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And the Mother, closing the homework book,
Went off satisfied and very proud, without seeing,
In the blue eyes and under the brow full of bumps,
The soul of her child given over to repugnances.
All day he sweated obedience; very
Intelligent; yet black tics, a few features
Seemed to prove in him bitter hypocrisies.
In the shadow of hallways with moldy hangings,
Passing by he stuck out his tongue, both fists
At his groin, and in his closed eyes saw dots.
A door opened onto evening: by the lamp
He could be seen, up there, gasping on the banister,
Under a gulf of daylight hanging from the roof. Summer
Especially, vanquished, stupid, he was stubborn
About shutting himself in the coolness of latrines:
There he thought, calm and offering his nostrils.
When, washed of the day’s odors, the little garden
Behind the house, in winter, was moonlit,
Lying at the foot of a wall, buried in the marl
And for visions crushing his dark eye,
He listened to the scabby espaliers swarming.
Pity! These children alone were his familiars
Who, puny, bare brows, eyes fading on the cheek,
Hiding thin fingers yellow and black with mud
Under clothes stinking of the fair and all decrepit,
Conversed with the gentleness of idiots!
And if, having caught him at foul pities,
His mother was frightened; the deep tendernesses
Of the child threw themselves on that astonishment.
It was good. She had the blue gaze—which lies!
At seven he wrote novels, about the life
Of the great desert, where ravished Liberty shines,
Forests, suns, shores, savannas!—He helped himself
With illustrated papers where, red, he looked at
Spanish women laughing and Italian women.
When she came, brown-eyed, mad, in calico dresses,
—Eight years—the daughter of the workers next door,
The little brute, and she had jumped,
In a corner, on his back shaking her braids,
And he was under her, he bit her buttocks,
For she never wore pants;
—And, bruised by her fists and heels,
He brought back the flavors of her skin to his room.
He feared the pale Sundays of December,
When, pomaded, on a mahogany pedestal table,
He read a Bible with a cabbage-green edge;
Dreams oppressed him each night in the alcove.
He did not love God; but men, whom at tawny evening,
Black, in smocks, he saw returning to the suburb
Where criers, with three rolls of the drum,
Make the crowds laugh and grumble around edicts.
—He dreamed the amorous prairie, where swells
Luminous, healthy perfumes, golden pubescences,
Make their calm stirring and take their flight!
And as he savored above all dark things,
When, in the bare room with closed shutters,
High and blue, bitterly seized with dampness,
He read his endlessly pondered novel,
Full of heavy ocher skies and drowned forests,
Of flowers of flesh spread in sidereal woods,
Vertigo, collapses, routs and pity!
—While the rumor of the neighborhood was made,
Below,—alone, and lying on pieces of raw
Canvas, and violently sensing the sail!
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-poets-of-seven-years-arthur-rimbaud/