The Poems and Prose Poems of Charles Baudelaire

THE SKY

Where'er he be, on water or on land,

Under pale suns or climes that flames enfold;

One of Christ's own, or of Cythera's band,

Shadowy beggar or Crœsus rich with gold;

Citizen, peasant, student, tramp; whate'er

His little brain may be, alive or dead;

Man knows the fear of mystery everywhere,

And peeps, with trembling glances, overhead.

The heaven above? A strangling cavern wall;

The lighted ceiling of a music-hall

Where every actor treads a bloody soil —

The hermit's hope; the terror of the sot;

The sky: the black lid of the mighty pot

Where the vast human generations boil!

SPLEEN

I'm like some king in whose corrupted veins

Flows aged blood; who rules a land of rains;

Who, young in years, is old in all distress;

Who flees good counsel to find weariness

Among his dogs and playthings, who is stirred

Neither by hunting-hound nor hunting-bird;

Whose weary face emotion moves no more

E'en when his people die before his door.

His favourite Jester's most fantastic wile

Upon that sick, cruel face can raise no smile;

The courtly dames, to whom all kings are good,

Can lighten this young skeleton's dull mood

No more with shameless toilets. In his gloom

Even his lilied bed becomes a tomb.

The sage who takes his gold essays in vain

To purge away the old corrupted strain,

His baths of blood, that in the days of old

The Romans used when their hot blood grew cold,

Will never warm this dead man's bloodless pains,

For green Lethean water fills his veins.

THE OWLS

Under the overhanging yews,

The dark owls sit in solemn state.

Like stranger gods; by twos and twos

Their red eyes gleam. They meditate.

Motionless thus they sit and dream

Until that melancholy hour

When, with the sun's last fading gleam,

The nightly shades assume their power.

From their still attitude the wise

Will learn with terror to despise

All tumult, movement, and unrest;

For he who follows every shade,

Carries the memory in his breast,

Of each unhappy journey made.

BIEN LOIN D'ICI

Here is the chamber consecrate,

Wherein this maiden delicate,

And enigmatically sedate,

Fans herself while the moments creep,

Upon her cushions half-asleep,

And hears the fountains plash and weep.

Dorothy's chamber undefiled.

The winds and waters sing afar

Their song of sighing strange and wild

To lull to sleep the petted child.

From head to foot with subtle care,

Slaves have perfumed her delicate skin

With odorous oils and benzoin.

And flowers faint in a corner there.

MUSIC

Music doth oft uplift me like a sea

Towards my planet pale,

Then through dark fogs or heaven's infinity

I lift my wandering sail.

With breast advanced, drinking the winds that flee,

And through the cordage wail,

I mount the hurrying waves night hides from me

Beneath her sombre veil.

I feel the tremblings of all passions known

To ships before the breeze;

Cradled by gentle winds, or tempest-blown

I pass the abysmal seas

That are, when calm, the mirror level and fair

Of my despair!

CONTEMPLATION

Thou, O my Grief, be wise and tranquil still,

The eve is thine which even now drops down,

To carry peace or care to human will,

And in a misty veil enfolds the town.

While the vile mortals of the multitude,

By pleasure, cruel tormentor, goaded on,

Gather remorseful blossoms in light mood —

Grief, place thy hand in mine, let us be gone

Far from them. Lo, see how the vanished years,

In robes outworn lean over heaven's rim;

And from the water, smiling through her tears,

Remorse arises, and the sun grows dim;

And in the east, her long shroud trailing light,

List, O my grief, the gentle steps of Night.

TO A BROWN BEGGAR-MAID

White maiden with the russet hair,

Whose garments, through their holes, declare

That poverty is part of you,

And beauty too.

To me, a sorry bard and mean,

Your youthful beauty, frail and lean,

With summer freckles here and there,

Is sweet and fair.

Your sabots tread the roads of chance,

And not one queen of old romance

Carried her velvet shoes and lace

With half your grace.

In place of tatters far too short

Let the proud garments worn at Court

Fall down with rustling fold and pleat

About your feet;

In place of stockings, worn and old,

Let a keen dagger all of gold

Gleam in your garter for the eyes

Of roués wise;

Let ribbons carelessly untied

Reveal to us the radiant pride

Of your white bosom purer far

Than any star;

Let your white arms uncovered shine.

Polished and smooth and half divine;

And let your elfish fingers chase

With riotous grace

The purest pearls that softly glow.

