The Poems and Prose Poems of Charles Baudelaire

THE FLOWERS OF EVIL

THE DANCE OF DEATH

Carrying bouquet, and handkerchief, and gloves,

Proud of her height as when she lived, she moves

With all the careless and high-stepping grace,

And the extravagant courtesan's thin face.

Was slimmer waist e'er in a ball-room wooed?

Her floating robe, in royal amplitude,

Palls in deep folds around a dry foot, shod

With a bright flower-like shoe that gems the sod.

The swarms that hum about her collar-bones

As the lascivious streams caress the stones,

Conceal from every scornful jest that flies,

Her gloomy beauty; and her fathomless eyes

Are made of shade and void; with flowery sprays

Her skull is wreathed artistically, and sways,

Feeble and weak, on her frail vertebræ.

O charm of nothing decked in folly! they

Who laugh and name you a Caricature,

They see not, they whom flesh and blood allure,

The nameless grace of every bleached, bare bone

That is most dear to me, tall skeleton!

Come you to trouble with your potent sneer

The feast of Life! or are you driven here,

To Pleasure's Sabbath, by dead lusts that stir

And goad your moving corpse on with a spur?

Or do you hope, when sing the violins,

And the pale candle-flame lights up our sins,

To drive some mocking nightmare far apart,

And cool the flame hell lighted in your heart?

Fathomless well of fault and foolishness!

Eternal alembic of antique distress!

Still o'er the curved, white trellis of your sides

The sateless, wandering serpent curls and glides.

And truth to tell, I fear lest you should find,

Among us here, no lover to your mind;

Which of these hearts beat for the smile you gave?

The charms of horror please none but the brave.

Your eyes' black gulf, where awful broodings stir,

Brings giddiness; the prudent reveller

Sees, while a horror grips him from beneath,

The eternal smile of thirty-two white teeth.

For he who has not folded in his arms

A skeleton, nor fed on graveyard charms,

Recks not of furbelow, or paint, or scent,

When Horror comes the way that Beauty went.

O irresistible, with fleshless face,

Say to these dancers in their dazzled race:

"Proud lovers with the paint above your bones,

Ye shall taste death, musk-scented skeletons!

Withered Antinous, dandies with plump faces,

Ye varnished cadavers, and grey Lovelaces,

Ye go to lands unknown and void of breath,

Drawn by the rumour of the Dance of Death.

From Seine's cold quays to Ganges' burning stream,

The mortal troupes dance onward in a dream;

They do not see, within the opened sky,

The Angel's sinister trumpet raised on high.

In every clime and under every sun,

Death laughs at ye, mad mortals, as ye run;

And oft perfumes herself with myrrh, like ye

And mingles with your madness, irony!"

THE BEACONS

RUBENS, oblivious garden of indolence,

Pillow of cool flesh where no man dreams of love,

Where life flows forth in troubled opulence,

As airs in heaven and seas in ocean move,

LEONARD DA VINCI, sombre and fathomless glass,

Where lovely angels with calm lips that smile,

Heavy with mystery, in the shadow pass,

Among the ice and pines that guard some isle.

REMBRANDT, sad hospital that a murmuring fills,

Where one tall crucifix hangs on the walls,

Where every tear-drowned prayer some woe distils,

And one cold, wintry ray obliquely falls.

Strong MICHELANGELO, a vague far place

Where mingle Christs with pagan Hercules;

Thin phantoms of the great through twilight pace,

And tear their shroud with clenched hands void of ease.

The fighter's anger, the faun's impudence,

Thou makest of all these a lovely thing;

Proud heart, sick body, mind's magnificence:

PUGET, the convict's melancholy king.

WATTEAU, the carnival of illustrious hearts,

Fluttering like moths upon the wings of chance;

Bright lustres light the silk that flames and darts,

And pour down folly on the whirling dance.

GOYA, a nightmare full of things unknown;

The fœtus witches broil on Sabbath night;

Old women at the mirror; children lone

Who tempt old demons with their limbs delight.

DELACROIX, lake of blood ill angels haunt,

Where ever-green, o'ershadowing woods arise;

Under the surly heaven strange fanfares chaunt

And pass, like one of Weber's strangled sighs.

And malediction, blasphemy and groan,

Ecstasies, cries, Te Deums, and tears of brine,

Are echoes through a thousand labyrinths flown;

For mortal hearts an opiate divine;

A shout cried by a thousand sentinels,

An order from a thousand bugles tossed,

A beacon o'er a thousand citadels,

A call to huntsmen in deep woodlands lost.

It is the mightiest witness that could rise

To prove our dignity, O Lord, to Thee;

This sob that rolls from age to age, and dies

Upon the verge of Thy Eternity!

