The Parisian Orgy, or Paris Repopulated

Poem by Arthur Rimbaud Collection PoetryThemes WarPeriod 19th centuryArthur's analysis ↓

O cowards, here she is! Spew yourselves into the stations!
The sun wiped with its burning lungs
The boulevards that one evening the Barbarians filled.
Here is the holy City, seated in the west!

Go! the refluent fires will be foretold,
Here are the quays, here are the boulevards, here
Are the houses on the light azure that radiates
And that one evening the redness of bombs starred!

Hide the dead palaces in wooden niches!
That frightened ancient day refreshes your gazes.
Here is the red-haired flock of hip-wringers:
Be mad, you will be funny, being haggard!

Pack of bitches in heat eating poultices,
The cry of the golden houses summons you. Fly!
Eat! Here is the night of joy with deep spasms
That descends into the street. O desolate drinkers,

Drink! When the light arrives intense and mad,
Ransacking at your sides the streaming luxuries,
Are you not going to drool, without gesture, without a word,
Into your glasses, eyes lost in the white distances?

Swallow, for the Queen with cascading buttocks!
Listen to the action of stupid, heart-rending
Hiccups! Listen to the leaping into ardent nights
Of the rattling idiots, old men, puppets, lackeys!
O hearts of filth, appalling mouths,
Function harder, mouths of stench!
A wine for these base torpors, on these tables…
Your bellies are melted with shames, O Victors!

Open your nostril to the superb nausea!
Steep the cords of your necks in strong poisons!
On your childish napes, lowering his crossed hands,
The Poet says to you: “O cowards, be mad!

Because you ransack the belly of Woman,
You still fear from her a convulsion
That cries out, asphyxiating your infamous brood
On her breast, in a horrible pressure.

Syphilitic, mad, kings, puppets, ventriloquists,
What does it matter to the whore Paris,
Your souls and your bodies, your poisons and your rags?
She will shake herself free of you, snarling rotters!

And when you are laid low, groaning on your entrails,
Your flanks dead, clamoring for your money, desperate,
The red courtesan with breasts swollen with battles
Far from your stupor will twist her burning fists!

When your feet have danced so hard in the angers,
Paris! when you received so many knife blows,
When you lie, holding back in your clear pupils
A little of the goodness of the renewed beast,
O sorrowful city, O almost dead city,
Head and both breasts thrown toward the Future
Opening on your pallor its billions of doors,
City that the dark Past could bless:

Body remagnetized for enormous pains,
You drink again the frightful life! you feel
The flux of livid worms welling in your veins,
And on your clear love the freezing fingers prowl!

And it is not bad. The worms, the livid worms
Will no more hinder your breath of Progress
Than the Stryx extinguished the eye of the Caryatids
Where tears of astral gold fell from the blue steps.”

Though it is dreadful to see you again covered,
Thus; though never has been made of a city
An ulcer more stinking to green Nature,
The Poet says to you: “Splendid is your Beauty!”

The storm consecrated you supreme poetry;
The immense movement of forces comes to your aid;
Your work boils, death rumbles, chosen City!
Gather the stridencies in the heart of the deaf trumpet.

The Poet will take the sob of the Infamous,
The hatred of Convicts, the clamor of the Damned;
And his rays of love will whip the Women.
His stanzas will leap: There! there! bandits!

– Society, everything is restored: – the orgies
Weep their old rattle in the old brothels:
And the delirious gases, on the reddened walls,
Flame sinisterly toward the pallid azures!

Arthur Rimbaud

Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.

Text published on Poésies 123: https://www.poesies123.com/en/poem-the-parisian-orgy-or-paris-repopulated-arthur-rimbaud/

Arthur

Interpretation

Arthur's analysis

A youthful poem by Arthur Rimbaud, "The Parisian Orgy, or Paris Repopulated" unfolds an urban fresco in which invective and prophetic vision mingle in quatrains of alexandrines. From the opening apostrophe "O cowards, here she is!", the tone is set: Paris, "the holy City, seated in the west", rises again after a cataclysm, but for an orgy of decadence. The boulevards, once filled by the Barbarians, become the theater of an obscene resurrection.

The poet urges the victors to give themselves over to every excess: "Hide the dead palaces", "Be mad", "Eat!". The images of "hip-wringers" and "bitches in heat" establish a grotesque animality. The hammered form, with its imperatives and its anaphoras, mimics the urgency of a modern bacchanal in which the city "is repopulated" in debauchery.

Then the vision reverses: the "Poet" speaks between quotation marks to denounce the fear of Woman, syphilis, and to prophesy the fall of the "puppets" and the "kings". The "whore Paris" will shake herself free of these "snarling rotters". The satire targets a society in decomposition, but Rimbaud does not stop at condemnation: he transfigures the city into a "sorrowful city", "almost dead", which drinks "the frightful life" and whose "livid worms" in the veins do not prevent the "breath of Progress".

The poem culminates in a paradoxical apotheosis: "Splendid is your Beauty!". The storm has "consecrated" Paris, the immense movement of forces comes to her aid. The Poet, a Christ-like and visionary figure, will take "the sob of the Infamous" and his "stanzas will leap". Beauty is born of evil, of rot and of revolt.

Thus, in this poem, Rimbaud makes of Paris a courtesan at once monstrous and sacred, where orgy and death give birth to a new energy. The ample and jarring form, the raw images and the rhetorical reversals express a tension between disgust and fascination: the city is repopulated in horror, but only to be reborn in "supreme poetry".

Analysis written with the help of artificial intelligence, following the analysis method established by Arthur.

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