A Season In Hell

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Meanwhile, let us demand new things from the poets - ideas and forms. All the clever ones will think they can easily satisfy this demand: that’s not so! ..... In these lines of ‘A Season in Hell,’the speaker introduces his dark and dreary circumstances. He’s incredibly sad and destroys any possibility, it seems, of him returning to a happy state. The speaker turns to darkness, crime, and cultivates sin within his own heart. But, at the end of this section, he starts to consider the possibility that this doesn’t need to be the case. Perhaps, he can regain his “appetite” for life.

If the old imbeciles hadn’t discovered only the false significance of Self, we wouldn’t have to now sweep away those millions of skeletons which have been piling up the products of their one-eyed intellect since time immemorial, and claiming themselves to be their authors! In the light of day, his prose loses some of that intensity. He becomes something tamer, better understood. In light of the preface, Rimbaud runs the risk of even failing to be purely Rimbaudian - he is human, after all, and simply a man, behind a desk, writing... I feel he loses his allure in this light, rather than gains it. Yes, he is human, but the legend is so much more fun and eagerly traced...? Here I am on the Breton shore. How the towns glow in the evening. My day is done: I’m quitting Europe. Sea air will scorch my lungs: lost climates will tan me. To swim, trample the grass, hunt, above all smoke: drink hard liquors like boiling metals – as those dear ancestors did round the fire. In Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell & Illuminations, to extinguish all human will to live, all human hope from one’s soul is to find eternity, a semblance of universality that makes the living of life more bearable, where the best thing to be and become is an outcast to one’s desires, to find in fleeing all the lost selves we’ve had to inhabit. Este mes pensé que no llegaría a cumplir mi meta de leer al menos un clásico francés como lo había venido haciendo desde enero —porque honestamente he tenido menos tiempo libre estas últimas semanas—, hasta que se me ocurrió buscar por el lado de la poesía y recordé que tenía a Arthur Rimbaud entre mis pendientes desde hace un tiempo.

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Well, first, it still does have the essence of Rimbaud and that counts for something, even if the language has become somewhat mangled. Second, I quite enjoy having the English and French texts side-by-side (a favored feature that can also be found in the translations of Fowlie and Varèse). And, finally, I really enjoyed the translator's preface and postscript. I learned some new things about Rimbaud's life from these, but the veracity of some things is questionable as certain key biographical details that Mathieu includes completely conflict with points made in the other translations that I have read. I think I will probably read Enid Starkie's biography of Rimbaud at some point and try to see what light she can offer. Of course, Rimbaud is not a poet who can easily be pinned down and the stories included by Mathieu, while different from those of other translators, are very interesting nonetheless -- missing pieces to a jigsaw puzzle that will never be complete. And Mathieu's postscript is also valuable in the sense that it, unlike other translations, points the reader toward works that influenced the young Rimbaud, including the works of Swedenborg, Eliphas Levi and the novels of Balzac. Quite interesting and worthy of further investigation. O divine Spouse, my Lord, do not refuse the confession of the most sorrowful of your servants. I am lost. I am drunk. I am impure. What a life! According to some sources, [ who?] Rimbaud's first stay in London in September 1872 converted him from an imbiber of absinthe to a smoker of opium, and drinker of gin and beer. According to biographer Graham Robb, this began "as an attempt to explain why some of his [Rimbaud's] poems are so hard to understand, especially when sober". [3] The poem was by Rimbaud himself dated April through August 1873, but these are dates of completion. He finished the work in a farmhouse in Roche, Ardennes. A Felt lyric says "you're reading from A Season in Hell but you don't know what it's about" but there's no shame in that when academics can't quite agree on its subject either. Priests, professors, masters, you are wrong to turn me over to Justice. I have never belonged to this people. I have never been Christian. I am of the race that sang under torture. I do not understand your laws. I have no moral sense, I am a brute.”

The first study for the man that wants to be a poet is true complete knowledge of himself: he looks for his soul; examines it, tests it, learns it. As soon as he knows it, he must develop it! That seems simple: a natural development takes place in every brain: so many egoists proclaim themselves authors: there are plenty of others who attribute their intellectual progress to themselves! – But the soul must be made monstrous: after the fashion of the comprachicos, yes! Imagine a man planting and cultivating warts on his face.It’s obvious to me I’ve always belonged to an inferior race. I don’t understand rebellion. My race never rose up except to pillage: like wolves round a beast they haven’t killed. In Greece, as I say, verse and lyre took rhythm from Action. Afterwards, music and rhyme are a game, a pastime. The study of the past charms the curious: many of them delight in reviving these antiquities: – that’s up to them. The universal intelligence has always thrown out its ideas naturally: men gathered a part of these fruits of the mind: they acted them out, they wrote books by means of them: so it progressed, men not working on themselves, either not being awake, or not yet in the fullness of the great dream. Civil-servants – writers: author; creator, poet: that man has never existed! Perhaps this is not just some weird wittering after all, given the influence Rimbaud has had on so many. Even if I create all your memories — even if I know how to control you — I'll suffocate you." (p43)

