Poets and Poems

Arthur Rimbaud

A  major figure in the French Symbolist movement, his "genius, its flowering, explosion and sudden extinction, still astonishes" (Hackett)

The French poet Arthur Rimbaud was born on 20 October 1854, the second child of Captain Frédéric Rimbaud (who abandoned the family in 1860) and his wife Marie Cuif. He was educated at home in Charlesville, at the Pension Rossat school in Orleans and from age eleven at the College de Charlesville, where he excelled. Although precocious, he rebelled against his mother's strict discipline. War disrupted his education and he left school without sitting the baccalaureate.

In August 1870, aged fifteen, he ran away from home and was arrested in Paris for travelling there by train without a ticket. In February 1871 he ran away again to join the insurgents in the Paris Commune, but returned home after only three weeks and before the brutal suppression of the rebellion by the French army. His behaviour at home changed completely. No longer the neat schoolboy of whom so much was expected, he became openly provocative, drank alcohol, stole books and behaved rudely. The change seems to have been deliberate, for in May 1871 he wrote to close friends saying that 'I have recognised myself as a poet'; and that in order to attain visionary power he was seeking a 'rational derangement of all the senses'.

He had been writing poetry for some time; his early collection 'the Poésies' was started in 1869. His astonishing poem 'The Drunken Boat' (le Bateau Ivre) was written in 1871 and, in its exploration of the irrational and the unconscious, prefigured many of the themes he was to explore in his later work*.

In 1871 he sent this and several other poems to an established Symbolist poet. Intrigued, Paul Verlaine** sent him a one-way ticket to Paris and they soon afterwards became lovers. Their relationship was a stormy one. By September 1872 they were in London, living on money sent by Verlaine's mother and whatever odd jobs they could find. Rimbaud continued writing, spending many hours in the reading room of the British Museum.

In June 1873 Verlaine returned to Paris alone, but quickly regretted the separation. They arranged to meet in Brussels but the reunion went badly. The unstable Verlaine procured a revolver and when Rimbaud insisted on their parting he drunkenly fired shots at him from close range. Amazingly only one found its target, embedding itself in Rimbaud's wrist. Rimbaud ended up in hospital and Verlaine was sentenced to two years in prison. They met for the last time in Stuttgart in March 1875, by which time Verlaine had converted to Catholicism and Rimbaud, it seems, had abandoned literature. He was then only twenty one. It was Verlaine who ensured his one time friend's fame by publishing his poetry.

Rimbaud was weary of Western civilisation and spent most his remaining years as a trader in North Africa, becoming fluent in many local languages and dialects. He had relationships with some native women but remained childless. He was based mainly at Aden and at Harar in Ethiopia but travelled on a hazardous trading mission, visiting territory that had never yet been explored.

In May 1891, after noticing swelling in his right knee, he undertook an agonisingly painful journey to the coast to seek medical help. He sailed to Marseille and was admitted to hospital, where the doctors diagnosed carcinoma and decided that they had no choice but to amputate his leg. He was readmitted*** in August and died on 10 November 1891, aged 37.

His last conversations with his sister Isabella were to describe waking visions he was having; and when she later read 'Illuminations' she was amazed, she said, to recognise the same visions recorded there.

* Rimbaud's main poetical works are 'Le Bateau Ivre', 'Illuminations' and 'A Season in Hell' (Une Saison en Enfer). The latter is a repudiation of the transcendent state he thought he had previously achieved in his poetry, but which he now understood instead to have been a descent into the realm of his unconscious.
** Paul Verlaine, ten years Rimbaud's senior, had recently married and his young wife, Mathilde, was pregnant. They lived with his parents who welcomed the chance to meet this new prodigy, but were appalled by his unkempt appearance and uncouth manner. He did not remain there long. Verlaine was wearying of domestic life; he had recently left his job and had started drinking again. Not long after his son was born he left his family and rented a room to live with Rimbaud.
*** Between his first and second admission he went home for a month to the family farm in Charlesville, where his sister Isabella showered him with love and care. She accompanied him back to the hospital when his condition deteriorated and the pain became unbearable. A devout Catholic, she did all she could to persuade him to convert and was overjoyed when he agreed to let a priest hear his confession and to administer the last rites before he died.

Romance

You aren't very serious at seventeen.
Some fine evening, to hell with the books and the
lemonade and the flashy cafés with their glittering
windowpanes. You walk out under the green lime trees
on the promenade.

The lime trees smell good in these June evenings!
Sometimes the air is so soft that you close your eyelids;
the wind heavy with sounds - the town isn't far off -
smells of grapevines and beer ...

II

Look, you see a tiny handkerchief of dark blue sky
framed by a little branch and pierced by a wicked
star, little and altogether white, which drowns
with a sweet shudder ...

June night! Seventeen! You get yourself drunk.
The sap is champagne and goes to your head ...
You wander; You feel a kiss on your lips which
palpitates there like a little animal ...

III

Your crazy heart does a Robinson Crusoe across all
the novels when in the light of a pale street lamp
a young girl goes by with little charming airs
under the shadow of the terrifying coat collar
of her father

and because she thinks you immensely simple she turns
with a quick movement while all the time her little boots
trot on ... and the tune you were whistling
dies on your lips ...