Rimbaud’s Use of Montage

The essay is followed by my translation and by the French text of “Villes.”


     Fragmentation and elliptical expression are implicated in all literary usage. Figures of speech, for instance, always require the reader’s imaginative leap though this action is so natural to the human mind, always so sensitive to structure and pattern and abstract form, that we are not ordinarily conscious of it. These characteristics are particularly evident in modern literature and, like other characteristics of the modern, in the poems of Arthur Rimbaud.
     Texts like the prose poems of his Illuminations may be considered as literary examples of what in cinema would be called montage. This most revolutionary technique of cinema is identified with Sergei Eisenstein, though he credits Griffith as his own source. [1] Those who feel at sea in the middle of one of these poems might do well to simply watch the mental movie scripted by the poet’s images without concern for unity or consistency until the end. As when watching one of the breathtaking sequences in Ivan the Terrible, one might relish the formal structure and melodic appeal of Rimbaud’s words which, like Eisenstein’s masterful images, carry the reader or viewer effortlessly aloft.
     To filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein the visual sequence of montages of image is the most potent and distinctively cinematic of the techniques he developed in his own films and in his teaching and critical writing. He calls montage “the most powerful compositional means of telling a story” and “a syntax for the correct construction of each particle of a film fragment.” [2] Through montage he pursued a “unity of a higher order.” [3] An admirer of James Joyce during Stalinism when such enthusiasm could have the most serious consequences, he praised Joyce’s skill at presenting apparent “disintegration in stylistic unity” and declared himself very nearly a disciple, saying, “from Joyce the next leap is to film.” [4]
     Eisenstein differed with his colleague Pudovkin’s view of montage as “linkage,” building an accumulated case as though with mounting evidence, and championed instead the idea of montage as “collision,” forcefully juxtaposing elements with no immediate connection, thus obliging the viewer to make one, consciously or, perhaps better yet, unconsciously. [5] His own montages seek to be at once “monistic” in the final effect and “dialectic” in working toward that end. [6]
     The filmmaker was quite clear about the literary parallels to his visual techniques, citing Flaubert and others as influences. Such gaps have long been exploited as a source of literary beauty. Long after Lautréamont described a boy’s fairness as "beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella" [7] his simile became a Surrealist slogan. More modern manifestations of related theories include Rothenburg and Robert Kelly ‘s concept of “deep images [8] or Bly’s of “leaping” poetry. [9]
     Some have found Rimbaud’s prose poems to include an almost indigestible density of signification. (The same complaint is sometimes made of John Ashbery, perhaps Rimbaud’s finest translator. [10]) If the consumer experiences the images as a series, allowing them to register “without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” [11] they will not only register as powerful impressions, but they will shortly form highly ordered groupings that might, in the end, be called unified or even “monistic.” By listing the images over each section of the poem, I mean to suggest how they might appear as raw experience. I follow with a rapid, stream-of-consciousness interpretation, always provisional. I present this explication as a document of one reader’s response. In the end I believe the poem seems almost classical in its regard for form.


Cities

     The very title launches a sort of bipolar dialectic that functions throughout the poem. A short time before Rimbaud, Baudelaire’s Parisian flâneur was at once engaged and alienated, while looking forward a bit, Eliot is astonished at the sight of the “unreal city.” [12] In spite of the title much of the piece employs natural images: palms, gorges, and high peaks. The writer occupies cities, and that fact suggests his alienation from his own original nature, a tense estrangement which is in fact the central theme. The idea is unannounced. The reader must await its unfolding in time, like a film.