THE SADNESS OF THE MOON

The Moon more indolently dreams to-night

Than a fair woman on her couch at rest.

Caressing, with a hand distraught and light,

Before she sleeps, the contour of her breast.

Upon her silken avalanche of down,

Dying she breathes a long and swooning sigh;

And watches the white visions past her flown,

Which rise like blossoms to the azure sky.

And when, at times, wrapped in her languor deep,

Earthward she lets a furtive tear-drop flow,

Some pious poet, enemy of sleep,

Takes in his hollow hand the tear of snow

Whence gleams of iris and of opal start,

And hides it from the Sun, deep in his heart.

EXOTIC PERFUME

When with closed eyes in autumn's eves of gold

I breathe the burning odours of your breast,

Before my eyes the hills of happy rest

Bathed in the sun's monotonous fires, unfold.

Islands of Lethe where exotic boughs

Bend with their burden of strange fruit bowed down.

Where men are upright, maids have never grown

Unkind, but bear a light upon their brows.

Led by that perfume to these lands of ease,

I see a port where many ships have flown

With sails outwearied of the wandering seas;

While the faint odours from green tamarisks blown,

Float to my soul and in my senses throng,

And mingle vaguely with the sailor's song.

BEAUTY

I am as lovely as a dream in stone,

And this my heart where each finds death in turn,

Inspires the poet with a love as lone

As clay eternal and as taciturn.

Swan-white of heart, a sphinx no mortal knows,

My throne is in the heaven's azure deep;

I hate all movements that disturb my pose,

I smile not ever, neither do I weep.

Before my monumental attitudes,

That breathe a soul into the plastic arts,

My poets pray in austere studious moods,

For I, to fold enchantment round their hearts,

Have pools of light where beauty flames and dies,

The placid mirrors of my luminous eyes.

THE BALCONY

Mother of memories, mistress of mistresses,

O thou, my pleasure, thou, all my desire,

Thou shalt recall the beauty of caresses,

The charm of evenings by the gentle fire,

Mother of memories, mistress of mistresses!

The eves illumined by the burning coal,

The balcony where veiled rose-vapour clings —

How soft your breast was then, how sweet your soul!

Ah, and we said imperishable things,

Those eves illumined by the burning coal.

Lovely the suns were in those twilights warm,

And space profound, and strong life's pulsing flood,

In bending o'er you, queen of every charm,

I thought I breathed the perfume in your blood.

The suns were beauteous in those twilights warm.

The film of night flowed round and over us,

And my eyes in the dark did your eyes meet;

I drank your breath, ah! sweet and poisonous,

And in my hands fraternal slept your feet —

Night, like a film, flowed round and over us.

I can recall those happy days forgot,

And see, with head bowed on your knees, my past.

Your languid beauties now would move me not

Did not your gentle heart and body cast

The old spell of those happy days forgot.

Can vows and perfumes, kisses infinite,

Be reborn from the gulf we cannot sound;

As rise to heaven suns once again made bright

After being plunged in deep seas and profound?

Ah, vows and perfumes, kisses infinite!

THE SICK MUSE

Poor Muse, alas, what ails thee, then, to-day?

Thy hollow eyes with midnight visions burn,

Upon thy brow in alternation play,

Folly and Horror, cold and taciturn.

Have the green lemure and the goblin red,

Poured on thee love and terror from their urn?

Or with despotic hand the nightmare dread

Deep plunged thee in some fabulous Minturne?

Would that thy breast where so deep thoughts arise,

Breathed forth a healthful perfume with thy sighs;

Would that thy Christian blood ran wave by wave

In rhythmic sounds the antique numbers gave,

When Phœbus shared his alternating reign

With mighty Pan, lord of the ripening grain.

THE VENAL MUSE

Muse of my heart, lover of palaces,

When January comes with wind and sleet,

During the snowy eve's long wearinesses,

Will there be fire to warm thy violet feet?

Wilt thou reanimate thy marble shoulders

In the moon-beams that through the window fly?

Or when thy purse dries up, thy palace moulders,

Reap the far star-gold of the vaulted sky?

For thou, to keep thy body to thy soul,

Must swing a censer, wear a holy stole,

And chaunt Te Deums with unbelief between.

Or, like a starving mountebank, expose

Thy beauty and thy tear-drowned smile to those

Who wait thy jeste to drive away thy spleen.

THE EVIL MONK

The ancient cloisters on their lofty walls

Had holy Truth in painted frescoes shown,

And, seeing these, the pious in those halls

Felt their cold, lone austereness less alone.

At that time when Christ's seed flowered all around,

More than one monk, forgotten in his hour,

Taking for studio the burial-ground,

Glorified Death with simple faith and power.

