After the flood, by Arthur Rimbaud 🇫🇷✒️🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

Après le déluge – Les illuminations – Arthur Rimbaud – 1886 – with translations from 🇫🇷 French into 🇬🇧 English by Enzo Martinelli

🇫🇷 – Après le déluge, de Arthur Rimbaud

Aussitôt que l'idée du Déluge se fut rassise, un lièvre s'arrêta dans les sainfoins et les clochettes mouvantes, et dit sa prière à l'arc-en-ciel à travers la toile de l'araignée.

Oh ! les pierres précieuses qui se cachaient, - les fleurs qui regardaient déjà.

Dans la grande rue sale, les étals se dressèrent, et l'on tira les barques vers la mer étagée là-haut comme sur les gravures.

Le sang coula, chez Barbe-Bleue, - aux abattoirs, - dans les cirques, où le sceau de Dieu blêmit les fenêtres. Le sang et le lait coulèrent.

Les castors bâtirent. Les "mazagrans" fumèrent dans les estaminets.

Dans la grande maison de vitres encore ruisselante, les enfants en deuil regardèrent les merveilleuses images. Une porte claqua - et, sur la place du hameau, l'enfant tourna ses bras, compris des girouettes et des coqs des clochers de partout, sous l'éclatante giboulée.

Madame *** établit un piano dans les Alpes. La messe et les premières communions se célébrèrent aux cent mille autels de la cathédrale.

Les caravanes partirent. Et le Splendide Hôtel fut bâti dans le chaos de glaces et de nuit du pôle.

Depuis lors, la Lune entendit les chacals piaulant par les déserts de thym, - et les églogues en sabots grognant dans le verger. Puis, dans la futaie violette, bourgeonnante, Eucharis me dit que c'était le printemps.

- Sourds, étang, - Écume, roule sur le pont et passe par-dessus les bois ; - draps noirs et orgues, éclairs et tonnerre, - montez et roulez ; - Eaux et tristesses, montez et relevez les Déluges.

Car depuis qu'ils se sont dissipés, - oh, les pierres précieuses s'enfouissant, et les fleurs ouvertes ! - c'est un ennui ! et la Reine, la Sorcière qui allume sa braise dans le pot de terre, ne voudra jamais nous raconter ce qu'elle sait, et que nous ignorons.

🇬🇧 – After the flood, by Arthur Rimbaud

As soon as the idea of the Flood had subsided, A hare stopped in the saints and the moving bells, and said his prayer to the rainbow through the spider's web.

Oh! the precious stones that were hiding, - the flowers that were already looking.

In the big dirty street, the stalls were set up, and the boats were pulled towards the sea leveled up there as on the engravings.

Blood flowed, at Bluebeard's - at the slaughterhouses, - in the circuses, where the seal of God bleaches the windows. Blood and milk flowed.

The beavers built. The "mazagrans" smoked in the taverns.

In the large house of still dripping glass, the grieving children looked at the wonderful images.

A door slammed - and, in the hamlet square, the child turned his arms, including weathervanes and roosters from steeples everywhere, under the dazzling shower.

Madame *** sets up a piano in the Alps. Mass and first communions were celebrated at the hundred thousand altars of the cathedral.

The caravans left. And the Splendide Hotel was built in the chaos of ice and night of the pole.

Since then the Moon has heard the jackals peeping through the deserts of thyme, - and the clogged echoes growling in the orchard. Then, in the purple, budding forest, Eucharis told me that it was spring.

- Deaf, pond, - Foam, roll over the bridge and go over the woods; - black sheets and organs, lightning and thunder, - ride and ride; - Waters and sorrows, rise and raise the Floods.

For ever since they dissipated, - oh, the precious stones burying themselves, and the flowers open! - it's a nuisance! and the Queen, the Witch who kindles her embers in the earthenware pot, will never want to tell us what she knows, and what we do not know.

This poem, along with other selected works by Rimbaud, translated into English by Enzo Martinelli, is now published in an ebook collection available on Kobo and other selected sellers.

After the Deluge: Rimbaud’s Vision of Creation and Collapse in “Les Illuminations”

Arthur Rimbaud’s “Après le Déluge” (“After the Deluge”), the opening prose poem of Les Illuminations, stands as both an entryway and a manifesto—a metaphysical overture that bursts open the surreal and alchemical world of the collection. Composed in the late 1870s, likely during Rimbaud’s most experimental phase, this poem introduces many of the key themes and stylistic revolutions that define Les Illuminations: rupture and rebirth, the disintegration of linear narrative, and the fusion of poetic vision with dream logic. Through its enigmatic imagery and radical tone, “Après le Déluge” not only anchors Rimbaud’s collection but also anticipates the explosion of modernist literature in the 20th century.

A Poem of Genesis and Rupture

At first glance, “Après le Déluge” reads like a fevered cosmogony, a surreal rewriting of Genesis where divine retribution and creative ecstasy intermingle. The poem begins abruptly:

“As soon as the idea of the Deluge had subsided…”

This line immediately places the reader after a cataclysm, in a world stripped of moral order and historical continuity. Rimbaud evokes not the flood itself, but its aftermath—when something ancient has ended, and the raw materials of a new world stir into being. The poem then unfolds as a delirious sequence of disjointed images and fragmentary visions: a child collapsing in the opera house, a hotel in ruins, shepherds adorned with surreal symbols, animals hallucinating, and a chorus of springtime joys that feel at once innocent and grotesque.

