Eternal alembic of antique
distress!
Baudelaire - Poems and Prose Poems
There was a considerable difference in the years of this pair;
the mother was twenty-seven, the father sixty-two, at the birth of their
only child. By his first marriage the elder Baudelaire had one son,
Claude, who, like his half-brother Charles, died of paralysis, though a
steady man of business. That great modern neurosis, called Commerce, has
its mental wrecks, too, and no one pays attention; but when a poet falls
by the wayside is the chase begun by neurologists and other soul-hunters
seeking victims. After the death of Baudelaire's father, the widow,
within a year, married the handsome, ambitious Aupick, then chef de
bataillon, lieutenant-colonel, decorated with the Legion of Honour, and
later general and ambassador to Madrid, Constantinople, and London.
Charles was a nervous, frail youth, but unlike most children of genius,
he was a scholar and won brilliant honours at school. His stepfather was
proud of him. From the Royal College of Lyons, Charles went to the Lycee
Louis-le-Grand, Paris, but was expelled in 1839, on various
discreditable charges. Troubles soon began at home. He was irascible,
vain, precocious, and given to dissipation. He quarreled with General
Aupick, and disdained his mother. But she was to blame, she has
confessed; she had quite forgotten the boy in the flush of her second
love. He could not forget, or forgive what he called her infidelity to
the memory of his father. Hamlet-like, he was inconsolable. The good
Bishop of Montpellier, who knew the family, said that Charles was a
little crazy--second marriages usually bring woe in their train. "When a
mother has such a son, she doesn't re-marry," said the young poet
Charles signed himself Baudelaire-Dufays, or sometimes Dufais. He wrote
in his journal: "My ancestors, idiots or maniacs . . . all victims of
terrible passions"; which was one of his exaggerations. His grandfather
on the paternal side was a Champenois peasant, his mother's family
presumably Norman, but not much is known of her forbears. Charles
believed himself lost from the time his half-brother was stricken. He
also believed that his instability of temperament--and he studied his
"case" as would a surgeon--was the result of his parents' disparity in
years.
After his return from the East, where he did not learn English as has
been said--his mother taught him as a boy to converse in and write the
language--he came into his little inheritance, about fifteen thousand
dollars. Two years later he was so heavily in debt that his family asked
for a guardian on the ground of incompetency. He had been swindled,
being young and green. How had he squandered his money? Not exactly on
opera-glasses, like Gerard de Nerval, but on clothes, pictures,
furniture, books. The remnant was set aside to pay his debts. Charles
would be both poet and dandy. He dressed expensively but soberly, in the
English fashion; his linen dazzling, the prevailing hue of his
habiliments black. In height he was medium, his eyes brown, searching,
luminous, the eye of a nyctalops, "eyes like ravens"; nostrils
palpitating, cleft chin, mouth expressive, sensual jaw, strong and
square. His hair was black, curly, glossy, his forehead high, square and
white. In the Deroy portrait he wears a beard; he is there what Catulle
Mendes nicknamed him: "His Excellence, Monseigneur Brummel! " Later he
was the elegiac Satan, the author of L'Imitation de N. S. le Diable; or
the Baudelaire of George Moore: "the clean-shaven face of the mock
priest, the slow cold eyes and the sharp cunning sneer of the cynical
libertine who will be tempted that he may better know the worthlessness
of temptation. " In the heyday of his blood he was perverse and
deliberate. Let us credit him with contradicting the Byronic notion that
ennui could best be cured by dissipation; in sin Baudelaire found the
saddest of all consolations. Mendes laughs at the legend of Baudelaire's
violence, of his being given to explosive phrases. Despite Gautier's
stories about the Hotel Pimodan and its club of hasheesh-eaters, M.
