Rimbaud: Index of First Lines

Ma Boheme (Fantasie)  

Je m'en allais les poings dans mes poches crevees

as like things and things just now bright adorned

or when bright his living word the silent singing

to move divine sea bitter ugly sad basest decease

in snow petals and feet's sand out flying beneath

or back golden and beasts huge his lion’s horizon

by moon summer and golden wave the silent ecstasy

as snow softly and bitter long was wind’s whisper

to your spirit was nature seas too tender morning

in worn hurrah the gibbet like the wolves forests





In this poem I used a version of a method I call Eidonomics. Here I take the first line of Rimbaud's poem (French original) and convert it into numbers: 2 4 6 3 6 4 3 6 7. Then I look for sequences of words of the same length. In this instance, I used a translation of Rimbaud's selected poems by A. S. Kline as a database. In the case of some phrases it might appear superficially that they are from the source text, but this is seldom so. My only action is to select from the very large number of lines often produced.

I have a computer program that looks for these patterns. Any sequence of numbers and any text to search is possible.