VENUS ANADYOMENE
20 lines✦
omme d'un cercueil vert en fer-blanc, une têteDe femme à cheveux bruns fortement pommadésD'une vieille baignoire émerge, lente et bête,Montrant des déficits assez mal ravaudés; Puis le col gras et gris, les larges omoplatesQui saillent; le dos court qui rentre et qui ressort,--La graisse sous la peau paraît en feuilles platesEt les rondeurs des reins semble prendre l'essor. Tailhade has painted his "Vieilles Actrices" at greater length, butsmiling; Rimbaud does not endanger his intensity by a chuckle. He isserious as Cézanne is serious. Comparisons across an art are alwaysvague and inexact, and there are no real parallels; still it is possibleto think of Corbière a little as one thinks of Goya, without Goya'sSpanish, with infinite differences, but with a macabre intensity, and amodernity that we have not yet surpassed. There are possible grounds forcomparisons of like sort between Rimbaud and Cézanne. Tailhade and Rimbaud were both born in '54; there is not a question ofpriority in date, I do not know who hit first on the form, but Rimbaud's"Chercheuses" is a very good example of a mould not unlike that intowhich Tailhade has cast his best poems.
✦