Charles Baudelaire
(1821-1867)

Ignorance, error, cupidity, and sin
Possess our souls and exercise our flesh;
Habitually we cultivate remorse
As beggars entertain and nurse their lice.

Thrice-potent Satan in our cursed bed
Lulls us to sleep, our spirit overkissed,
Until the precious metal of our will
Is vaporized that cunning alchemist!

Who but the Devil pulls our waking-strings!
Abominations lure us to their side;
Each day we take another step to hell,
Descending through the stench, unhorrified.

Like an exhausted rake3 who mouths and chews
The martyrized breast of an old withered whore
We steal, in passing, whatever joys we can,
Squeezing the driest orange all the more.

Packed in our brains incestuous as worms
Our demons celebrate in drunken gangs,
And when we breathe, that hollow rasp is Death
Sliding invisibly down into our lungs.

If the dull canvas of our wretched life
Is unembellished with such pretty ware
As knives or poison, pyromania, rape,
It is because our soul's too weak to dare!

But in this den of jackals, monkeys, curs,
Scorpions, buzzards, snakes . . . this paradise
Of filthy beasts that screech, howl, grovel, grunt-
In this menagerie of mankind's vice

There's one supremely hideous and impure!
Soft-spoken, not the type to cause a scene,
He'd willingly make rubble of the earth
And swallow up creation in a yawn.

I mean Ennui! who in his hookah-dreams
Produces hangmen and real tears together.
How well you know tills fastidious monster, reader,
Hypocrite reader, you! my double! my brother!

THE ALBATROSS

Often, to pass the time on board, the crew
will catch an albatross, one of those big birds
which nonchalantly chaperone a ship
across the bitter fathoms of the sea.

Tied to the deck, this sovereign of space,
as if embarrassed by its clumsiness,
pitiably lets its great white wings
drag at its sides like a pair of unshipped oars.

How weak and awkward, even comical
this traveller but lately so adroit
one deckhand sticks a pipestem in its beak,
another mocks the cripple that once flew!

The Poet is like this monarch of the clouds
riding the storm above the marksman's range;
exiled on the ground, hooted and jeered,
he cannot walk because of his great wings.

CORRESPONDENCES

Nature is a temple from whose living columns
Commingling voices emerge at times;
Here man wanders through forests of symbols
Which seem to observe him with familiar eyes.

Like long-drawn echoes afar converging
In harmonies darksome and profound,
Vast as the night and vast as light,
Colors, scents and sounds correspond.

There are fragrances fresh as the flesh of children,
Sweet as the oboe, green as the prairie,
And others overpowering, rich and corrupt,
Possessing the pervasiveness of everlasting things
Like benjamin, frankincense, amber, myrrh,
Which the raptures of the senses and the spirit sing.

THE HEAD OF HAIR

Ecstatic fleece that ripples to your nape
and reeks of negligence in every curl!
To people my dim cubicle tonight
with memories shrouded in that head of hair,
I'd have it flutter like a handkerchief!

For torpid Asia, torrid Africa
- the wilderness I thought a world away
survive at the heart of this dark continent.
As other souls set sail to music, mine,
0 my love! embarks on your redolent hair.

a harbor where my soul can slake its thirst
for color, sound and smell where ships that glide
among the seas of golden silk throw wide
their yardarms to embrace a glorious sky
palpitating in eternal heat.

Drunk, and in love with drunkenness, I'll dive
into this ocean where the other lurks,
and solaced by these waves, my restlessness
will find a fruitful lethargy at last,
rocking forever at aromatic ease.

Blue hair, vault of shadows, be for me
the canopy of overarching sky;
here at the downy roots of every strand
I stupefy myself on the mingled scent
of musk and tar and coconut oil for hours.

For hours? Forever! Into that splendid mane
let me braid rubies, ropes of pearls to bind
you indissolubly to my desire
you the oasis where I dream, the gourd
from which I gulp the wine of memory.

CARRION

Remember, my soul, the thing we saw
    that lovely summer day?
On a pile of stones where the path turned off,
    the hideous carrion -

legs in the air, like a whore - displayed,
    indifferent to the last,
a belly slick with lethal sweat
    and swollen with foul gas.

the sun lit up that rottenness
    as though to roast it through,
restoring to Nature a hundredfold
    what she had here made one.

And heaven watched the splendid corpse
    like a flower open wide -
you nearly fainted dead away
    at the perfume it gave off.

Flies kept humming over the guts
    from which a gleaming clot
of maggots poured to finish off
    what scraps of flesh remained.

The tide of trembling vermin sank,
    then bubbled up afresh
as if the carcass, drawing breath,
    by their lives lived again

and made a curious music there -
    like running water, or wind,
or the rattle of chaff the winnower
    loosens in his fan.

Shapeless - nothing was left but a dream
    the artist had sketched in,
forgotten, and only later on
    finished from memory.

Behind the rocks an anxious bitch
    eyed us reproachfully,
waiting for the chance to resume
    her interrupted feast.

- Yet you will come to this offence,
    this horrible decay,
you, the light of my life, the sun
    and moon and stars of my love!