And my soul is a sepulchre where I,

Ill cenobite, have spent eternity:

On the vile cloister walls no pictures rise.

O when may I cast off this weariness,

And make the pageant of my old distress

For these hands labour, pleasure for these eyes?

THE TEMPTATION

The Demon, in my chamber high.

This morning came to visit me,

And, thinking he would find some fault,

He whispered: "I would know of thee

Among the many lovely things

That make the magic of her face,

Among the beauties, black and rose,

That make her body's charm and grace,

Which is most fair?" Thou didst reply

To the Abhorred, O soul of mine:

"No single beauty is the best

When she is all one flower divine.

When all things charm me I ignore

Which one alone brings most delight;

She shines before me like the dawn,

And she consoles me like the night.

The harmony is far too great,

That governs all her body fair,

For impotence to analyse

And say which note is sweetest there.

O mystic metamorphosis!

My senses into one sense flow —

Her voice makes perfume when she speaks,

Her breath is music faint and low!"

THE IRREPARABLE

I

Can we suppress the old Remorse

Who bends our heart beneath his stroke,

Who feeds, as worms feed on the corse,

Or as the acorn on the oak?

Can we suppress the old Remorse!

Ah, in what philtre, wine, or spell,

May we drown this our ancient foe,

Destructive glutton, gorging well,

Patient as the ants, and slow?

What wine, what philtre, or what spell?

Tell it, enchantress, if you can,

Tell me, with anguish overcast,

Wounded, as a dying man,

Beneath the swift hoofs hurrying past.

Tell it, enchantress, if you can,

To him the wolf already tears

Who sees the carrion pinions wave,

This broken warrior who despairs

To have a cross above his grave —

This wretch the wolf already tears.

Can one illume a leaden sky,

Or tear apart the shadowy veil

Thicker than pitch, no star on high,

Not one funereal glimmer pale

Can one illume a leaden sky?

Hope lit the windows of the Inn,

But now that shining flame is dead;

And how shall martyred pilgrims win

Along the moonless road they tread?

Satan has darkened all the Inn!

Witch, do you love accursèd hearts?

Say, do you know the reprobate?

Know you Remorse, whose venomed darts

Make souls the targets for their hate?

Witch, do you know accursèd hearts?

The Might-have-been with tooth accursed

Gnaws at the piteous souls of men,

The deep foundations suffer first,

And all the structure crumbles then

Beneath the bitter tooth accursed.

II

Often, when seated at the play,

And sonorous music lights the stage,

I see the frail hand of a Fay

With magic dawn illume the rage

Of the dark sky. Oft at the play

A being made of gauze and fire

Casts to the earth a Demon great.

And my heart, whence all hopes expire,

Is like a stage where I await,

In vain, the Fay with wings of fire!

A FORMER LIFE

Long since, I lived beneath vast porticoes,

By many ocean-sunsets tinged and fired,

Where mighty pillars, in majestic rows,

Seemed like basaltic caves when day expired.

The rolling surge that mirrored all the skies

Mingled its music, turbulent and rich,

Solemn and mystic, with the colours which

The setting sun reflected in my eyes.

And there I lived amid voluptuous calms,

In splendours of blue sky and wandering wave,

Tended by many a naked, perfumed slave,

Who fanned my languid brow with waving palms.

They were my slaves – the only care they had

To know what secret grief had made me sad.

DON JUAN IN HADES

When Juan sought the subterranean flood.

And paid his obolus on the Stygian shore.

Charon, the proud and sombre beggar, stood

With one strong, vengeful hand on either oar.

With open robes and bodies agonised,

Lost women writhed beneath that darkling sky;

There were sounds as of victims sacrificed:

Behind him all the dark was one long cry.

And Sganarelle, with laughter, claimed his pledge;

Don Luis, with trembling finger in the air,

Showed to the souls who wandered in the sedge

The evil son who scorned his hoary hair.

Shivering with woe, chaste Elvira the while,

Near him untrue to all but her till now,

Seemed to beseech him for one farewell smile

Lit with the sweetness of the first soft vow.

And clad in armour, a tall man of stone

Held firm the helm, and clove the gloomy flood;

But, staring at the vessel's track alone,

Bent on his sword the unmoved hero stood.

THE LIVING FLAME

They pass before me, these Eyes full of light,

Eyes made magnetic by some angel wise;

The holy brothers pass before my sight,

And cast their diamond fires in my dim eyes.

They keep me from all sin and error grave,

They set me in the path whence Beauty came;

They are my servants, and I am their slave,

And all my soul obeys the living flame.