Mendes denies that Baudelaire was a victim of the hemp. What the
majority of mankind does not know concerning the habits of literary
workers is this prime fact: men who work hard, writing verse--and there
is no mental toil comparable to it--cannot drink, or indulge in opium,
without inevitable collapse. The old-fashioned ideas of "inspiration,"
spontaneity, easy improvisation, the sudden bolt from heaven, are
delusions still hugged by the world. To be told that Chopin filed
at his music for years, that Beethoven in his smithy forged his
thunderbolts by the sweat of his brow, that Manet toiled like a
labourer on the dock, that Baudelaire was a mechanic in his devotion
to poetic work, that Gautier was a hard-working journalist, are
disillusions for the sentimental. Minerva springing full-fledged from
Jupiter's skull to the desk of the poet is a pretty fancy; but Balsac
and Flaubert did not encourage this fancy. Work literally killed Poe, as
it killed Jules de Goncourt, Flaubert and Daudet. Maupassant went insane
because he would work and he would play the same day. Baudelaire worked
and worried. His debts haunted him his life long. His constitution was
flawed--Sainte-Beuve told him that he had worn out his nerves--from the
start, he was detraque; but that his entire life was one huge debauch is
a nightmare of the moral police in some red cotton nightcap country.
His period of mental production was not brief nor barren. He was a
student. Du Camp's charge that he was an ignorant man is disproved by
the variety and quality of his published work. His range of sympathies
was large. His mistake, in the eyes of his colleagues, was to write so
well about the seven arts. Versatility is seldom given its real
name--which is protracted labour. Baudelaire was one of the elect, an
aristocrat, who dealt with the quintessence of art; his delicate air of
a bishop, his exquisite manners, his modulated voice, aroused unusual
interest and admiration. He was a humanist of distinction; he has left a
hymn to Saint Francis in the Latin of the decadence. Baudelaire, like
Chopin, made more poignant the phrase, raised to a higher intensity the
expressiveness of art.
Women played a commanding role in his life. They always do with any poet
worthy of the name, though few have been so frank in acknowledging this
as Baudelaire. Yet he was in love more with Woman than the individual.
The legend of the beautiful creature he brought from the East resolves
itself into the dismal affair with Jeanne Duval. He met her in Paris,
after he had been in the East. She sang at a cafe concert in Paris. She
was more brown than black. She was not handsome, not intelligent, not
good; yet he idealized her, for she was the source of half his
inspiration. To her were addressed those marvellous evocations of the
Orient, of perfume, tresses, delicious dawns on strange far-away seas
and "superb Byzant," domes that devils built. Baudelaire is the poet of
perfumes; he is also the patron saint of ennui. No one has so chanted
the praise of odours. His soul swims on perfume as do other souls on
music, he has sung. As he grew older he seemed to hunt for more acrid
odours; he often presents an elaborately chased vase the carving of
which transports us, but from which the head is quickly averted. Jeanne,
whom he never loved, no matter what may be said, was a sorceress. But
she was impossible; she robbed, betrayed him; he left her a dozen times
only to return. He was a capital draughtsman with a strong nervous line
and made many pen-and-ink drawings of her. They are not prepossessing.
In her rapid decline she was not allowed to want. Madame Aupick paid her
expenses in the hospital. A sordid history. She was a veritable flower
of evil for Baudelaire. Yet poetry, like music, would be colourless,
scentless, if it sounded no dissonances. Fancy art reduced to the
beatific and banal chord of C major!
He fell in love with the celebrated Madame Sabatier, a reigning beauty,
at whose salon artistic Paris assembled. She had been christened by
Gautier Madame la Presidente, and her sumptuous beauty was portrayed by
Ricard in his La Femme au Chien. She returned Baudelaire's love. They
soon parted. Again a riddle which the published letters hardly solve.
One letter, however, does show that Baudelaire had tried to be faithful,
and failed. He could not extort from his exhausted soul the sentiment;
but he put its music on paper. His most seductive lyrics were addressed
to Madame Sabatier: "A la tres chere, a la tres-belle," a hymn saturated
with love. Music, spleen, perfumes--"colour, sound, perfumes call to
each other as deep to deep; perfumes like the flesh of children, soft as
hautboys, green as the meadows"--criminals, outcasts, the charm of
childhood, the horrors of love, pride, and rebellion, Eastern
landscapes, cats, soothing and false; cats, the true companions of
lonely poets; haunted clocks, shivering dusks, and gloomier
dawns--Paris in a hundred phases--these and many other themes this
strange-souled poet, this "Dante, pacer of the shore," of Paris has
celebrated in finely wrought verse and profound phrases. In a single
line he contrives atmosphere; the very shape of his sentence, the ring
of the syllables, arouse the deepest emotion. A master of harmonic
undertones is Baudelaire. His successors have excelled him in making
their music more fluid, more lyrical, more vapourous--many young French
poets pass through their Baudelarian green-sickness--but he alone knows
the secrets of moulding those metallic, free sonnets, which have the
resistance of bronze; and of the despairing music that flames from the
mouths of lost souls trembling on the wharves of hell. He is the supreme
master of irony and troubled voluptuousness.