The sweetest sonnets of Belleau,

Offered by gallants ere they fight

For your delight;

And many fawning rhymers who

Inscribe their first thin book to you

Will contemplate upon the stair

Your slipper fair;

And many a page who plays at cards,

And many lords and many bards,

Will watch your going forth, and burn

For your return;

And you will count before your glass

More kisses than the lily has;

And more than one Valois will sigh

When you pass by.

But meanwhile you are on the tramp,

Begging your living in the damp,

Wandering mean streets and alleys o'er,

From door to door;

And shilling bangles in a shop

Cause you with eager eyes to stop,

And I, alas, have not a son

To give to you.

Then go, with no more ornament,

Pearl, diamond, or subtle scent,

Than your own fragile naked grace

And lovely face.

THE SWAN

I

Andromache, I think of you! The stream,

The poor, sad mirror where in bygone days

Shone all the majesty of your widowed grief,

The lying Simoïs flooded by your tears,

Made all my fertile memory blossom forth

As I passed by the new-built Carrousel.

Old Paris is no more (a town, alas,

Changes more quickly than man's heart may change);

Yet in my mind I still can see the booths;

The heaps of brick and rough-hewn capitals;

The grass; the stones all over-green with moss;

The

débris

, and the square-set heaps of tiles.

There a menagerie was once outspread;

And there I saw, one morning at the hour

When toil awakes beneath the cold, clear sky,

And the road roars upon the silent air,

A swan who had escaped his cage, and walked

On the dry pavement with his webby feet,

And trailed his spotless plumage on the ground.

And near a waterless stream the piteous swan

Opened his beak, and bathing in the dust

His nervous wings, he cried (his heart the while

Filled with a vision of his own fair lake):

"O water, when then wilt thou come in rain?

Lightning, when wilt thou glitter?"

Sometimes yet

I see the hapless bird – strange, fatal myth —

Like him that Ovid writes of, lifting up

Unto the cruelly blue, ironic heavens,

With stretched, convulsive neck a thirsty face,

As though he sent reproaches up to God!

II

Paris may change; my melancholy is fixed.

New palaces, and scaffoldings, and blocks,

And suburbs old, are symbols all to me

Whose memories are as heavy as a stone.

And so, before the Louvre, to vex my soul,

The image came of my majestic swan

With his mad gestures, foolish and sublime,

As of an exile whom one great desire

Gnaws with no truce. And then I thought of you,

Andromache! torn from your hero's arms;

Beneath the hand of Pyrrhus in his pride;

Bent o'er an empty tomb in ecstasy;

Widow of Hector – wife of Helenus!

And of the negress, wan and phthisical,

Tramping the mud, and with her haggard eyes

Seeking beyond the mighty walls of fog

The absent palm-trees of proud Africa;

Of all who lose that which they never find;

Of all who drink of tears; all whom grey grief

Gives suck to as the kindly wolf gave suck;

Of meagre orphans who like blossoms fade.

And one old Memory like a crying horn

Sounds through the forest where my soul is lost…

I think of sailors on some isle forgotten;

Of captives; vanquished … and of many more.

THE SEVEN OLD MEN

O swarming city, city full of dreams,

Where in full day the spectre walks and speaks;

Mighty colossus, in your narrow veins

My story flows as flows the rising sap.

One morn, disputing with my tired soul,

And like a hero stiffening all my nerves,

I trod a suburb shaken by the jar

Of rolling wheels, where the fog magnified

The houses either side of that sad street,

So they seemed like two wharves the ebbing flood

Leaves desolate by the river-side. A mist,

Unclean and yellow, inundated space —

A scene that would have pleased an actor's soul.

Then suddenly an aged man, whose rags

Were yellow as the rainy sky, whose looks

Should have brought alms in floods upon his head,

Without the misery gleaming in his eye,

Appeared before me; and his pupils seemed

To have been washed with gall; the bitter frost

Sharpened his glance; and from his chin a beard

Sword-stiff and ragged, Judas-like stuck forth.

He was not bent but broken: his backbone

Made a so true right angle with his legs,

That, as he walked, the tapping stick which gave

The finish to the picture, made him seem

Like some infirm and stumbling quadruped

Or a three-legged Jew. Through snow and mud

He walked with troubled and uncertain gait,

As though his sabots trod upon the dead,

Indifferent and hostile to the world.

His double followed him: tatters and stick

And back and eye and beard, all were the same;

Out of the same Hell, indistinguishable,

These centenarian twins, these spectres odd,

Trod the same pace toward some end unknown.

To what fell complot was I then exposed!

Humiliated by what evil chance?

For as the minutes one by one went by

Seven times I saw this sinister old man

Repeat his image there before my eyes!

Let him who smiles at my inquietude,

Who never trembled at a fear like mine,

Know that in their decrepitude's despite

These seven old hideous monsters had the mien

Of beings immortal.

