Crazy Laughter Original text Arthur Rimbaud, 1870 Adapted words and music © copyright 2000 Holly Tannen      "These poets, you see, are not from here below. Let them live their crazy life. Let them have their cold and hunger, let them run and love, and sing. They are rich, these children, for their souls are full of rhymes, rhymes which laugh and cry. Let them live: God have mercy on the poor, and the world will bless the poet." - Arthur Rimbaud O good my lord come to the greenwood The skies have dropped all their cloak of rain Come bring your lady to sport and dally And hear the sweet songs of love again. But Sire when you have heard my story Then you like me shall sore lament The crows and magpies have caught the sparrow Villon is taken by Parliament. He lies on straw, fed on bread and water Down in the dungeon at Chatelet The poet writes one last lonely lyric "The hangman's noose is sad in May." Now he regrets all those moonlit evenings Flamboyant inns where drunkards yell Open highways and narrow back streets Where sweethearts sell what they have to sell Perhaps he quarreled with a dozen doxies Or thrashed the guard at some country inn Or stole the tripes from a careless butcher My lord, this is not so great a sin. Perhaps he sang of the dumpy chaplain Beneath his cassock so black and staid Who pays less heed to the dames' confessions Than to the rump of his chambermaid. The student cold in his lonely garret The fiddler paying his tab with song The stablehand, the drunken soldier All sing the praise of François Villon. So leave the poet his crazy laughter Let him run free beneath the sky Till his soul overflows with verses His songs that make you laugh and cry. So leave the poet his cold and hunger The love and longing he must endure All the world shall praise the poet And the Lord have mercy upon the poor.

This song was inspired by the "Lettre de Charles d'Orléans à Louis XI pour solliciter la grâce de Francois Villon, menacé de la Potence," by Arthur Rimbaud (age 15).      Most of what we know about François Villon comes from the records of the police. He was born in Paris in 1431 and received his master's degree from the University of Paris around 1450. But instead of settling down to a secure teaching position, Villon preferred to hang out in the taverns writing satirical songs and poems. For some reason he was never able to make a living at this, so he supported his poetry habit through his skill in burglary, until they caught him at it and he was sentenced to be hanged. However, Charles, the Duke of Orléans, was himself an amateur poet and an admirer of Villon. He wrote a letter to the king asking for Villon's release.      The letter has not survived. So it came to pass in the spring of 1870 that a young schoolteacher, George Izambard, on his first teaching assignment in the provincial French city of Charleville, set his prize student an assignment: write the letter that should have been written.

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updated 29 March 2002 : 10:29 Caspar (Pacific) time

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