A green valley, a singing river, the sun raining down on the grass: in the first quatrain Rimbaud paints a luminous nook. In it a young soldier sleeps, mouth open and head bare, stretched out in the cool, «pale in his green bed».
The poem seems a peaceful scene — nature cradling a sleeping boy — until the last line abruptly gives it the lie: he has «two red holes in his right side». He was not sleeping: he was dead. Rimbaud wrote it at sixteen, in October 1870, and its plainness is its weapon.
The verse is kept in French. Translating it in passing would replace the work with a paraphrase of it.