Beautiful Eyes that gleam with mystic light

As candles lighted at full noon; the sun

Dims not your flame phantastical and bright.

You sing the dawn; they celebrate life done;

Marching you chaunt my soul's awakening hymn,

Stars that no sun has ever made grow dim!

CORRESPONDENCES

In Nature's temple living pillars rise,

And words are murmured none have understood.

And man must wander through a tangled wood

Of symbols watching him with friendly eyes.

As long-drawn echoes heard far-off and dim

Mingle to one deep sound and fade away;

Vast as the night and brilliant as the day,

Colour and sound and perfume speak to him.

Some perfumes are as fragrant as a child,

Sweet as the sound of hautboys, meadow-green;

Others, corrupted, rich, exultant, wild,

Have all the expansion of things infinite:

As amber, incense, musk, and benzoin,

Which sing the sense's and the soul's delight.

THE FLASK

There are some powerful odours that can pass

Out of the stoppered flagon; even glass

To them is porous. Oft when some old box

Brought from the East is opened and the locks

And hinges creak and cry; or in a press

In some deserted house, where the sharp stress

Of odours old and dusty fills the brain;

An ancient flask is brought to light again,

And forth the ghosts of long-dead odours creep.

There, softly trembling in the shadows, sleep

A thousand thoughts, funereal chrysalides,

Phantoms of old the folding darkness hides,

Who make faint flutterings as their wings unfold,

Rose-washed and azure-tinted, shot with gold.

A memory that brings languor flutters here:

The fainting eyelids droop, and giddy Fear

Thrusts with both hands the soul towards the pit

Where, like a Lazarus from his winding-sheet,

Arises from the gulf of sleep a ghost

Of an old passion, long since loved and lost.

So I, when vanished from man's memory

Deep in some dark and sombre chest I lie.

An empty flagon they have cast aside,

Broken and soiled, the dust upon my pride,

Will be your shroud, beloved pestilence!

The witness of your might and virulence,

Sweet poison mixed by angels; bitter cup

Of life and death my heart has drunken up!

REVERSIBILITY

Angel of gaiety, have you tasted grief?

Shame and remorse and sobs and weary spite,

And the vague terrors of the fearful night

That crush the heart up like a crumpled leaf?

Angel of gaiety, have you tasted grief?

Angel of kindness, have you tasted hate?

With hands clenched in the shade and tears of gall,

When Vengeance beats her hellish battle-call,

And makes herself the captain of our fate,

Angel of kindness, have you tasted hate?

Angel of health, did ever you know pain,

Which like an exile trails his tired footfalls

The cold length of the white infirmary walls,

With lips compressed, seeking the sun in vain?

Angel of health, did ever you know pain?

Angel of beauty, do you wrinkles know?

Know you the fear of age, the torment vile

Of reading secret horror in the smile

Of eyes your eyes have loved since long ago?

Angel of beauty, do you wrinkles know?

Angel of happiness, and joy, and light,

Old David would have asked for youth afresh

From the pure touch of your enchanted flesh;

I but implore your prayers to aid my plight,

Angel of happiness, and joy, and light.

THE EYES OF BEAUTY

You are a sky of autumn, pale and rose;

But all the sea of sadness in my blood

Surges, and ebbing, leaves my lips morose,

Salt with the memory of the bitter flood.

In vain your hand glides my faint bosom o'er,

That which you seek, beloved, is desecrate

By woman's tooth and talon; ah, no more

Seek in me for a heart which those dogs ate.

It is a ruin where the jackals rest,

And rend and tear and glut themselves and slay —

A perfume swims about your naked breast!

Beauty, hard scourge of spirits, have your way!

With flame-like eyes that at bright feasts have flared

Burn up these tatters that the beasts have spared!

SONNET OF AUTUMN

They say to me, thy clear and crystal eyes:

"Why dost thou love me so, strange lover mine?"

Be sweet, be still! My heart and soul despise

All save that antique brute-like faith of thine;

And will not bare the secret of their shame

To thee whose hand soothes me to slumbers long,

Nor their black legend write for thee in flame!

Passion I hate, a spirit does me wrong.

Let us love gently. Love, from his retreat,

Ambushed and shadowy, bends his fatal bow,

And I too well his ancient arrows know:

Crime, horror, folly. O pale marguerite,

Thou art as I, a bright sun fallen low,

O my so white, my so cold Marguerite.

THE REMORSE OF THE DEAD

O shadowy Beauty mine, when thou shalt sleep

In the deep heart of a black marble tomb;

When thou for mansion and for bower shalt keep

Only one rainy cave of hollow gloom;

And when the stone upon thy trembling breast,

And on thy straight sweet body's supple grace,

Crushes thy will and