Alleghenys and Lebanon -- chalets on tracks -- craters and colossi -- bells in gorges

     “Oh, cities! Here is a people for whom fantasies of the Alleghenys and the Lebanon were composed! Chalets of crystal and of wood which move on invisible tracks by means of unseen pulleys. Old craters surrounded by colossi where copper palms roar music through the flames. One overhears the love-feasts on the canals behind the chalets. The bells’ hunt cries through the gorges.”
     After announcing the title with an emotive exclamation point, he proceeds to characterize urbanites as people to suit whose taste such exotic realms as “the Alleghenys and the Lebanon” were specifically designed. He suggests their elaborate (virtually “steampunk” despite its date) artificiality by speaking of invisible tracks and pulleys.
     Then the images begin to flash by with dizzying speed. Rimbaud sketches a weird end-of-the-world scene like Coleridge’s Xanadu: a crater, a void, the emptiness of the modern soul seems in the center, surrounded by colossi more mysterious than those of Easter Island. Surely they are a response to the crater, an attempt through myth to restore balance. But this dialectic no sooner emerges than it is replaced by another natural/unnatural monster: copper palm trees which, in spite of their surprising material, are aflame, turning to a nightmare the tropical dream they first elicited. Further, in the midst of conflagration they, like the poet and, by implication, all the rest of us, are singing.
     Whatever can be the source of song? Perhaps the “love-feasts,” audible from a distance, the first introduction of the dynamo of eros that powers the creation and offers the potential for the persona’s escaping his distress and gaining a sense of belonging and fulfilment and joy. One next sees bells ringing wildly, their peal echoing through the gorges, those liminal areas where low turns to high, the tocsin ringing like the Buddha’s advice in the Lotus Sutra: “Your house is on fire! Act!” [13]


titanic choruses -- trumpeting Rolands -- masts on gangways -- seraphic centauresses

     “Choral societies with gigantic singers and striking robes and banners striking as a high peak dash on the scene. On platforms in the middle of the abyss, Rolands trumpet their courage. On gangways over the void and on the roofs of hostels heaven’s heat decks out the masts. The collapse of apotheoses has caught the higher fields where seraphic centauresses play among the avalanches.”
     Suddenly the colossi seem to have come alive and formed themselves into choruses. In the face of the dizzying onslaught we humans, poor doomed Rolands, crow and strut bravely as doom approaches. On the jerry-built justifications that get us through life and over our very accommodations the unforgiving absolute sun displays its mad love of pattern on the cosmic masts. The death of god has proceeded to the point where semi-divine women play heedless amid collapse and disaster.


a stormy sea -- sorrowful flowers -- gowned floating faeries -- theophany of Diana

     “Above the elevation of the highest peaks, a sea perturbed by the constant birth of Venus and filled with fleets of men’s choruses and with the thrum of valued conches and pearls. The sea grows dim with lethal blasts. On the slopes harvests of flowers, huge like our weapons and our winecups, bawl. Parades of Mabs in red and opalescent gowns climb the gullies. Way up there, feet in the blackberries and rushing water, Diana suckles the deer.”
     At the highest pinnacle of knowledge one finds only the great primal sea waving to reflect the sempiternal birth of Venus. The great sea of chaos is shaken by mortality to thicken the plot. The very flowers, inscribed with weapons and wine-cups, weep. Ascending faeries (the third mention of divinized female figures) rise from the gorges, seeking always the upward path and, as their goal, Diana sits at high altitude rooted in the water and the animals and the plants of perfected nature. She resembles those archaic goddesses of whom Gimbutas wrote. [14]


bacchantes under burning moon -- Venus going visiting -- bone-built houses -- elk on Main Street

     “Suburban bacchantes weep while the moon burns and cries. Venus visits the caves of ironworkers and ascetics. Groupings of belfries sing what’s on people’s minds. From manors built of bones comes an unknown tune. All myths alter and the elk rush through towns.”
     The bacchantes are the wise ones, but they weep under the burning moon of experience. Still some favored ones (here hermits and blacksmiths) can enjoy communion with Venus and in that way to become enlightened. Again song carries the human consciousness abroad as the bells sing out the truth. More music emerges from the grand structures people have built of their own knowledge of mortality, but it is not wholly intelligible. The myths must be updated as Diana’s animals troop trough Main Street in an undeniable rush of energy.


paroxysms of storm -- tribal dancing -- the dilemma of the Baghdad street -- conclusion

