Collected Poetical Works of Charles Baudelaire

by Charles Baudelaire

  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.

  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

&nbs
p; 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.

  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 nightma
re 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,