Sonnet to an Asshole

The Idol—Sonnet to an Asshole (French: L’Idole—Sonnet du trou du cul) is a poem written by Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine in 1871. The sonnet is both a celebration of the human anus and a parody of the fetishization of the female body by Albert Mérat and other Parnassian poets. It pushed the limits "not only of acceptable poetic and social behavior, but of French verse in its formal intelligibility too."

Rimbaud and Verlaine were lovers, regarded by scholars as the first openly gay couple in modern literary history. Verlaine composed the sonnet's first eight lines and Rimbaud wrote the last six. The poem was published in the Album Zutique.

Poem

English translation

In English, the poem begins:

Dark and wrinkled like a purple carnation
It breaths, nestling humbly among the still-damp
Froth of love that follows the gentle slope
Of the white buttocks to its crater's edge.
My dream has often kissed its opening...

French (original)

Full poem is as follows:

Obscur et froncé comme un œillet violet
Il respire, humblement tapi parmi la mousse
Humide encor d’amour qui suit la fuite douce
Des Fesses blanches jusqu’au cœur de son ourlet.

Des filaments pareils à des larmes de lait
Ont pleuré, sous le vent cruel qui les repousse,
À travers de petits caillots de marne rousse
Pour s’aller perdre où la pente les appelait.

Mon Rêve s’aboucha souvent à sa ventouse;
Mon âme, du coït matériel jalouse,
En fit son larmier fauve et son nid de sanglots.

C’est l’olive pâmée, et la flûte câline,
C’est le tube où descend la céleste praline:
Chanaan féminin dans les moiteurs enclos!