Angelic life, poetics and sublimation “Oraison du soir,” or the transfiguration of the lyric subject

The mix of formal perfection and blasphematory potency allows us to place “Oraison du soir” in a post-medieval tradition of the grotesque. Rimbaud’s sonnet thus creates a world in which oppositions are poised in balance in a vexed intersection where Christianity is held up for ridicule and encounters the pagan, and in which a poetics of caricature and a physiology of writing exists in parallel with the melancholy and moral injury of a subject strikingly similar to that of Rimbaud’s “Cœur supplicié”.