     “A paradise of thunderstorms collapses. Tribal people dance without pause to celebrate the night. And, one time, I went down in the crowds of a Baghdad street where troops were singing the joy of new work, with a brisk breeze blowing, circling, unable to escape the unreal phantoms of the hills where they must have gathered.
     What good arms, what fine hour will recover for me the place from which my sleep and my smallest movements come?”
     The sky, chaotic like the sea, is torn by huge storms, while below tribal people, the only possessors of the cosmic secrets, dance to embrace the night so alarming to the city-dweller. In the exotic yet urban medina of Baghdad he hears people singing their daily round, singing again to counteract the dark, but he feels always the cold reminding breeze of the metaphysical dilemmas of the mountains. Carrying this burden about with him, he cannot join the crowds. He wonders how he might regain that place of his own unconscious, his sleep, and also of his deepest nature, the origin of his “smallest movements.” In Zen terms he is looking for his original face, before his parents’ birth.
     We have then a poem on cities in which the few mentions of cities are emphatically exotic. Here an urban setting serves simply as an emblem of estrangement. Yet the poet realizes that he cannot return to a prelapsarian nature. The only routes toward mitigation of the unfitness we humans feel as a neurotic byproduct of self-consciousness are love and art, Venus and song. Wild as it is, the poem is optimistic in contrast to Rimbaud’s silence that was to come, his escape to Africa, when even these most powerful consolations came to be insufficient. Already in the nineteenth century, the pillars of certainty had fallen for the young poet, and he could find his way only by anticipating the techniques and themes of the age to come.



1. For homage to Griffith see p. 204-5 and 234-5 The Film Form and The Film Sense (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1957).

2. The Film Form, p. 111.

3. The Film Form, p. 254.

4. From Emily Tall, “Eisenstein on Joyce: Sergei Eisenstein's Lecture on James Joyce at the State Institute of Cinematography, November 1, 1934,” James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Winter, 1987), pp. 133-142.

5. Robert Bly, Leaping Poetry: An Idea with Poems and Translations.

6. The Film Form, Flaubert p. 12 For montage as collision, see p. 36.

7. Canto VI, Les Chants de Maldoror. Lautréamont became a hero of the Surrealists after Phillippe Soupault came upon a copy of Maldoror (while a mental patient) and showed to Breton.

8. Trobar 2.

9. The Film Form, p. 235.

10. Though I was immensely impressed with his 2011 translation of Illuminations, I avoided consulting it when doing my own version of “Villes.”

11. The phrase is from Keats’ letter, of course, on “negative capability.”

12. Line 60 of “The Wasteland.” In Baudelaire’s “Paysage” he sees a city in terms as artificial as Rimbaud’s, occupied with “crystal palaces.”

13. In Ch. 3.

14. See The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe and other books.

Cities
Oh, cities! Here is a people for whom fantasies of the Alleghenys and the Lebanon were composed! Chalets of crystal and of wood which move on invisible tracks by means of unseen pulleys. Old craters surrounded by colossi where copper palms roar music through the flames. One overhears the love-feasts on the canals behind the chalets. The bells’ hunt cries through the gorges. Choral societies with gigantic singers and striking robes and banners striking as a high peak dash on the scene. On platforms in the middle of the abyss, Rolands trumpet their courage. On gangways over the void and on the roofs of hostels heaven’s heat decks out the masts. The collapse of apotheoses has caught the higher fields where seraphic centauresses play among the avalanches. Above the elevation of the highest peaks, a sea perturbed by the constant birth of Venus and filled with fleets of men’s choruses and with the thrum of valued conches and pearls. The sea grows dim with lethal blasts. On the slopes harvests of flowers, huge like our weapons and our winecups, bawl. Parades of Mabs in red and opalescent gowns climb the gullies. Way up there, feet in the blackberries and rushing water, Diana suckles the deer. Suburban bacchantes weep while the moon burns and cries. Venus visits the caves of ironworkers and ascetics. Groupings of belfries sing what’s on people’s minds. From manors built of bones comes an unknown tune. All myths alter and the elk rush through towns. A paradise of thunderstorms collapses. Tribal people dance without pause to celebrate the night. And, one time, I went down in the crowds of a Baghdad street where troops were singing the joy of new work, with a brisk breeze blowing, circling, unable to escape the unreal phantoms of the hills where they must have gathered.
What good arms, what fine hour will recover for me the place from which my sleep and my smallest movements come?


