"Je conclurai sous le signe de ce poeme. "Honte" montre a quel point Rimbaud aura ete malheureux. Je prends ce mot absolument. Et, au dela de toute situation ou Rimbaud pourra se trouver, de toute idee qu'il pourra essayer de faire sienne, il faudra que l'on se souvienne de ce malheur."

In "Absolu et Parole", Bonnefoy continues to explore the dynamic relationship between the poet's art and his psyche, now in Paris. He begins by sketching biographical details, including Rimbaud's passion for poverty and his first experiments with absinthe and other drugs -- noting the contrast between Rimbaud's sincere pursuit of an absolute and his contemporaries' effete obsession with beauty and form. Bonnefoy then spends delves into the relationship between reality and the "inconnu". He claims first that l'inconnu is not simply the unknown (i.e. with what has not yet been seen, felt, or experienced) -- but neither is it some religious experience which is beyond reality. Rather, the "inconnu", for Bonnefoy, is closest to the metaphorical movement of the poem, in which experience touches something inside itself, and this interior is in consequence assimilated and rejoined to the exterior. The closest analogue would be the dream, which is contained in reality but warps reality, is part of a visionary rapture that has the potential to reconstitute one's ideas of sobriety so that the state of intoxication, in some way, becomes a truer expression of the real.

Still, as Bonnefoy shows in an analysis of the poem "Age d'or", some dregs of iron remain in this vision of ultimate unity (as he claimed, earlier, that Rimbaud gave up absinthe because he felt the consciousness it brought him was an escape rather than an arrival); the alchemically transformed voices still "s'agit de moi" -- the "moi" of the voyant cannot be safely sublimated, is only dangerously solipsized, and retains its presence in the midst of the vision, perhaps a consequence of the very nature of poetry itself, since there must be a "dichter" to deliver the dictum.

And so, at the moment when Rimbaud was discovering eternity in the ancient recession of sun and sea, the antique passages of space and time, he was becoming more and more convinced that his visions were mere illusions, temporal ecstasies. Thus his increasing awareness of and an attempt to renew a Christian charity in which the individual, through his own abundance, could be dissolved into universal life, as much philanthropist as self-serving through philanthropy. The continuation of his quest for love is again, for Bonnefoy, a response to the lingering presence of the mother, who has replaced nature in the act of giving birth, and hence, is the instigator of the separation.