Comme d'un cercueil vert en fer-blanc, une tête
De femme à cheveux bruns fortement pommadés
D'une vieille baignoire émerge, lente et bête,
Montrant des déficits assez mal ravaudés;
Puis le col gras et gris, les larges omoplates
Qui saillent; le dos court qui rentre et qui ressort,
--La graisse sous la peau paraît en feuilles plates
Et les rondeurs des reins semble prendre l'essor.
Tailhade has painted his "Vieilles Actrices" at greater length, but
smiling; Rimbaud does not endanger his intensity by a chuckle. He is
serious as Cézanne is serious. Comparisons across an art are always
vague and inexact, and there are no real parallels; still it is possible
to think of Corbière a little as one thinks of Goya, without Goya's
Spanish, with infinite differences, but with a macabre intensity, and a
modernity that we have not yet surpassed. There are possible grounds for
comparisons of like sort between Rimbaud and Cézanne.
Tailhade and Rimbaud were both born in '54; there is not a question of
priority 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 into
which Tailhade has cast his best poems.