Villes
Ce sont des villes ! C'est un peuple pour qui se sont montés ces Alleghanys et ces Libans de rêve ! Des chalets de cristal et de bois qui se meuvent sur des rails et des poulies invisibles. Les vieux cratères ceints de colosses et de palmiers de cuivre rugissent mélodieusement dans les feux. Des fêtes amoureuses sonnent sur les canaux pendus derrière les chalets. La chasse des carillons crie dans les gorges. Des corporations de chanteurs géants accourent dans des vêtements et des oriflammes éclatants comme la lumière des cimes. Sur les plates-formes au milieu des gouffres les Rolands sonnent leur bravoure. Sur les passerelles de l'abîme et les toits des auberges l'ardeur du ciel pavoise les mâts. L'écroulement des apothéoses rejoint les champs des hauteurs où les centauresses séraphiques évoluent parmi les avalanches. Au-dessus du niveau des plus hautes crêtes une mer troublée par la naissance éternelle de Vénus, chargée de flottes orphéoniques et de la rumeur des perles et des conques précieuses, - la mer s'assombrit parfois avec des éclats mortels. Sur les versants des moissons de fleurs grandes comme nos armes et nos coupes, mugissent. Des cortèges de Mabs en robes rousses, opalines, montent des ravines. Là-haut, les pieds dans la cascade et les ronces, les cerfs tettent Diane. Les Bacchantes des banlieues sanglotent et la lune brûle et hurle. Vénus entre dans les cavernes des forgerons et des ermites. Des groupes de beffrois chantent les idées des peuples. Des châteaux bâtis en os sort la musique inconnue. Toutes les légendes évoluent et les élans se ruent dans les bourgs. Le paradis des orages s'effondre. Les sauvages dansent sans cesse la fête de la nuit. Et une heure je suis descendu dans le mouvement d'un boulevard de Bagdad où des compagnies ont chanté la joie du travail nouveau, sous une brise épaisse, circulant sans pouvoir éluder les fabuleux fantômes des monts où l'on a dû se retrouver.
Quels bons bras, quelle belle heure me rendront cette région d'où viennent mes sommeils et mes moindres mouvements ?

Rimbaud's "The Lice-Pickers"

Rimbaud’s poem opens with a shocking line and continues to disturb to the end, yet the form – the rhymes and regular syllable count – allows his sensational material to be delivered with a measure of grace and irony. Merely writing about lice outraged traditional advocates of literary propriety, but the inclusion of parasites in a highly eroticized tableau multiplied the offense immeasurably. In the end both the steamy excitement (the charming fingers, the wish to kiss) and the disgusting details (sucked saliva, the sound of crushed insects) are subsumed in what looks very much like a drive for union with Ultimate Reality.

The all-too-human child his face covered with open sores, like Job an icon of suffering, might well seek the oblivion of dreams, but that psychic deliverance is realized only through the covertly (or unconsciously) sensual actions of the ministering ladies which make a powerful impression on the hypersexualized boy. “L’air bleu baigne un fouillis de fleurs” is of a piece with the “l’essaim blanc des rêves indistincts.” The poet does gain access to that transported realm, contained within the experience, figured as a taste, of the sound of the ladies’ breathing which to him seems “longs miels végétaux et rosés.” The same enchanted jouissance recurs in “les silences parfumés,” “grises indolences,” each emptied yet heightened.

The climax of the piece is the child’s submission to his Castle of Indolence, the “vin de la Paresse,” which is represented as a “soupir d’harmonica qui pourrait délirer.” This culminating image includes both the melody of the delicate music (a “glass harmonica,” I understand, like Mozart knew, not a mouth organ) and the delirium (corresponding to the earlier lesions) as the child finds that eros, even in artistic representation, as a succession of images, has the power to bring one outside oneself into the undifferentiated consciousness (because nothing, Nirvana, thus everything). Or nearly to that point, since the urge to weep recurs to him repeatedly, rhythmically, like the plangent waves rolling to shore and receding. What a poignant conclusion!

A number of critics take pains about the biographical details that may be associated with this poem. Since it seems as much about me as about young Rimbaud, I do not comment on that element.

