The Sleeper in the Valley / Arthur Rimbaud

This is a green female in which a peleg sings to him,
He runs like a madman over the torn grass.
Silver; where the sun shines, from the top of a proud mountain,
Announcement: This is a little guy with his horns.

A young soldier, open-mouthed, bare-headed,
His neck is bathed in white, fresh jasmine flowers,
Sleep; spread out on the grass, under thick bushes,
Pale in his green bed, on which the light poured like rain.

His feet between the ship's bulwarks, he sleeps. Smiling as he is.
A sick child will smile, a light slumber will fall upon him:
It was cold: I will cover him with heat, I will be a mother of earth.

No scents of Martiti still tickle his nostrils;
He sleeps in the sun, his hand on his chest,
Quail. Two red females on his right side.

(From French: Orna Lieberman)

Le dormeur du val Arthur RIMBAUD

It is a green hollow where a river sings,
Madly clinging to grass rags
Silver ; where the sun, from the proud mountain,
Luit: it's a small valley foaming with rays.

A young soldier, mouth open, head bare,
And the neck bathed in fresh blue watercress,
Sleeps; he is lying in the grass, under the clouds,
Pale in his green bed where the light rains.

His feet in the gladioli, he sleeps. Smiling like
A sick child would smile, he takes a nap:
Nature, rock him warmly: he is cold.

Perfumes do not make his nostrils shiver;
He sleeps in the sun, his hand on his chest,
Calm. There are two red holes on the right side.

https://youtu.be/VBkd3rcaCtY

Arthur Rimbaud's poem, Sleeping in the Valley, is one of the most beloved, well-known, quoted, and studied in French poetry. The sonnet is presented as an impressionistic painting in which everything is intertwined: idyllic nature, a green valley, a singing stream. The light, water, and plants intertwine and confuse the senses of the observer. The light becomes tangible, like the water in which it is reflected, the plants unite with the water, and everything is in constant motion.

The impressionistic picture of nature incorporates a young soldier, at the height of his youth, sleeping in a ravine. Sleeping? Hints scattered throughout the poem prepare the observer for the final blow. The soldier is not simply asleep. Slowly, the reader realizes that nature, teeming with life, is in stark contrast to the dead soldier. The green ravine is a deathbed. The soldier will no longer be able to participate in nature's celebration of the senses. And the young man's untimely death, this unnatural death in the bosom of nature, sharpens the tragedies on which the poem is based.

The humanized river, depicted as mad, sprays water droplets onto the grass on which the body of the young soldier lies. The silvery drops, reflecting sunlight, resemble tears, like torn rags, severed from the body of the stream. Thus the war tore away the flowing life of the infant boy whose mother had only recently warmly rocked his cradle, caring for him with compassion when he fell to his death, as children do – later in the poem the dead soldier is likened to a sick child. Soon his mouth, head, neck, legs, nostrils, hands, chest, all the parts of his body that are listed one after the other, the young, the fresh, will become worn rags, rotting body tears that will merge with the damp earth. His neck is immersed in the marigolds and his feet are already among the gladioli – both aquatic plants, and yet he is sinking, drowning, in the swallowing swamp.

The historical background of the song

Neither the river is mad nor the soldier is sick. It seems that the madness and sickness of our world is being denounced here by the poet, who was only sixteen when he composed the sonnet (in my translation I chose to ignore the rhyme, which of course exists in the original, in accordance with the generality of this poetic form, in order to put the emphasis on the content). At that time, it was the war of France-Prussia in 1870, and more precisely, at the Battle of Anvil that sealed the crushing defeat of the French on September XNUMX of that year, twenty kilometers from Rimbaud's town of Charleville. It is possible that the young Arthur witnessed with his own eyes the scene he describes in his poem. The boy used to occasionally escape from his domineering mother and during his escapes he wandered around the war zone and wrote his first collection of poems.

Faint but palpable echoes of the harsh living conditions of the French army prisoners after the defeat at the Battle of Anvil are heard in the rows of the old man in the valley. Eighty thousand people are crowded in inhospitable conditions on the Ize peninsula west of Anvil, the Meuse River and its canal serving as a border for it. After torrential rains, a scorching sun beats down. Covered in mud, dressed in rags, the prisoners wander, starving, in search of food. Many die of disease and hundreds of rotting corpses accumulate in the river water, from which those who drink suffer from dysentery. The cruelty of the guards of the terrible open-air prison knows no bounds. They tease the unfortunate while they dine for their pleasure along the Meuse loop and shoot those who try to escape. When the camp is evacuated, a bleak desolation is discovered, seemingly in contrast to the pastoral landscape described in Rimbaud's poem.

