Collected Poetical Works of Charles Baudelaire

by Charles Baudelaire

  I’ll watch the singing, babbling human bands;

  And see clock-towers like spars against the sky,

  And heavens that bring thoughts of eternity;

  And softly, through the mist, will watch the birth

  Of stars in heaven and lamplight on the earth;

  The threads of smoke that rise above the town;

  The moon that pours her pale enchantment down.

  Seasons will pass till Autumn fades the rose;

  And when comes Winter with his weary snows,

  I’ll shut the doors and window-casements tight,

  And build my faery palace in the night.

  Then I will dream of blue horizons deep;

  Of gardens where the marble fountains weep;

  Of kisses, and of ever-singing birds —

  A sinless Idyll built of innocent words.

  And Trouble, knocking at my window-pane

  And at my closet door, shall knock in vain;

  I will not heed him with his stealthy tread,

  Nor from my reverie uplift my head;

  For I will plunge deep in the pleasure still

  Of summoning the spring-time with my will,

  Drawing the sun out of my heart, and there

  With burning thoughts making a summer air.

  THE VOYAGE.

  The world is equal to the child’s desire

  Who plays with pictures by his nursery fire —

  How vast the world by lamplight seems! How small

  When memory’s eyes look back, remembering all! —

  One morning we set forth with thoughts aflame,

  Or heart o’erladen with desire or shame;

  And cradle, to the song of surge and breeze,

  Our own infinity on the finite seas.

  Some flee the memory of their childhood’s home;

  And others flee their fatherland; and some,

  Star-gazers drowned within a woman’s eyes,

  Flee from the tyrant Circe’s witcheries;

  And, lest they still be changed to beasts, take flight

  For the embrasured heavens, and space, and light,

  Till one by one the stains her kisses made

  In biting cold and burning sunlight fade.

  But the true voyagers are they who part

  From all they love because a wandering heart

  Drives them to fly the Fate they cannot fly;

  Whose call is ever “On!” — they know not why.

  Their thoughts are like the clouds that veil a star;

  They dream of change as warriors dream of war;

  And strange wild wishes never twice the same:

  Desires no mortal man can give a name.

  II.

  We are like whirling tops and rolling balls —

  For even when the sleepy night-time falls,

  Old Curiosity still thrusts us on,

  Like the cruel Angel who goads forth the sun.

  The end of fate fades ever through the air,

  And, being nowhere, may be anywhere

  Where a man runs, hope waking in his breast,

  For ever like a madman, seeking rest.

  Our souls are wandering ships outwearied;

  And one upon the bridge asks: “What’s ahead?”

  The topman’s voice with an exultant sound

  Cries: “Love and Glory!” — then we run aground.

  Each isle the pilot signals when ’tis late,

  Is El Dorado, promised us by fate —

  Imagination, spite of her belief,

  Finds, in the light of dawn, a barren reef.

  Oh the poor seeker after lands that flee!

  Shall we not bind and cast into the sea

  This drunken sailor whose ecstatic mood

  Makes bitterer still the water’s weary flood?

  Such is an old tramp wandering in the mire,

  Dreaming the paradise of his own desire,

  Discovering cities of enchanted sleep

  Where’er the light shines on a rubbish heap.

  III.

  Strange voyagers, what tales of noble deeds

  Deep in your dim sea-weary eyes one reads!

  Open the casket where your memories are,

  And show each jewel, fashioned from a star;

  For I would travel without sail or wind,

  And so, to lift the sorrow from my mind,

  Let your long memories of sea-days far fled

  Pass o’er my spirit like a sail outspread.

  What have you seen?

  IV.

  “We have seen waves and stars,

  And lost sea-beaches, and known many wars,

  And notwithstanding war and hope and fear,

  We were as weary there as we are here.

  “The lights that on the violet sea poured down,

  The suns that set behind some far-off town,

  Lit in our hearts the unquiet wish to fly

  Deep in the glimmering distance of the sky;

  “The loveliest countries that rich cities bless,

  Never contained the strange wild loveliness

  By fate and chance shaped from the floating cloud —

  And we were always sorrowful and proud!

  “Desire from joy gains strength in weightier measure.

  Desire, old tree who draw’st thy sap from pleasure,

  Though thy bark thickens as the years pass by,

  Thine arduous branches rise towards the sky;

  “And wilt thou still grow taller, tree more fair

  Than the tall cypress?

  — Thus have we, with care,

  Gathered some flowers to please your eager mood,

  Brothers who dream that distant things are good!

  “We have seen many a jewel-glimmering throne;

  And bowed to Idols when wild horns were blown

  In palaces whose faery pomp and gleam

  To your rich men would be a ruinous dream;

  “And robes that were a madness to the eyes;

  Women whose teeth and nails were stained with dyes;

  Wise jugglers round whose neck the serpent winds—”

  V.

  And then, and then what more?

  VI.

  “O childish minds!

  “Forget not that which we found everywhere,

  From top to bottom of the fatal stair,

  Above, beneath, around us and within,

  The weary pageant of immortal sin.