Keeping the rhymes has required sacrifices, but that calculus cannot be evaded. The specifics of the translator’s decisions are of interest only, I think, to other translators, who then feel constrained from using similar wording. To my mind I have decided to be faithful to the original far more times than I have taken a liberty.


The Lice Pickers

When the child’s face, so full of red raw sores,
implores the pale swarm of vaporous dreams,
two great charming sisters come to his door
with their frail fingers and silver nails’ gleam.

They seat him in the casement window chair,
open to a blue air bath where scent lingers.
He feels through his dew-laden heavy hair,
the touch of fine, fearsome, and charming fingers.

To him their cringing breathing makes a tune
with long honied notes vegetal, rosehips,
and every now and then a whistling croon,
the wish to kiss or suck spittle from lip.

He hears the beating of their black eyelids
in perfumed hush. Electric hands so nice
crackle sweet amid grey indolence hid
as regal nails bring death to little lice.

Then in him rises up the wine of Sloth,
the breath of a mad harmonica’s sigh.
The child feels, along with their slow caress,
come and go without end, the wish to cry.


Les Chercheuses de Poux by Arthur Rimbaud

Quand le front de l’enfant, plein de rouges tourmentes,
Implore l’essaim blanc des rêves indistincts,
Il vient près de son lit deux grandes sœurs charmantes
Avec de frêles doigts aux ongles argentins.

Elles assoient l’enfant auprès d’une croisée
Grande ouverte où l’air bleu baigne un fouillis de fleurs
Et, dans ses lourds cheveux où tombe la rosée,
Promène leurs doigts fins, terribles et charmeurs.

Il écoute chanter leurs haleines craintives
Qui fleurent de longs miels végétaux et rosés
Et qu’interrompt parfois un sifflement, salives
Reprises sur la lèvre ou désirs de baisers.

Il entend leurs cils noirs battant sous les silences
Parfumés ; et leurs doigts électriques et doux
Font crépiter, parmi ses grises indolences,
Sous leurs ongles royaux, la mort des petits poux.

Voilà que monte en lui le vin de la Paresse,
Soupir d’harmonica qui pourrait délirer :
L’enfant se sent , selon la lenteur des caresses,
Sourdre et mourir sans cesse un désir de pleurer.

Thoughts on Mythology

These are notes from my recent talk on mythology at the Seligmann Center. I pass on my ideas in this raw form, without any attempt to work up an essay, in the belief that some of the ideas may be useful.


1
     The Greek word muthos in Homer has a broad meaning, fundamentally, anything delivered by word of mouth. The term came later to indicate conversation, counsel, the subject of speech, the matter, a purpose, a saying, a rumor; then a fiction or legend.

2
     In contemporary literary use, it is a story not tied to an individual text. Mythology arises as a sort of collective narrative: a body of linked and particularly significant stories that express in symbolic order the world-view of a community. Myth is deeply involved not only with the earliest poetry, but also science, philosophy, religion, and history, in fact all the intellectual disciplines. The definitive authority myths claim is evident in the fact that they often concern the gods or other spiritual beings. Myths are often taken as literal history, though they are also used by writers in self-consciously symbolic ways. Myth fades into legend and other cultural material.

3
     Not every collective narrative is mythic. Historical events are shared by large numbers of people. They may resonate in mythic ways, but the presumptive loyalty is to real events. Jokes lack the vast implications of myths.

4
     I continue to find Northrup Frye’s classification useful.

1) superior in kind to people and to their environment: mythic
2) superior in degree to people and environment: romance
3) superior in degree to people but not to environment: high mimetic (a hero of epic or tragedy, Aristotle’s hero)
4) inferior to the reader or equal: low-mimetic, ironic (realism, comedy)

     Frye notes, “Looking over this table, we see that European fiction, over the last fifteen centuries has moved steadily down this list . . . Something of the same progression can be traced in Classical literature, too.”

5
     In The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art David Lewis-Williams analyzes cave paintings and posits a simultaneous birth of language, art, and religion. With the birth of signs came the ability to lie.

6
      Mythic references may be traditional (Homeric hymns, Elder Edda, anthropological texts), literary (Ovid, Shakespeare, Rothenburg), modern (Superman, cowboy hero, Jewish blood guilt, Lincoln), or idiosyncratic (Blake, Yeats, outsider art).

