Pablo Neruda : Ode to Arthur Rimbaud
Poetry by Pablo Neruda
Chicago Review, Vol. 17, No. 1 (1964)
Now, this October,
you would be
a hundred years old,
heart-breaking friend.
Will you permit
me to speak to you ?
I am alone,
against my window the Pacific breaks
its eternal dark thunder.
It is night.
Against the oval
of your old portrait
the burning wood hurls
a passing gleam. You are a child
with twisted tufts of hair,
half-closed eyes, bitter mouth.
Forgive me
for talking to you
as I do, as I believe
you would now,
for talking to you of sea water
and wood that burns,
of simple things and simple beings.
They tortured you
and burned your soul,
they shut you up
in the walls of Europe
and frantically
you beat the doors.
And when
you were able to leave
you went wounded,
wounded and mute,
dead.
Well then, other poets left
a raven, a swan,
a willow,
a petal on the lyre;
you left a heart-broken
ghost who curses
and spits;
and you go about
aimlessly
without definite residence,
without number ?
along the streets of Europe,
returning to Marseille with African sand
in your shoes,
urgent
like a shiver,
thirsting,
bloodied,
with your pockets torn,
defiant,
lost,
wretched.
It isn't true
that you stole the fire,
that you ran
with celestial fury and with the ultra-violet
precious stones of hell.
It isn't so,
I don't believe it;
they refused you
simplicity, home,
lumber;
they rejected you,
closed their doors to you,
and then, irate archangel,
you would fly
to the dwellings of remoteness
and coin by coin,
sweating and bleeding
your stature,
you wanted
to accumulate the gold
necessary
for simplicity, for the key,
for the quiet wife,
for the son,
for your own chair,
for your bread and beer.
In your day
above the cobwebs,
broad
like an umbrella,
dusk closed up and
the gaslight flickered
sleepily.
Through the Commune you passed,
red child,
and your poetry shoot out
flames
which still rise punishing the walls
of the executions.
With dagger eye
you pierced the wormeaten
shadows,
the war, the roving
cross of Europe.
Because of that, today, at a hundred years
distance,
I invite you
to the simple
truth your wrathful brow
never reached;
to America I invite you,
to our rivers,
to our moon mist
above the cordilleras,
to the emancipation
of workers,
to the Volga electrified, to the extended homeland
of the peoples
of clusters and wheat,
to all that man
conquered without mystery,
with strength
and blood,
with one hand and another,
with millions
of hands.
They drove you mad,
Rimbaud; they condemned you
and hurled you into hell.
You deserted the cause
of the origin, discoverer
of fire; you buried
the flame
and in the deserted solitude
you served
your sentence.
Today it is simpler, we are
countries, we are
peoples,
who guarantee
the growth of poetry,
the distribution of bread, the patrimony
of the neglected.
Today
you would not be
lonely.