  “We have seen woman, stupid slave and proud,

  Before her own frail, foolish beauty bowed;

  And man, a greedy, cruel, lascivious fool,

  Slave of the slave, a ripple in a pool;

  “The martyrs groan, the headsman’s merry mood;

  And banquets seasoned and perfumed with blood;

  Poison, that gives the tyrant’s power the slip;

  And nations amorous of the brutal whip;

  “Many religions not unlike our own,

  All in full flight for heaven’s resplendent throne;

  And Sanctity, seeking delight in pain,

  Like a sick man of his own sickness vain;

  “And mad mortality, drunk with its own power,

  As foolish now as in a bygone hour,

  Shouting, in presence of the tortured Christ:

  ‘I curse thee, mine own Image sacrificed.’

  “And silly monks in love with Lunacy,

  Fleeing the troops herded by destiny,

  Who seek for peace in opiate slumber furled —

  Such is the pageant of the rolling world!”

  VII.

  O bitter knowledge that the wanderers gain!

  The world says our own age is little and vain;

  For ever, yesterday, to-day, to-morrow,

  ’Tis horror’s oasis in the sands of sorrow.

  Must we depart? If you can rest, remain;

  Part, if you must. Some fly, some cower in vain,

  Hoping that Tim
e, the grim and eager foe,

  Will pass them by; and some run to and fro

  Like the Apostles or the Wandering Jew;

  Go where they will, the Slayer goes there too!

  And there are some, and these are of the wise,

  Who die as soon as birth has lit their eyes.

  But when at length the Slayer treads us low,

  We will have hope and cry, “’Tis time to go!”

  As when of old we parted for Cathay

  With wind-blown hair and eyes upon the bay.

  We will embark upon the Shadowy Sea,

  Like youthful wanderers for the first time free —

  Hear you the lovely and funereal voice

  That sings: O come all ye whose wandering joys

  Are set upon the scented Lotus flower,

  For here we sell the fruit’s miraculous boon;

  Come ye and drink the sweet and sleepy power

  Of the enchanted, endless afternoon.

  VIII.

  O Death, old Captain, it is time, put forth!

  We have grown weary of the gloomy north;

  Though sea and sky are black as ink, lift sail!

  Our hearts are full of light and will not fail.

  O pour thy sleepy poison in the cup!

  The fire within the heart so burns us up

  That we would wander Hell and Heaven through,

  Deep in the Unknown seeking something new!

  LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE

  THE STRANGER.

  Tell me, enigmatic man, whom do you love best? Your father, your mother, your sister, or your brother?

  “I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother.”

  Your friends, then?

  “You use a word that until now has had no meaning for me.”

  Your country?

  “I am ignorant of the latitude in which it is situated.”

  Then Beauty?

  “Her I would love willingly, goddess and immortal.”

  Gold?

  “I hate it as you hate your God.”

  What, then, extraordinary stranger, do you love?

  “I love the clouds — the clouds that pass — yonder — the marvellous clouds.”

  EVERY MAN HIS CHIMÆRA.

  Beneath a broad grey sky, upon a vast and dusty plain devoid of grass, and where not even a nettle or a thistle was to be seen, I met several men who walked bowed down to the ground.

  Each one carried upon his back an enormous Chimæra as heavy as a sack of flour or coal, or as the equipment of a Roman foot-soldier.

  But the monstrous beast was not a dead weight, rather she enveloped and oppressed the men with her powerful and elastic muscles, and clawed with her two vast talons at the breast of her mount. Her fabulous head reposed upon the brow of the man like one of those horrible casques by which ancient warriors hoped to add to the terrors of the enemy.

  I questioned one of the men, asking him why they went so. He replied that he knew nothing, neither he nor the others, but that evidently they went somewhere, since they were urged on by an unconquerable desire to walk.

  Very curiously, none of the wayfarers seemed to be irritated by the ferocious beast hanging at his neck and cleaving to his back: one had said that he considered it as a part of himself. These grave and weary faces bore witness to no despair. Beneath the splenetic cupola of the heavens, their feet trudging through the dust of an earth as desolate as the sky, they journeyed onwards with the resigned faces of men condemned to hope for ever. So the train passed me and faded into the atmosphere of the horizon at the place where the planet unveils herself to the curiosity of the human eye.

  During several moments I obstinately endeavoured to comprehend this mystery; but irresistible Indifference soon threw herself upon me, nor was I more heavily dejected thereby than they by their crushing Chimæras.

  VENUS AND THE FOOL.

  How admirable the day! The vast park swoons beneath the burning eye of the sun, as youth beneath the lordship of love.

  There is no rumour of the universal ecstasy of all things. The waters themselves are as though drifting into sleep. Very different from the festivals of humanity, here is a silent revel.

  It seems as though an ever-waning light makes all objects glimmer more and more, as though the excited flowers burn with a desire to rival the blue of the sky by the vividness of their colours; as though the heat, making perfumes visible, drives them in vapour towards their star.

  Yet, in the midst of this universal joy, I have perceived one afflicted thing.

  At the feet of a colossal Venus, one of those motley fools, those willing clowns whose business it is to bring laughter upon kings when weariness or remorse possesses them, lies wrapped in his gaudy and ridiculous garments, coined with his cap and bells, huddled against the pedestal, and raises towards the goddess his eyes filled with tears.