7
     In poetry mythological references may serve to universalize or create group identity (as in the many medieval romances which wither begin or end by invoking the blessing of Christ), to compress (as in Raleigh’s reference to Philomel implying a world of violence in a word), to ironize, (as in Joyce’s Ulysses or the Coens’ O Brother Where Art Thou), or to decorate (as in Herrick’s “Parcae” where Atropos charms rather than frightens).

8
     Approaches to the understanding of myth include:

1) Euhemerism regards myths as distorted accounts of real historical events. Herodotus in his reasonable way, has recourse to this explanation. (On the other hand some ritual theorists would agree with Frye (above), and hold the opposite view: that gods degenerate over the years into myth, then legend (with supernatural apparatus), appearing next as history and finally as comedy.

2) Mythology has often been viewed as a sort of allegory with the gods representing either natural phenomena or concepts. The 19th century Sanskritist Max Müller supported an allegorical theory of myth. Modern variations of this theme include Freudian, Jungian, or other psychological theories.

3) Myths have been viewed as solely functional, often a form of social control. A simple form of this approach would be the vulgar Marxist analyst to whom every myth comments on class relations, but Malinowski took much the same approach.

4) The structural theory states that myths are patterned after the human mind as well as human nature. Claude Levi-Strauss, makes the claim that “myth is language,” and stresses formal play with meaning arising only from contrasts within a pattern, not from individual elements.

5) According to the myth-ritual theory, the existence of myth is tied to ritual. In its most extreme form, this theory claims that myths arose to explain rituals. I am myself fond on the work of James Frazer and the Cambridge School.

6) Myth has been considered the human language for investigating the metaphysical. In this sense myth is much like religion, providing human’s most profound analysis of the cosmos.

7) Myth is a symbolic statement about reality. Each culture defines and defends its assumptions with myth. Myth tends toward the encyclopedic, offering seamless explanations and prescriptions for the significant passages of life.

9
     To test these ideas with texts, I followed with this brief anthology of poem’s mentioning Aphrodite.

from Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (my translation)

She went to Paphos -- Cyprus -- where her
aromatic altar and her temple stood,
and she went in and shut the shining doors. 60
The graces then anointed her with oil
such as blooms on bodies of the gods.
(The oil was sweet, ambrosial, smelled so fine!)
Then laughter-loving Aphrodite donned
fine clothes of golden fabric on her flesh. 65
She left sweet-smelling Cyprus then for Troy
(fast she flew and high, the clouds her road),
to spring-rich Ida, beast-land, came she then,
she went through hills right to his home and after her
came bright-eyed lions, fawning grey-furred wolves 70
and bears, fast leopards ravenous for deer,
and then her heart rejoiced at seeing them
and to their hearts she tossed hot lust; they paired
in twos and mated in the shade,


Thomas Wyatt (the first stanza of an untitled poem)

Though this port : and I thy servaunt true,
And thou thy self doist cast thy bemes from hye
From thy chieff howse, promising to renew
Both Joye and eke delite, behold yet how that I,
Bannisshed from my blisse, carefully do crye,
"Helpe now, Citherea, my lady dere,
"My ferefull trust," en vogant la galere.


from Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis

Over one arm the lusty courser's rein
Under her other was the tender boy, 32
Who blush'd and pouted in a dull disdain,
With leaden appetite, unapt to toy;
She red and hot as coals of glowing fire
He red for shame, but frosty in desire. 36

The studded bridle on a ragged bough
Nimbly she fastens;—O! how quick is love:—
The steed is stalled up, and even now
To tie the rider she begins to prove: 40
Backward she push'd him, as she would be thrust,
And govern'd him in strength, though not in lust . . .

'Fondling,' she saith, 'since I have hemm'd thee here
Within the circuit of this ivory pale,
I'll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer;
Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale: 232
Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry,
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.

'Within this limit is relief enough,
Sweet bottom-grass and high delightful plain, 236
Round rising hillocks, brakes obscure and rough,
To shelter thee from tempest and from rain:
Then be my deer, since I am such a park; 239
No dog shall rouse thee, though a thousand bark.'


