Delirium Read Online Free Page B

mes poches crevées;/ Mon paletot aussi devenait idéal’ (`I ran off, my fists in my torn pockets;/ My overcoat too was growing ideal’). His threadbare appearance was a way of rejecting his mother’s concern with bourgeois standards of dress. It was like taking her face to pieces each time another seam was torn or another finger holed the lining.
                  The photograph we have of Rimbaud at the time of his First Communion, when he was eleven, depicts the boy wearing the black jacket and home-made slate-blue trousers, together with the starched white shirt, that his mother had painstakingly prepared. But his boots, despite the attempt to polish them, are worn into leather wrinkles. Rimbaud was hard on shoes because he walked; he needed that physical momentum in order to air his inner ferment. But there is already someone far older sitting behind his eyes. Someone who has taken the boy by surprise. Extreme vulnerability and extreme contempt meet as an insoluble contradiction. The pose for the photographer’s slow release is enforced, but the boy has been unable to settle into a state of composure. No matter his resolution at this age to accept Christianity, the rebel within him is basking in corners. Later on this vulpine presentiment will stretch its sinewy body, show its wolf’s red eyes and prick up its ears. It is waiting for the time of the assassins.
                  In the lazy autumn light of October 1870 Rimbaud enjoyed the last sensations of innocence to permeate his childhood. His precocity, his obscenity, his disrespect for adults whatever their station in life, had whipped up a fire of rebellion in him, which was to be fanned to a visionary heat in the course of the next three years.
                  The gold light was an interlude. Izambard was sent to Brussels, found Rimbaud at Douai, and from there he returned to Charleville in the company of a police officer. How he must have dreaded the reception that awaited him at home. His hatred of his mother was increased by the way he could mentally mutilate her. She was powerless to efface his effigial imaginings. Perhaps he saw her as a one-eyed, square-bodied ogre blocking the entrance to his street. He could do anything to her; mastectomize her, run up the cliff-face of her body to plant a flag in her skull, or he could imagine her shrunk to something so small she would sit in a mouse-hole begging for crumbs of cheese.
                  But the journey was worth it for the poems and the sense of spiritual liberation that Rimbaud experienced whenever he was on the road. In poems like ‘Le Mal’ and l’Eclatante Victoire de Sarrebrück’, the latter inspired by a brilliantly coloured Belgian print, Rimbaud picks up on the spirit of war raging in the French countryside. In le Mal’ his outrage at authoritarian institutions — the Army and the Church — and his compassion for those butchered in the name of territorial avarice, finds powerful expression. `Tandis qu’une folie épouvantable broie/En fait de cent milliers d’hommes un tas fumant;/ — Pauvres morts! dans l’ete, dans l’herbe, dans ta joie,/ Nature! ô toi qui fis ces hommes saintement! . . (‘While a ravening madness triturates/ And heaps a hundred thousand men into a pyre;/ Poor victims! in summer, in the grass,/ As nature’s own, weren’t these intended joy. . . .’)
                  But it is in ‘Le Dormeur du val’ that we both see and feel the poet’s presence. The poem operates on a taut thread, and if it comes out on the side of compassion, it is because the dead soldier is young. It is almost as if Rimbaud is looking for the last time at the child he has to relinquish in order to become the embodiment of the suprahuman voyant , and that valediction is symbolized by the open-mouthed, bloodied corpse that lies sprawled in the blue watercress. The imagination at work here is not hallucinated, but it is heightened.