  And his eyes say: “I am the last and most alone of all mortals, inferior to the meanest of animals in that I am denied either love or friendship. Yet I am made, even I, for the understanding and enjoyment of immortal Beauty. O Goddess, have pity upon my sadness and my frenzy.”

  The implacable Venus gazed into I know not what distances with her marble eyes.

  INTOXICATION.

  One must be for ever drunken: that is the sole question of importance. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time that bruises your shoulders and bends you to the earth, you must be drunken without cease. But how? With wine, with poetry, with virtue, with what you please. But be drunken. And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace, on the green grass by a moat, or in the dull loneliness of your chamber, you should waken up, your intoxication already lessened or gone, ask of the wind, of the wave, of the star, of the bird, of the timepiece; ask of all that flees, all that sighs, all that revolves, all that sings, all that speaks, ask of these the hour; and wind and wave and star and bird and timepiece will answer you: “It is the hour to be drunken! Lest you be the martyred slaves of Time, intoxicate yourselves, be drunken without cease! With wine, with poetry, with virtue, or with what you will.”

  THE GIFTS OF THE MOON.

  The Moon, who is caprice itself, looked in at the window as you slept in your cradle, and said to herself: “I am well pleased with this child.”

  And she softly descended her stairway of clouds and passed through the window-pane without noise. She bent over you with the supple tenderness of a mother and laid her colours upon your face. Therefrom your eyes have remained green and your cheeks extraordinarily pale. From contemplation of your visitor your eyes are so strangely wide; and she so tenderly wounded you upon the breast that you have ever kept a certain readiness to tears.

  In the amplitude of her joy, the Moon filled all your chamber as with a phosphorescent air, a luminous poison; and all this living radiance thought and said: “You shall be for ever under the influence of my kiss. You shall love all that loves me and that I love: clouds, and silence, and night; the vast green sea; the unformed and multitudinous waters; the place where you are not; the lover you will never know; monstrous flowers, and perfumes that bring madness; cats that stretch themselves swooning upon the piano and lament with the sweet, hoarse voices of women.

  “And you shall be loved of my lovers, courted of my courtesans. You shall be the Queen of men with green eyes, whose breasts also I have wounded in my nocturnal caress: men that love the sea, the immense green ungovernable sea; the unformed and multitudinous waters; the place where they are not; the woman they will never know; sinister flowers that seem to bear the incense of some unknown religion; perfumes that trouble the will; and all savage and voluptuous animals, images of their own folly.”

  And that is why I am couched at your feet, O spoiled child, beloved and accursed, seeking in all your being the reflection of that august divinity, that prophetic godmother, that poisonous nurse of all lunatics.

  THE INVITATION TO THE VOYAGE.

  It is a superb land, a country of Cockaigne, as they say, th
at I dream of visiting with an old friend. A strange land, drowned in our northern fogs, that one might call the East of the West, the China of Europe; a land patiently and luxuriously decorated with the wise, delicate vegetations of a warm and capricious phantasy.

  A true land of Cockaigne, where all is beautiful, rich, tranquil, and honest; where luxury is pleased to mirror itself in order; where life is opulent, and sweet to breathe; from whence disorder, turbulence, and the unforeseen are excluded; where happiness is married to silence; where even the food is poetic, rich and exciting at the same time; where all things, my beloved, are like you.

  Do you know that feverish malady that seizes hold of us in our cold miseries; that nostalgia of a land unknown; that anguish of curiosity? It is a land which resembles you, where all is beautiful, rich, tranquil and honest, where phantasy has built and decorated an occidental China, where life is sweet to breathe, and happiness married to silence. It is there that one would live; there that one would die.

  Yes, it is there that one must go to breathe, to dream, and to lengthen one’s hours by an infinity of sensations. A musician has written the “Invitation to the Waltz”; where is he who will write the “Invitation to the Voyage,” that one may offer it to his beloved, to the sister of his election?

  Yes, it is in this atmosphere that it would be good to live, — yonder, where slower hours contain more thoughts, where the clocks strike the hours of happiness with a more profound and significant solemnity.

  Upon the shining panels, or upon skins gilded with a sombre opulence, beatified paintings have a discreet life, as calm and profound as the souls of the artists who created them.

  The setting suns that colour the rooms and salons with so rich a light, shine through veils of rich tapestry, or through high leaden-worked windows of many compartments. The furniture is massive, curious, and bizarre, armed with locks and secrets, like profound and refined souls. The mirrors, the metals, the ail ver work and the china, play a mute and mysterious symphony for the eyes; and from all things, from the corners, from the chinks in the drawers, from the folds of drapery, a singular perfume escapes, a Sumatran revenez-y, which is like the soul of the apartment.

  A true country of Cockaigne, I have said; where all is rich, correct and shining, like a beautiful conscience, or a splendid set of silver, or a medley of jewels. The treasures of the world flow there, as in the house of a laborious man who has well merited the entire world. A singular land, as superior to others as Art is superior to Nature; where Nature is made over again by dream; where she is corrected, embellished, refashioned.