So, just recently, when I found myself on the brink of the final squawk! it dawned on me to look again for the key to that ancient party where I might find my appetite once more. From the same desert, in the same night, always my weary eyes wake to the star of silver, always, without troubling the Kings of life, the three mages, heart, soul, and mind. When shall we go beyond the shores and mountains, to hail the birth of fresh toil; fresh wisdom, the rout of tyrants and demons, the end of superstition, to adore – as newcomers – Christmas on earth! But orgies and the company of women were forbidden me. Not even a friend. I could see myself before an angry crowd, facing the firing-squad, weeping with a misery they couldn’t have understood, and forgiving them! – Like Joan of Arc! – ‘Priests, professors, masters, you’re wrong to hand me over to justice. I’ve never been part of this race. I’ve never been a Christian: I’m of the race that sings under torture: I don’t understand the law: I’ve no moral sense, I’m a brute: you’re wrong...’

This article's lead section may be too short to adequately summarize the key points. Please consider expanding the lead to provide an accessible overview of all important aspects of the article. ( October 2014) Despite the fact that this poem was originally written in French and then translated into English, there are several literary devices that are important to take note of. These include but are not limited to anaphora, metaphor, and imagery. The first of these, anaphora, is seen through the use and reuse of words at the beginning of multiple lines. For example, “I” at the start of several lines in the Introduction.

Cover of the first edition October 1873 Recording by Vincent Planchon for Audiocite.net. Part 1. Recording by Vincent Planchon for Audiocite.net. Part 2. Recording by Vincent Planchon for Audiocite.net. Part 3. My mind, be on your guard. No violent decisions on salvation. Stir yourself! – Ah, science is not swift enough for us! I could see the whole scene with which, in his mind, he surrounded himself: clothes, fabrics, furniture; I lent him emblems, another face. I saw all that touched him, as he would have created it for himself. When he seemed listless, I followed him, myself, in strange and complex deeds, far out, for good or ill: I was certain of never entering his world. How many hours of vigil, beside his dear sleeping body, questioning why he wanted to evade reality so deeply! No man every wished for it so. I realised – without fearing for him – that he might well prove a serious danger to society. – He knows perhaps secrets for transforming life? No, he only seeks them, I’d tell myself. Then, his charity is bewitched, and I’m its prisoner. No other soul would have had the strength – the strength of despair – to endure it – to be protected and loved by him! Besides, I could never imagine him with some other soul: one sees one’s own Angel, never another’s – I think. In his soul it was as if I were in a palace, emptied so none as base as self can be seen: that’s it. Alas! I depended on him deeply. But what did he want with my dull cowardly existence? He made me no better, even though he failed to kill me! Sadly distressed, I sometimes said to him: “I understand you.” He shrugged his shoulders. Autumn already! – But why regret an eternal sun, if we are engaged in discovering the divine light – far from races that die with the seasons.Romanticism has never been properly judged. Who could judge it? The Critics! The Romantics! Who prove so clearly that the singer is so seldom the work, that’s to say the idea sung and intended by the singer. I'm now making myself as scummy as I can. Why? I want to be a poet, and I'm working at turning myself into a seer. You won't understand any of this, and I'm almost incapable of explaining it to you. The idea is to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. It involves enormous suffering, but one must be strong and be a born poet. It's really not my fault." The completed poem, displaying the attractive notion of a despairing teenager tossing off brilliant experiments in the heat of passion, shows the marks of careful editing, making the work more unified and objective. Three fragments of Rimbaud’s manuscript revisions were discovered in the twentieth century. As collected and translated by Wyatt Mason in the Modern Library edition (2002) of Rimbaud’s poetry, they show that the author removed personal references to his sojourn in London with Verlaine and to the hallucinations he experienced there while smoking opium. He replaced them with the more general language of Heaven and Hell and allusions to such biblical figures as the Foolish Virgin and the melancholy preacher of Ecclesiastes. Denunciations of poets, both in specific and in general, are left out. The first lines of this poem also contain an example of a metaphor This is seen through the use of the “feast” to represent a good life in which one has an “appetite” for the next day. It is undeniable that Rimbaud was a master of imagery. Almost every line of this poem has an example that could imprint itself on a reader’s mind take for example: “I made the wild beast’s silent leap to strangle every joy”. I’d no longer be capable of demanding the comfort of a bastinado. I don’t think I’m embarking for a wedding with Jesus Christ for father-in-law.