Rimbaud...

ILLUMINATIONS

Childhood

IV

I am the saint at prayer on the terrace like the peaceful beasts that graze down to the sea of Palestine.

I am the scholar of the dark armchair. Branches and rain hurl themselves at the windows of my library.

I am the pedestrian of the highroad by way of the dwarf woods; the roar of the sluices drowns my steps. I can see for a long time the melancholy wash of the setting sun.

I might well be the child abandoned on the jetty on its way to the high seas, the little farm boy following the lane, its forehead touching the sky.

The paths are rough. The hillocks are covered with broom. The air is motionless. How far away are the birds and the springs! It can only be the end of the world ahead.

ILLUMINATIONS

Vagabonds

Pitiful brother! What frightful nights I owed him! "I have not put enough ardor into this enterprise. I have trifled with his infirmity. My fault should we go back to exile, and to slavery." He implied I was unlucky and of a very strange innocence, and would add disquieting reasons.

For reply, I would jeer at this Satanic doctor and, in the end, going over to the window, I would create, beyond the countryside crossed by bands of rare music, phantoms of nocternal extravegence to come.

After this vaguely hygenic diversion, I would lie down on my pallet and no sooner asleep than, almost every night, the poor brother would rise, his mouth foul, eyes starting from his head, - just as he had dreamed he looked! - and would drag me into the room, howling his dream of imbecilic sorrow.

I had, in truth, pledged myself to restore him to his primitive state of child of the Sun, - and, nourished by the wine of caverns and the biscuit of the road, we wandered, I impatient to find the place and the formula.