Then, I thought, must I,

Undying, contemplate the awful eighth;

Inexorable, fatal, and ironic double;

Disgusting Phoenix, father of himself

And his own son! In terror then I turned

My back upon the infernal band, and fled

To my own place, and closed my door; distraught

And like a drunkard who sees all things twice,

With feverish troubled spirit, chilly and sick,

Wounded by mystery and absurdity!

In vain my reason tried to cross the bar,

The whirling storm but drove her back again;

And my soul tossed, and tossed, an outworn wreck,

Mastless, upon a monstrous, shoreless sea.

THE LITTLE OLD WOMEN

I

Deep in the tortuous folds of ancient towns,

Where all, even horror, to enchantment turns,

I watch, obedient to my fatal mood,

For the decrepit, strange and charming beings,

The dislocated monsters that of old

Were lovely women – Laïs or Eponine!

Hunchbacked and broken, crooked though they be,

Let us still love them, for they still have souls.

They creep along wrapped in their chilly rags,

Beneath the whipping of the wicked wind,

They tremble when an omnibus rolls by,

And at their sides, a relic of the past,

A little flower-embroidered satchel hangs.

They trot about, most like to marionettes;

They drag themselves, as does a wounded beast;

Or dance unwillingly as a clapping bell

Where hangs and swings a demon without pity.

Though they be broken they have piercing eyes,

That shine like pools where water sleeps at night;

The astonished and divine eyes of a child

Who laughs at all that glitters in the world.

Have you not seen that most old women's shrouds

Are little like the shroud of a dead child?

Wise Death, in token of his happy whim,

Wraps old and young in one enfolding sheet.

And when I see a phantom, frail and wan,

Traverse the swarming picture that is Paris,

It ever seems as though the delicate thing

Trod with soft steps towards a cradle new.

And then I wonder, seeing the twisted form,

How many times must workmen change the shape

Of boxes where at length such limbs are laid?

These eyes are wells brimmed with a million tears;

Crucibles where the cooling metal pales —

Mysterious eyes that are strong charms to him

Whose life-long nurse has been austere Disaster.

II

The love-sick vestal of the old "Frasciti";

Priestess of Thalia, alas! whose name

Only the prompter knows and he is dead;

Bygone celebrities that in bygone days

The Tivoli o'ershadowed in their bloom;

All charm me; yet among these beings frail

Three, turning pain to honey-sweetness, said

To the Devotion that had lent them wings:

"Lift me, O powerful Hippogriffe, to the skies" —

One by her country to despair was driven;

One by her husband overwhelmed with grief;

One wounded by her child, Madonna-like;

Each could have made a river with her tears.

III

Oft have I followed one of these old women,

One among others, when the falling sun

Reddened the heavens with a crimson wound —

Pensive, apart, she rested on a bench

To hear the brazen music of the band,

Played by the soldiers in the public park

To pour some courage into citizens' hearts,

On golden eves when all the world revives.

Proud and erect she drank the music in,

The lively and the warlike call to arms;

Her eyes blinked like an ancient eagle's eyes;

Her forehead seemed to await the laurel crown!

IV

Thus you do wander, uncomplaining Stoics,

Through all the chaos of the living town:

Mothers with bleeding hearts, saints, courtesans,

Whose names of yore were on the lips of all;

Who were all glory and all grace, and now

None know you; and the brutish drunkard stops,

Insulting you with his derisive love;

And cowardly urchins call behind your back.

Ashamed of living, withered shadows all,

With fear-bowed backs you creep beside the walls,

And none salute you, destined to loneliness!

Refuse of Time ripe for Eternity!

But I, who watch you tenderly afar,

With unquiet eyes on your uncertain steps,

As though I were your father, I – O wonder! —

Unknown to you taste secret, hidden joy.

I see your maiden passions bud and bloom,

Sombre or luminous, and your lost days

Unroll before me while my heart enjoys

All your old vices, and my soul expands

To all the virtues that have once been yours.

Ruined! and my sisters! O congenerate hearts,

Octogenarian Eves o'er whom is stretched

God's awful claw, where will you be to-morrow?

A MADRIGAL OF SORROW

What do I care though you be wise?

Be sad, be beautiful; your tears

But add one more charm to your eyes,

As streams to valleys where they rise;

And fairer every flower appears

After the storm. I love you most

When joy has fled your brow downcast;

When your heart is in horror lost,

And o'er your present like a ghost

Floats the dark shadow of the past.

I love you when the teardrop flows,

Hotter than blood, from your large eye;

When I would hush you to repose

Your heavy pain breaks forth and grows

Into a loud and tortured cry.

