Memory, Poem by Arthur Rimbaud

Poem by Arthur Rimbaud Collection Derniers versPeriod 19th century

Clear water; like the salt of childhood tears,
The assault in the sun of the whiteness of women’s bodies;
the silk, in a crowd and of pure lilies, of the oriflammes
beneath the walls that some maiden defended;

the frolicking of angels; — No… the marching golden current,
stirs its arms, black, and heavy, and above all fresh, with grass. She
sinks, having the blue Sky for canopy, calls
for curtains the shadow of the hill and of the arch.

Ah! the damp flagstone stretches its limpid bubbles!
The water furnishes with pale and bottomless gold the ready beds.
The green and faded dresses of the little girls
make the willows, from which leap the unbridled birds.

Purer than a louis, yellow and warm eyelid
the marsh marigold — your conjugal faith, O Spouse! —
at prompt noon, from its dull mirror, jealous
in the gray sky of heat for the pink and dear Sphere.

III

Madame stands too upright in the nearby
meadow where the threads of labor snow down; the parasol
in her fingers; treading the umbel; too proud for herself;
children reading in the flowering greenery
their red morocco book! Alas, He, like
a thousand white angels who part on the road,
goes away beyond the mountain! She, all
cold, and black, runs! after the man’s departure!

Regret of the thick and young arms of pure grass!
Gold of April moons in the heart of the holy bed! Joy
of the riverside shipyards abandoned, prey
to August evenings that made these rot spread!

Let her weep now beneath the ramparts! the breath
of the tall poplars is for the lone breeze.
Then, it is the sheet of water, without reflections, without source, gray:
an old man, dredger, in his motionless boat, toils.

Toy of that mournful eye of water, I cannot pluck from it,
O motionless boat! oh! arms too short! neither the one
nor the other flower: neither the yellow one that importunes me,
there; nor the blue one, friend to the ash-colored water.

Ah! the pollen of the willows that a wing shakes off!
The roses of the reeds long since devoured!
My boat, forever fixed; and its chain pulled
At the bottom of that borderless eye of water, — to what mud?

Arthur Rimbaud

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