This postdiluvian tableau resembles a mental or metaphysical landscape more than a physical one. Rimbaud’s language pulses with transformation: “the colors, the forms, the sounds” are all in motion. We are witnessing not a return to order but a birth of new chaos. In this way, the flood becomes an allegory of creative destruction—Rimbaud’s own abandonment of traditional poetics and bourgeois values in favor of radical innovation.

The Voice of the Seer

“Après le Déluge” exemplifies the poetic identity Rimbaud outlined in his famous Lettre du voyant (“Letter of the Seer”) written in 1871. There, he declared that the poet must become a voyant (seer) through “a long, immense and reasoned derangement of all the senses.” The poet, Rimbaud claimed, must reject conventional language, logic, and moral order to access deeper truths hidden beneath the surface of reality.

This “derangement” is precisely what animates “Après le Déluge.” The poem disregards narrative coherence and instead follows the associative leaps of a dream or hallucination. Sentences morph, images shift, time collapses. A factory appears beside a golden bridge. An opera house shudders with the cries of children. The poem ends with the cryptic phrase: “Et le réveil s’installait dans les quartiers.” (“And awakening settled in the neighborhoods.”)

This “awakening” is not a return to rationality or bourgeois normalcy. Rather, it marks the arrival of a new consciousness—a dream consciousness that redefines what poetic meaning can be. If “Après le Déluge” is about anything, it is about the act of becoming: a world, a poet, a vision emerging from the ruins of the known.

A Departure from Traditional Poetics

Stylistically, “Après le Déluge” is revolutionary. It is a prose poem, a form that Rimbaud helped pioneer and which he used as a vessel for fluid, uncontainable expression. Traditional meters, rhymes, and stanzaic forms are abandoned in favor of rhythmic prose that is both lyrical and disjointed. The poetic voice oscillates between omniscient narration and subjective intensity, slipping between the symbolic and the sensual without warning.

In this, Rimbaud foreshadows later developments in Symbolism, Surrealism, and Modernism. His dismantling of linear narrative and embrace of free-associative logic prefigure the works of André Breton, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce. The way Rimbaud blends high metaphysical inquiry with concrete and sensual imagery—flowers, machines, laughter, glass—would also influence visual artists, musicians, and filmmakers throughout the 20th century.

“Les Illuminations”: A Visionary Fragment

As the first poem of Les Illuminations, “Après le Déluge” sets the tone for what follows. The collection, whose title suggests both “visions” and “revelations,” is not a cohesive narrative but a kaleidoscope of inner landscapes and fragmented voices. “Après le Déluge” serves as a metaphoric creation myth for this poetic universe. The flood, in Rimbaud’s reimagining, does not cleanse the world in moral terms—it fractures it open, allowing for ecstatic reconstitution.

In many ways, “Après le Déluge” is Rimbaud’s declaration that the old world has died, and the poet must forge a new language, a new seeing. If Les Illuminations is a book of visions, then “Après le Déluge” is the moment of first light: chaotic, luminous, and unstable.

It is also significant that this poem opens a collection that Rimbaud compiled but never published in his lifetime. By the time Les Illuminations appeared in 1886, Rimbaud had long abandoned poetry and was living a life of mercantile adventure in Africa. His poetic withdrawal only added to the mythos of Les Illuminations as a prophetic text, a document left behind like a relic from a vanished visionary.

Legacy and Global Influence

“Après le Déluge” has left an indelible mark on the history of world literature. Its innovations resonate not only in French poetry but across linguistic and cultural boundaries. Surrealist poets like Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon took up Rimbaud’s methods of dislocation and sensory overload, as did artists like Salvador Dalí and René Magritte in visual forms. In the Anglophone world, poets such as Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, and Patti Smith drew directly from Rimbaud’s rebel spirit and mystical tone, seeing in him a poetic model of freedom, rebellion, and visionary insight.

Moreover, “Après le Déluge” speaks to contemporary concerns with collapse and renewal. Its imagery of a world in ruins that blooms into strange beauty has a renewed relevance in the 21st century, as we grapple with environmental crises, technological disorientation, and global upheaval. Rimbaud’s poem reminds us that from the end of one world, another might yet emerge—wild, imperfect, but undeniably alive.

Conclusion: The Flood as Revelation

“Après le Déluge” is more than the beginning of Les Illuminations—it is an initiation into Rimbaud’s poetic cosmos. Through it, we are invited to step into a world where logic breaks down, where the senses are reshaped, and where language becomes a force of liberation. It is both apocalyptic and hopeful, ecstatic and devastating. As with all great visionary works, its meaning cannot be fixed; it is an event more than a message, a burst of transformation that continues to ripple through literature and art to this day.

Rimbaud once wrote, “Je est un autre” (“I is another”), and in “Après le Déluge,” the world is also another—reborn, estranged, and illuminated.

If you enjoyed this post, follow for more critical explorations of classic poetry and its resonances in our modern world. And feel free to share your own interpretations of Rimbaud in the comments—his visions were never meant to remain solitary.