And then, voluptuousness divine!

Delicious ritual and profound!

I drink in every sob like wine,

And dream that in your deep heart shine

The pearls wherein your eyes were drowned.

I know your heart, which overflows

With outworn loves long cast aside,

Still like a furnace flames and glows,

And you within your breast enclose

A damnèd soul's unbending pride;

But till your dreams without release

Reflect the leaping flames of hell;

Till in a nightmare without cease

You dream of poison to bring peace,

And love cold steel and powder well;

And tremble at each opened door,

And feel for every man distrust,

And shudder at the striking hour —

Till then you have not felt the power

Of Irresistible Disgust.

My queen, my slave, whose love is fear,

When you awaken shuddering,

Until that awful hour be here,

You cannot say at midnight drear:

"I am your equal, O my King!"

THE IDEAL

Not all the beauties in old prints vignetted,

The worthless products of an outworn age,

With slippered feet and fingers castanetted,

The thirst of hearts like this heart can assuage.

To Gavarni, the poet of chloroses,

I leave his troupes of beauties sick and wan;

I cannot find among these pale, pale roses,

The red ideal mine eyes would gaze upon.

Lady Macbeth, the lovely star of crime,

The Greek poet's dream born in a northern clime —

Ah, she could quench my dark heart's deep desiring;

Or Michelangelo's dark daughter Night,

In a strange posture dreamily admiring

Her beauty fashioned for a giant's delight!

MIST AND RAIN

Autumns and winters, springs of mire and rain,

Seasons of sleep, I sing your praises loud,

For thus I love to wrap my heart and brain

In some dim tomb beneath a vapoury shroud

In the wide plain where revels the cold wind,

Through long nights when the weathercock whirls round,

More free than in warm summer day my mind

Lifts wide her raven pinions from the ground.

Unto a heart filled with funereal things

That since old days hoar frosts have gathered on,

Naught is more sweet, O pallid, queenly springs,

Than the long pageant of your shadows wan,

Unless it be on moonless eves to weep

On some chance bed and rock our griefs to sleep.

SUNSET

Fair is the sun when first he flames above,

Flinging his joy down in a happy beam;

And happy he who can salute with love

The sunset far more glorious than a dream.

Flower, stream, and furrow! – I have seen them all

In the sun's eye swoon like one trembling heart —

Though it be late let us with speed depart

To catch at least one last ray ere it fall!

But I pursue the fading god in vain,

For conquering Night makes firm her dark domain,

Mist and gloom fall, and terrors glide between,

And graveyard odours in the shadow swim,

And my faint footsteps on the marsh's rim,

Bruise the cold snail and crawling toad unseen.

THE CORPSE

Remember, my Beloved, what thing we met

By the roadside on that sweet summer day;

There on a grassy couch with pebbles set,

A loathsome body lay.

The wanton limbs stiff-stretched into the air,

Steaming with exhalations vile and dank,

In ruthless cynic fashion had laid bare

The swollen side and flank.

On this decay the sun shone hot from heaven

As though with chemic heat to broil and burn,

And unto Nature all that she had given

A hundredfold return.

The sky smiled down upon the horror there

As on a flower that opens to the day;

So awful an infection smote the air,

Almost you swooned away.

The swarming flies hummed on the putrid side,

Whence poured the maggots in a darkling stream,

That ran along these tatters of life's pride

With a liquescent gleam.

And like a wave the maggots rose and fell,

The murmuring flies swirled round in busy strife:

It seemed as though a vague breath came to swell

And multiply with life

The hideous corpse. From all this living world

A music as of wind and water ran,

Or as of grain in rhythmic motion swirled

By the swift winnower's fan.

And then the vague forms like a dream died out,

Or like some distant scene that slowly falls

Upon the artist's canvas, that with doubt

He only half recalls.

A homeless dog behind the boulders lay

And watched us both with angry eyes forlorn,

Waiting a chance to come and take away

The morsel she had torn.

And you, even you, will be like this drear thing,

A vile infection man may not endure;

Star that I yearn to! Sun that lights my spring!

O passionate and pure!

Yes, such will you be, Queen of every grace!

When the last sacramental words are said;

And beneath grass and flowers that lovely face

Moulders among the dead.

Then, O Beloved, whisper to the worm

That crawls up to devour you with a kiss,

That I still guard in memory the dear form

Of love that comes to this!

AN ALLEGORY

Here is a woman, richly clad and fair,

Who in her wine dips her long, heavy hair;

Love's claws, and that sharp poison which is sin,

Are dulled against