Back to the song

The beginning of the sonnet does indeed lead us to a kind of paradise. It seems that vital, colorful, and cheerful nature – sunlight, melodious, bubbling river water, and lush, blooming vegetation – serves as a welcoming haven for a young soldier to take a short, light nap. Like a compassionate mother, the valley offers a soft, green carpet for the warrior to rest, who surrenders himself with full trust to her protection, generosity, and devotion. Moreover, is it not in the womb of the motherly goddess of nature herself that the boy is safely immersed? But the last line of the poem is unexpectedly struck by a fierce blow, revealing the horror of the young soldier’s death: two sword stabs or two gunshot wounds to his right side.

And is this so? The poet does indeed deceive the hasty reader with cunning tricks, but nevertheless, from the beginning, many hints are scattered that will not disappear from the eyes of an attentive reader and will slowly arouse his suspicions. The details of the picture that unfolds before our eyes are implied in two ways until the final, short and clear stroke. The sleeping figure's mouth is probably twisted in a smile-like grimace, his head devoid of protection, exposed, symbolizes vulnerability, the pallor of his face is alarming, the coldness of his body, despite the rays of the sun flooding the valley, is puzzling. The concluding verse is actually already given in the opening verse: The narrow valley is nothing but a grave pit.

The tension between life and death that dominates the poem is expressed in the properties of the two plants mentioned in it by their explicit names: cress and gladiolus. Cress – because of its double ovary, it is a plant with velvety leaves that reproduces easily and lines the riverbank. In French: cresson from the Latin verb: crescere which means born, grown, flourished. Gladioli – from -sif, a short sword, which ends the life of the one who is stabbed, because of their pointed leaves and long, narrow stem. In French, glaïeuls from the Latin word, gladiolus
Which means dagger.

Caressing and tearing as well as movement and freezing, light slumber and eternal sleep, sun and rain, poverty and abundance, ignorance and helplessness, kindness and indifference, gentleness and violence, beauty and horror, celebration and mourning, are some of the opposites found simultaneously in Rimbaud's sonnet.

The mystical dimension of Rimbaud's poem

The two red punctures on the young man's right side refer to the Christian tradition, according to which a Roman soldier pierced Jesus with a spear in this place on his body after the crucifixion, in order to confirm his killing. The word blood is not mentioned in the poem, but the abundant water that surrounds the soldier at the beginning of the poem in green and blue colors turns red at the end. The water foreshadows blood, like the blood and water in the New Testament (the Gospel of John) that came out of Jesus' wound after he was pierced with the holy spear. The end of the poem connects to its beginning: the two puncture holes in the soldier's body recreate the gaping wound that forms the narrow valley at the heart of the universe.

And if the two red holes that the swordsman has pierced in the soldier's right side constitute an explicit allusion to the wounds of the crucified one, then many other mystical allusions accompany it: the descending movement of the light on the horizontal river creates, together with it, a cross of radiance and water. The light flowing around the soldier's face constitutes a halo of saints. The hand of the martyr on his chest is reminiscent of paintings of Christian saints in this position. Mother nature is an allegory for the Holy Virgin rocking her baby in her lap. Mother Earth is Mary and the soldier is Jesus.
The mystical dimension is linked to the political dimension in Rimbaud. The defeat at Anvil led to the fall of Napoleon III and the end of the Second Empire he had established. The Third Republic, in which Rimbaud, who opposed Napoleon's rule, believed, was at hand. The sacrifice of the soldiers who fell at Anvil is similar, as implied in Rimbaud's poem, to the sacrifice of Jesus and opens the way to resurrection - the rise of the Third Republic, which was proclaimed in Paris two days after the defeat.

In conclusion

A typical sonnet with a dramatic point at the end, a symbolist poem that applies the theory of the Impressionist painters, a conscripted poem that denounces the crimes and horrors of war, a mystical touch that elevates the soldier to the rank of a martyr whose body bears the marks of Jesus' wounds, a necessary sacrifice for the redemption that will come in the form of the Third Republic - the young poet's poem is rich in meanings and layers and heralds his work for the future.

A few words about Dr. Orna Lieberman

Orna Lieberman, PhD in Literature French, is a Bible, literature and culture researcher, living in France. You are welcome to visit her blog, The Language of the Bible – New Light on an Ancient Language, which is mainly dedicated to explaining the Bible through its language.

Dr. Orna Lieberman researched and found that every word in Hebrew also expresses its opposite: every word has an opposite twin. Evil is also evil, wicked is also wicked, and singing is also singing. Details and explanations about the phenomenon of language duality and its meanings are available on the blog, which also includes quite a few entries on French culture and other cultures. In this way, the blog unites Orna’s two great loves, Hebrew and French.

French culture occupies a prominent place in her life, and her many and varied articles on the website “Francophiles Anonymous” illustrate the range of topics in which she is interested and which she researches.

Did you like the article?

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• And if you like 19th-century French poets and the articles of Dr. Orna Lieberman, you are invited to read Her wonderful article on Baudelaire.