Charles Baudelaire 1821-1867
The Ghost
Like an angel, feral eyed,
Piercing to your sleeping side,
Gliding down with oily flight
In the inwards of the night,
I shall give you, my dark one,
Kisses frozen as the moon,
Caresses such as snakes give
Slithering round the open grave.
When the livid daylights waken
You will find my place forsaken,
Icy till the evening's here:
As others might with tenderness
Rule your life and your youngness
I shall rule you with a fear.
Spleen I
I'm like the king of a rain-country, rich
but sterile, young but with an old wolf's itch,
one who escapes his tutor's monologues,
and kills the day in boredom with his dogs;
nothing cheers him, darts, tennis, falconry,
his people dying by the balcony;
the bawdry of the pet hermaphrodite
no longer gets him through a single night;
his bed of fleur-de-lys becomes a tomb;
even the ladies of the court, for whom
all kings are beautiful, cannot put on
shameful enough dresses for this skeleton;
the scholar who makes his gold cannot invent
washes to cleanse the poisoned element;
even in baths of blood, Rome's legacy,
our tyrant's solace in senility,
he cannot warm up his shot corpse, whose food
is syrup-green. Lethean ooze, not blood.
Spleen II
When the low heavy sky weighs like a lid,
Upon the spirit aching for the light,
And all the wide horizon's line is hid,
By a black day sadder than any night;
When the changed earth is but a dungeon dank,
Where batlike Hope goes blindly fluttering,
And, striking wall and roof and mouldered plank,
Bruises his tender head and timid wing;
When like grim prison bars stretch down the thin,
Straight, rigid pillars of the endless rain,
And the dumb throngs of infamous spiders spin,
Their meshes in the caverns of the brain,
Suddenly, bells leap forth into the air,
Hurling a hideous uproar to the sky,
As 'twere a band of homeless spirits who fare,
Through the strange heavens, wailing stubbornly.
And hearses, without drum or instrument,
File slowly through my soul; crushed, sorrowful,
Weeps Hope, and Grief, fierce and omnipotent,
Plants his black banner on my drooping skull.
To the Reader
Folly, error, sin and parsimony
Preoccupy our spirits and work on our bodies
Feeding our consciences
Like beggars nourishing their lice.
Our sins are stubborn, our repentance weak
We make ourselves pay handsomely for each confession
And happily rejoin the muddy path
Believing our base tears can wash away the stains.
On the pillow of evil, Satan Trismegistus
Cradles at length our enchanted soul
And the rich metal of our will
Is boiled away by that artful chemist.
It is the Devil who holds the threads that move us!
It is in hateful objects that we find peace;
Each day, one step further towards Hell
Without horror, through the stinking shadows.
Like a poor sinner who kisses and consumes
The tortured breast of an ancient whore,
We steal in passing a clandestine joy
We squeeze as strongly as a withered fruit.
Serried, seething, like a million ants
In our brains riots a Demon horde
And, when we breathe, Death in our lungs
Descends, a sightless river, with deaf moans.
If rape and poison, arson and the knife
Have not yet woven their pleasant designs
On the dull canvas of our lowly destinies
It is because our soul, alas, is not yet bold enough!
But among the jackals, panthers and chimerae
The monkeys, scorpions, vultures and the snakes
The monsters yelping, shouting, grunting, crawling
In the ill-famed menagerie of all our vices
Is one more ugly, evil, fouler than the rest
Making no grand gestures or great cries
Yet it would gladly lay waste to the earth
And with a yawn would swallow up the world
And it is Boredom! Eye laden with involuntary tears,
Dreaming of scaffolds, pulls upon its pipe
You know it, reader, this delicate monster
- Hypocrite reader, - my likeness, - my brother!
The Poetry
Room
The Main Hall