Yes, you will come to this, my queen,
    after the sacraments,
when you rot underground among
    the bones already there.

But as their kisses eat you up,
    my Beauty, tell die worms
I've kept the sacred essence, saved
    the form of my rotted loves!

SPLEEN (IV)

When skies are low and heavy as a lid
over the mind tormented by disgust,
and hidden in the gloom the sun pours down
on us a daylight dingier than the dark;

when earth becomes a trickling dungeon where
Trust like a bat keeps lunging through the air,
beating tentative wings along the walls
and bumping its head against the rotten beams;

when rain falls straight from unrelenting clouds,
forging the bars of some enormous jail,
and silent hordes of obscene spiders spin
their webs across the basements of our brains;

then all at once the raging bells break loose,
hurling to heaven their awful caterwaul,
like homeless ghosts with no one left to haunt
whimpering their endless grievances.

- And giant hearses, without dirge or drums,
parade at half-step in my soul, where Hope,
defeated, weeps, and the oppressor Dread
plants his black flag on my assenting skull.

PARISIAN DREAM!

1

It is a terrible terrain
    no mortal eye has seen
whose image still seduces me
    this morning as it fades . . .

Sleep is full of miracles!
    Some impulse in my dream
had rid the region I devised
    of every growing thing,

and proud of the resulting scene
    I savored in my art
the rapturous monotony
    of metal, water, stone . . .

A maze of stairs and arches formed
    an endless palace filled
with basins where the bright cascades
    fell into tarnished gold;

Like crystal curtains, cataracts
    streamed down metal walls,
shimmering where the ripples made
    perpetual descent;

colonnades instead of trees
    shaded sleeping pools
where, vain as women, huge naiads
    marveled at themselves;

pale-blue sheets of water spread
    between the marble quays -
their rims of rose and green converged
    a universe away;

unimaginable gems
    glowed in magic streams;
mirrors dizzily exchanged
    the dazzling world they showed!

Sacred rivers crossed the sky
    in silent unconcern,
pouring the treasure of their urns
    into diamond gulfs.

Architect of such conceits,
    I sent submissive seas
into the jewelled conduits
    my will erected there;

and every color, even black,
    became a lustrous prism;
liquid turned to glowing glass
    and what was crystal flowed;

yet neither sun nor moon appeared,
    and no horizon paled
to light such wonders - from within
    each thing was luminous!

And on these marvels as they moved
    there weighed (without a sound -
the eye alone was master here)
    the silence of the Void.

2

Waking, dazzled, I was back
    in my familiar slum
and felt returning to my soul
    the curse of all my cares;

with unrelenting strokes the clock
    insisted it was noon,
and shadows poured out of the sky
    upon a sluggish world.

My heart flew up like a bird before the mast,
circled the shrouds and mounted free and clear;
the ship rolled on beneath a cloudless sky
like an angel drunk on the glory of the sun.

What is that dreary island - the black one there?
Cythera, someone says, the one in the song
insipid Eldorado of good old boys:
it isn't much of a place, as you can see.

Island of feasting hearts and secret joys!
Like a fragrance, the voluptuary ghost
of Aphrodite floats above your shores,
inflaming minds with languor and with love.

Island green with myrtle, rich with bloom,
revered forever by all mortal men
from whose adoring hearts wells up a sigh
soft as the fallen petals of a rose

or the relentless moan of doves . . . Cythera now
was nothing more than a thistled promontory
vexed by the wheeling gulls' unruly cries.
Yet there was something ... I could see it now;

no temple sheltered by its sacred grove,
no priestess gathering blossoms, her loose robe
half-opened to the breezes as they passed,
her flesh ignited by a secret fire;

but as we cleared the coastline - close enough
to scare the shorebirds with our flapping sails -
we saw what it was: black against the sky,
no cypress but a branching gallows-tree.

Perched on their provender, ferocious birds
were ravaging the ripe corpse hanging there,
driving their filthy beaks like cruel drills
into each cranny of its rotten flesh;

the eyes were holes, and from the ruined groin
a coil of heavy guts had tumbled out -
the greedy creatures, gorged on hideous sweets,
had peck by vicious peck castrated him.

Below his feet, among a whining pack
that waited, muzzles lifted for their share,
some bigger beast was prowling back and forth
like a hangman huge among his underlings.

Inhabitant of Cythera, rapture's child,
how silently you suffered these affronts
in expiation of your shameful rites
and sins that have proscribed your burial.

Ludicrous carcass! I hung there with you,
and at the sight of your insulted limbs
I tasted, like a vomit in my mouth,
the bitter tide of age-old sufferings.

Knowing what you were and what you are,
I felt each saber-tooth and jabbing beak
of jet-black panthers and of carrion-crows
that once so loved to lacerate my flesh.

. . . The sky was suave, the sea serene; for me
from now on everything was bloody and black
- the worse for me - and as if in a shroud
my heart lay buried in this allegory.

On Aphrodite's island all I found
was a token gallows where my image hung. . .
Lord give me strength and courage to behold
my body and my heart without disgust!

[From Wilkie & Hurt, eds., Introduction to World Literature, Vol. 2.]