Collected Poetical Works of Charles Baudelaire

by Charles Baudelaire

  “I can give thee that which gets all, which is worth all, which takes the place of all.” And he tapped his monstrous paunch, whence came a sonorous echo as the commentary to his obscene speech. I turned away with disgust and replied: “I need no man’s misery to bring me happiness; nor will I have the sad wealth of all the misfortunes pictured upon thy skin as upon a tapestry.”

  As for the She-devil, I should lie if I denied that at first I found in her a certain strange charm, which to define I can but compare to the charm of certain beautiful women past their first youth, who yet seem to age no more, whose beauty keeps something of the penetrating magic of ruins. She had an air at once imperious and sordid, and her eyes, though heavy, held a certain power of fascination. I was struck most by her voice, wherein I found the remembrance of the most delicious contralti, as well as a little of the hoarseness of a throat continually laved with brandy.

  “Wouldst thou know my power?” said the charming and paradoxical voice of the false goddess. “Then listen.” And she put to her mouth a gigantic trumpet, enribboned, like a mirliton, with the titles of all the newspapers in the world; and through this trumpet she cried my name so that it rolled through space with the sound of a hundred thousand thunders, and came re-echoing back to me from the farthest planet.

  “Devil!” cried I, half tempted, “that at least is worth something.” But it vaguely struck me, upon examining the seductive virago more attentively, that I had seen her clinking glasses with certain drolls of my acquaintance, and her blare of brass carried to my ears I know not what memory of a fanfare prostituted.

  So I replied, with all disdain: “Get thee hence! I know better than wed the light o’ love of them that I will not name.”

  Truly, I had the right to be proud of a so courageous renunciation. But unfortunately I awoke, and all my courage left me. “In truth,” I said, “I must have been very deeply asleep indeed to have had such scruples. Ah, if they, would but return while I am awake, I would not be so delicate.”

  So I invoked the three in a loud voice, offering to dishonour myself as often as necessary to obtain their favours; but I had without doubt too deeply offended them, for they have never returned.

  ‘THE FLOWERS OF EVIL’ (Translated by F. P. Sturm)

  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,

  Falls 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,

  Reeks 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 Antinoüs, 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 witn
ess 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.

  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 ail’s 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 Mintume?

  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 jests 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 IRRÉPARABLE

  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.