Baudelaire is a masculine poet. He carved rather than sang; the plastic
arts spoke to his soul. A lover and maker of images. Like Poe, his
emotions transformed themselves into ideas. Bourget classified him as
mystic, libertine, and analyst. He was born with a wound in his soul, to
use the phrase of Pere Lacordaire. (Curiously enough, he actually
contemplated, in 1861, becoming a candidate for Lacordaire's vacant seat
in the French Academy. Sainte-Beuve dissuaded him from this folly. )
Recall Baudelaire's prayer: "Thou, O Lord, my God, grant me the grace to
produce some fine lines which will prove to myself that I am not the
last of men, that I am not inferior to those I contemn. " Individualist,
egoist, anarchist, his only thought was letters. Jules Laforgue thus
described Baudelaire: "Cat, Hindoo, Yankee, Episcopal, Alchemist. " Yes,
an alchemist who suffocated in the fumes he created. He was of Gothic
imagination, and could have said with Rolla: "Je suis venu trop tard
dans un monde trop vieux. " He had an unassuaged thirst for the absolute.
The human soul was his stage, he its interpreting orchestra.
In 1857 The Flowers of Evil was published by Poulet-Malassis, who
afterward went into bankruptcy--a warning to publishers with a taste for
fine literature. The titles contemplated were Limbes, or Lesbiennes.
Hippolyte Babou suggested the one we know. These poems were suppressed
on account of six, and poet and publisher summoned. As the municipal
government had made a particular ass of itself in the prosecution of
Gustave Flaubert and his Madame Bovary, the Baudelaire matter was
disposed of in haste. He was condemned to a fine of three hundred
francs, a fine which was never paid, as the objectionable poems were
removed. They were printed in the Belgian edition, and may be read in
the new volume, OEuvres. Posthumes.
Baudelaire was infuriated over the judgment, for he knew that his book
was dramatic in expression. He had expected, like Flaubert, to emerge
from the trial with flying colours; therefore to be classed as one who
wrote objectionable literature was a shock. "Flaubert had the Empress
back of him," he complained; which was true; the Empress Eugenie, also
the Princess Mathilde. But he worked as ever and put forth those
polished intaglios called Poems in Prose, for the form of which he had
taken a hint from Aloys Bertrand's Gaspard de la Nuit. He filled this
form with a new content; not alone pictures, but moods, are to be found
in those miniatures. Pity is their keynote, a tenderness for the abject
and lowly, a revelation of sensibility that surprised those critics who
had discerned in Baudelaire only a sculptor of evil. In one of his poems
he described a landscape of metal, of marble and water; a babel of
staircases and arcades, a palace of infinity, surrounded by the silence
of eternity. This depressing yet magical dream was utilized by Huysmans
in his A Rebours. But in the tiny landscapes of the Prose Poems there is
nothing rigid or artificial. Indeed, the poet's deliberate attitude of
artificiality is dropped. He is human. Not that the deep fundamental
note of humanity is ever absent in his poems; the eternal diapason is
there even when least overheard. Baudelaire is more human than Poe. His
range of sympathy is wider. In this he transcends him as a poet, though
his subject-matter often issues from the very dregs of life. Brother to
pitiable wanderers, there are, nevertheless, no traces of cant, no
"Russian pity" a la Dostoievsky, no humanitarian or socialistic
rhapsodies in his work. Baudelaire is an egoist He hated the sentimental
sapping of altruism. His prose-poem, Crowds, with its "bath of
multitude," may have been suggested by Poe; but in Charles Lamb we find
the idea: "Are there no solitudes out of caves and the desert? or
cannot the heart, in the midst of crowds, feel frightfully alone? "
His best critical work is the Richard Wagner and Tannhauser, as
significant an essay as Nietzsche's Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. And
Baudelaire's polemic appeared at a more critical period in Wagner's
career. Wagner sent a brief hearty letter of thanks to the critic, and
later made his acquaintance. To Wagner, Baudelaire introduced a young
Wagnerian, Villiers de l'Isle Adam. This Wagner letter is included in
the volume of Crepet; but there are no letters published from Baudelaire
to Franz Liszt, though they were friends. In Weimar I saw at the Liszt
Museum several from Baudelaire which should have been included in the
Letters. The poet understood Liszt and his reforms as he understood
Wagner. The German composer admired the French poet, and his Kundry, in
the sultry second act of Parsifal, has a Baudelairian hue, especially in
the temptation scene.
