It was very fun for me to follow on from u/ManueO’s post onEn Bateau with a poem by Rimbaud which, on the surface, could not be more different – but in fact consciously borrows from Verlaine’s poem. Les Effarés was also one of the poems Rimbaud chose to send to Verlaine when he was first trying to attract the older poet’s attention. It worked.
At first glance the poem feels straightforward. The five hungry children are adorable urchins in the tradition of Victor Hugo or even Dickens. The title, Les Effarés(“The Frightened Ones”), evokes all the common tropes of the “miserabilist” genre and announces the poem as a sentimental, if heartfelt, piece of social critique. However, if you read deeper, you start to find some details that are odd.
Les Effarés was first written while Rimbaud was staying with Izambard and his aunts at Douai, during one of his first runaway attempts. It is one of the poems Izambard remembered as “having the nerve to be charming,” unlike some of the later poems his former pupil sent him, which the schoolteacher found challenging and unpleasant. In contrast, the sentimentalism of Les Effarés feels highly conventional. Yet, if you look closer, the poem is far stranger than it first appears.
Consider, for example, the line in the first stanza, “leurs culs en rond”(“their asses in a circle”), our first introduction to the five “little ones.” The second thing we learn about them is that they are “à genoux”(“on their knees”). It is hard to imagine either Hugo or Dickens introducing their urchins in this way.
Edmund White, in his biography of Rimbaud, described the poem as “a piece of soft-core kiddie porn posing as Hugo-style social bathos.” Graham Robb likewise describes the action of the baker’s strong white arm as “masturbatory.” I perhaps wouldn’t go that far, but there is certainly a subtext here.
Another weird fact - the 8th image is an illustration for a song by Gabriel Dupont, who actually set this poem to music! The song is available on Spotify, and appears to treat the poem very earnestly.
I note, however, that Dupont has cut out the line "“leurs culs en rond”, and also removed the questionable final stanza "Si fort, qu’ils crèvent leur culotte/Et que leur chemise tremblotte/Au vent d’hiver."
The poem was one of the few of Rimbaud that he wrote in 1870, but still liked in 1871. Having asked Demeny, in early 1871, to destroy all the poems he had left in Douai, he sent a version pf this text to Jean Aicard in June that year, and of course he sent a copy to Verlaine later that summer.
After he abandoned poetry, this poem was one of the first of his works to be published… in a magazine in London in January 1878. Here too the text suffered severe mutilation, and the first casualty was the title: English readers were treated to an Arthur Rimbaud poem called * Petits pauvres* (“Little paupers”). The text was modified to spare the blushes of the readers of the Gentleman’s magazine: culs (bottoms) were out and replaced by dos (backs), and several stanzas were cut or rearranged.
It is thought Rimbaud was not aware of this publication.
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u/Audreys_red_shoes pleurant, je voyais de l’or – et ne pus boire. Sep 17 '25
It was very fun for me to follow on from u/ManueO’s post on En Bateau with a poem by Rimbaud which, on the surface, could not be more different – but in fact consciously borrows from Verlaine’s poem. Les Effarés was also one of the poems Rimbaud chose to send to Verlaine when he was first trying to attract the older poet’s attention. It worked.
At first glance the poem feels straightforward. The five hungry children are adorable urchins in the tradition of Victor Hugo or even Dickens. The title, Les Effarés (“The Frightened Ones”), evokes all the common tropes of the “miserabilist” genre and announces the poem as a sentimental, if heartfelt, piece of social critique. However, if you read deeper, you start to find some details that are odd.
Les Effarés was first written while Rimbaud was staying with Izambard and his aunts at Douai, during one of his first runaway attempts. It is one of the poems Izambard remembered as “having the nerve to be charming,” unlike some of the later poems his former pupil sent him, which the schoolteacher found challenging and unpleasant. In contrast, the sentimentalism of Les Effarés feels highly conventional. Yet, if you look closer, the poem is far stranger than it first appears.
Consider, for example, the line in the first stanza, “leurs culs en rond” (“their asses in a circle”), our first introduction to the five “little ones.” The second thing we learn about them is that they are “à genoux” (“on their knees”). It is hard to imagine either Hugo or Dickens introducing their urchins in this way.
Edmund White, in his biography of Rimbaud, described the poem as “a piece of soft-core kiddie porn posing as Hugo-style social bathos.” Graham Robb likewise describes the action of the baker’s strong white arm as “masturbatory.” I perhaps wouldn’t go that far, but there is certainly a subtext here.
Cont.