of moments and mathematical infinities chase me through a world where I suffer every civil success, respected by strange children and subjected to limitless affection. —I dream of war, of might and right, of utterly unforeseeable logic.

  It’s as simple as a musical phrase.

  ADVT.

  For sale: what the Jews haven’t sold, what neither nobles nor criminals have dared, what remains unknown to both wicked love and society’s infernal probity: what neither time nor science need notice: