Obscur Et Fronce

Stages (Scenes)

by Arthur Rimbaud

Ancient Comedy pursues its harmonies and divides its Idylls: 

Raised platforms along the boulevards. 

A long wooden pier the length of a rocky field in which 

the barbarous crowd moves about under the denuded trees. 

In corridors of black gauze, following the promenades 

with their lanterns and their leaves. 

Birds of the mysteries swoop down onto a masonry pontoon, 

swayed by the sheltered archipelago of spectators' boats. 

Operatic scenes with accompaniment of flute and drum 

look down from slanting recesses contrived below 

the ceilings around modern club rooms and halls of ancient Orient. 

The fairy spectacle maneuvers at the top of an amphitheater 

crowned with thickets,-- or moves and modulates for the Boeotians 

in the shade of waving forest trees, on the edge of the cultivated fields. 

The opera-comique is divided on a stage at the line of intersection 

of ten partitions set up between the gallery and the footlights. 

Tear 

Far away from birds and herds and village girls, 

I was drinking, kneeling down in some heather 

Surrounded by soft hazel copses, 

In an afternoon mist, warm and green. 

What can I have been drinking in that young Oise, 

Voiceless elms, flowerless turf, overcast sky. 

What did I draw from the gourd of the wine ? 

Some golden liquor, pale, which causes sweating. 

Such as I was, I should have made a poor inn-sign. 

Then the storm changed the sky, until the evening. 

It was black countries, lakes, poles, 

Colonnades under the blue night, railway stations. 

The water from the woods trickled away into virgin sands, 

The wind, from the sky, threw sheets of ice across the ponds ... 

But ! like a fisher for gold or shellfish, 

To think that I did not bother to drink ! 

Obscur Et Fronce 

Dark, wrinkled as a purple pink,

It breathes, it nestles in that bed of moss,

Still damp from love, which hugs the slope,

The white thighs' slope, to crater's heart.

Threads, gossamer, milky tears

Wept, wept, in scouring wind

That drove them on clots of scarlet scree

Till they tumbled on the edge, were gone.

My dreams touch kisses, kisses to the gate.

Soul envies couplings of the flesh,

Its tear-bottle this, its nest of sobs.

Ecstatic olive! Seductive flute!

Throat sucking almond-sweet sublime!

Moss-circled, female, promised land!