The Seated

Poem by Arthur Rimbaud Collection PoetryThemes PoliticsPeriod 19th century

Black with wen-like lumps, pockmarked, eyes ringed with green
circles, their bulbous fingers clenched on their femurs,
The sinciput patched with vague hirsute growths
Like leprous blossoms on old walls;

They have grafted in epileptic loves
Their freakish bone-structure onto the great black skeletons
Of their chairs; their feet on the rickety rungs
Interlace for mornings and for evenings!

These old men have always braided themselves with their seats,
Feeling the vivid suns percaline their skin,
Or, eyes on the window where the snows wither,
Trembling with the toad’s painful trembling.

And the Seats have kindnesses for them: stained
Brown, the straw yields to the angles of their loins;
The soul of old suns kindles, swaddled
In these braids of ears where the grains fermented.

And the Seated, knees to teeth, green pianists,
Ten fingers under their seat with its drum-like murmurs,
Hear themselves ripple with sad barcaroles,
And their noddles roll in surges of love.
– Oh! do not make them stand! It is the shipwreck…
They rise up, growling like slapped cats,
Slowly opening their shoulder blades, O rage!
All their baggy trousers puff at their bloated loins.

And you listen to them, knocking their bald heads
Against dark walls, pressing and pressing their twisted feet,
And their coat buttons are tawny pupils
That hook your eye from the depths of corridors!

Then they have an invisible hand that kills:
On the way back, their gaze filters that black venom
That charges the suffering eye of the beaten bitch,
And you sweat, caught in an atrocious funnel.

Settled again, fists drowned in dirty cuffs,
They muse on those who made them stand
And, from dawn to dusk, clusters of tonsils
Under their puny chins quiver fit to burst.

When austere sleep has lowered their visors,
They dream on their arm of fecundated seats,
Of real little loves of chairs in lisière
By which proud desks will be bordered;

Flowers of ink spitting comma-shaped pollen
Lull them, along the crouching calyxes
Like the flight of dragonflies along gladioli
– And their member grows irritated on the beards of ears.

Arthur Rimbaud

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