At Arles where rolls the Rhone In the atrocious midday light A man of phosphor and blood Gives a haunting groan Like a woman giving birth And the man flees howling Pursued by the sun A sun of strident yellow To a whorehouse near the Rhone The man comes like a christmas king With his absurd present He has the blue and gentle look The true mad lucid look Of those who give life everything Of those who are not jealous And shows the poor child His ear couched in the cloth And she cries without understanding anything Imagining sad omens And looks without daring to take The frightful tender shell In which the moans of dead love And the inhuman voices of art Mix with the murmurs of the sea And die on the tiling In the room where the red eiderdown Of a sudden bursting red Blends this red so red With the much more redder blood Of half-dead Vincent And wise as the very image Of misery and love The nude child all alone and ageless Looks upon poor Vincent Stricken by his own storm Which spreads on the tile Onto his most beautiful painting And the storm runs out indifferent Rolling before it its great barrels of blood The dazzling storm of Vincent's genius And Vincent stays there sleeping waking croaking And the sun over the whorehouse Like a mad orange in a nameless desert The sun on Arles Howling turns around.