A Hymn to Venus and Cupid (Herrick)

SEA-BORN goddess, let me be
By thy son thus grac'd and thee;
That whene'er I woo, I find
Virgins coy but not unkind.
Let me when I kiss a maid
Taste her lips so overlaid
With love's syrup, that I may,
In your temple when I pray,
Kiss the altar and confess
There's in love no bitterness.

Final stanza from Un Voyage à Cythère (Baudelaire)
On your isle, O Venus! I found upright only
A symbolic gallows from which hung my image...
O! Lord! give me the strength and the courage
To contemplate my body and soul without loathing!
Dans ton île, ô Vénus! je n'ai trouvé debout
Qu'un gibet symbolique où pendait mon image...
— Ah! Seigneur! donnez-moi la force et le courage
De contempler mon coeur et mon corps sans dégoût!

Venus Anadyomène (Rimbaud)

As from a green zinc coffin, a woman’s
Head with brown hair heavily pomaded
Emerges slowly and stupidly from an old bathtub,
With bald patches rather badly hidden;

Then the fat gray neck, broad shoulder-blades
Sticking out; a short back which curves in and bulges;
Then the roundness of the buttocks seems to take off;
The fat under the skin appears in slabs:

The spine is a bit red; and the whole thing has a smell
Strangely horrible; you notice especially
Odd details you’d have to see with a magnifying glass…

The buttocks bear two engraved words: CLARA VENUS;
—And that whole body moves and extends its broad rump
Hideously beautiful with an ulcer on the anus.

Comme d’un cercueil vert en fer blanc, une tête
De femme à cheveux bruns fortement pommadés
D’une vieille baignoire émerge, lente et bête,
Avec des déficits assez mal ravaudés;

Puis le col gras et gris, les larges omoplates
Qui saillent; le dos court qui rentre et qui ressort;
Puis les rondeurs des reins semblent prendre l’essor;
La graisse sous la peau paraît en feuilles plates:

L’échine est un peu rouge, et le tout sent un goût
Horrible étrangement; on remarque surtout
Des singularités qu’il faut voir à la loupe…

Les reins portent deux mots gravés: CLARA VENUS;
—Et tout ce corps remue et tend sa large croupe
Belle hideusement d’un ulcère à l’anus.


An autumn morning in Shokoku-ji (Snyder)

Last night watching the Pleiades,
Breath smoking in the moonlight,
Bitter memory like vomit
Choked my throat.
I unrolled a sleeping bag
On mats on the porch
Under thick autumn stars.
In dream you appeared
(Three times in nine years)
Wild, cold, and accusing.
I woke shamed and angry:
The pointless wars of the heart.
Almost dawn. Venus and Jupiter.
The first time I have
Ever seen them close.


Birth of Eventually Venus (MacLeish)

Cast up by the sea
By the seventh wave
Beyond the sea reach
In the rubble of weed and
Wet twig
The not yet amphibious
Animalcula
Gasps and wiggles on the beach
Gathering her long gold hair about her
And gazing with pure eyes
Upon the unknown world.

Venus Over the Desert (Williams)

If I do not sin, she said, you shall not
walk in long gowns down stone corridors.
There is no reprieve where there is no fall-
ing off. I lie in your beds all night, from
me you wake and go about your tasks. My flesh
clings to your bones. What use is holiness
unless it affirms my perfections, my breasts,
my thighs which you part, shaking, and my lips
the door to my pleasures? Sin, you call it,
but there cannot be cold unless the heat
has bred it, how can you know otherwise? Love
comfort me in the face of my defeats! Poor
monks, you think you are gentle but I tell you
you kill as sure as shot kills a bird flying.

The Death of Venus (also titled the Birth of Venus) (Creeley)

I dreamt her sensual proportions
had suffered sea-change,

that she was a porpoise
a sea-beast rising lucid from the mist.

The sound of waves killed speech
But there were gestures –

of my own, it was to call her closer,
of hers, she snorted and filled her lungs with water,

then sank, to the bottom,
and, looking down, clear it was, like crystal,

there I saw her.