The end was at hand. Baudelaire had been steadily, rather, unsteadily,
going downhill; a desperate figure, a dandy in shabby attire. He went
out only after dark, he haunted the exterior boulevards, associated
with birds of nocturnal plumage. He drank without thirst, ate without
hunger, as he has said. A woeful decadence for this aristocrat of life
and letters. Most sorrowful of sinners, a morose delectation scourged
his nerves and extorted the darkest music from his lyre. He fled to
Brussels, there to rehabilitate his dwindling fortunes. He gave a few
lectures, and met Rops, Lemonnier, drank to forget, and forgot to work.
He abused Brussels, Belgium, its people. A country, he cried, where the
trees are black, the flowers without odour, and where there is no
conversation! He, the brilliant causeur, the chief blaguer of a circle
in which young James McNeill Whistler was reduced to the role of a
listener--this most spiritual among artists, found himself a failure in
the Belgian capital. It may not be amiss to remind ourselves that
Baudelaire was the creator of many of the paradoxes attributed, not only
to Whistler, but to an entire school--if one may employ such a phrase.
The frozen imperturbability of the poet, his cutting enunciation, his
power of blasphemy, his hatred of Nature, his love of the artificial,
have been copied by the aesthetic blades of our day. He it was who first
taunted Nature with being an imitator of art, with always being the
same. Oh, the imitative sunsets! Oh, the quotidian eating and drinking!
And as pessimist, too, he led the mode. Baudelaire, like Flaubert,
grasped the murky torch of pessimism once held by Chateaubriand,
Benjamin Constant, and Senancour. Doubtless, all this stemmed from
Byronism. And now it is as stale as Byronism.
His health failed, and he lacked money enough to pay for doctor's
prescriptions; he even owed for the room in his hotel. At Namur, where
he was visiting the father-in-law of Felician Rops (March, 1866), he
suffered from an attack of paralysis. He was removed to Brussels. His
mother, who lived at Honneur, in mourning for her husband, came to his
aid. Taken to France, he was placed in a sanatorium. Aphasia set in. He
could only ejaculate a mild oath, and when he caught sight of himself in
the mirror he would bow pleasantly as if to a stranger. His friends
rallied, and they were among the most distinguished people in Paris, the
elite of souls. Ladies visited him, one or two playing Wagner on the
piano--which must have added a fresh nuance to death--and they brought
him flowers. He expressed his love for flowers and music to the last. He
could not bear the sight of his mother; she revived in him some painful
memories, but that passed, and he clamoured for her when she was absent.
If anyone mentioned the names of Wagner or Manet, he smiled. And with a
fixed stare, as if peering through some invisible window opening upon
eternity, he died, August 31, 1867, aged forty-six.
Barbey d'Aurevilly himself a Satanist and dandy (oh, those comical old
attitudes of literature), had prophesied that the author of Fleurs du
Mal would either blow out his brains or prostrate himself at the foot of
the cross. (Later he said the same of Huysmans. ) Baudelaire had the
alternative course forced upon him by fate after he had attempted
spiritual suicide for how many years? (He once tried actual suicide, but
the slight cut in his throat looked so ugly to him that he went no
farther. ) His soul had been a battle-field for the powers of good and
evil. That at the end he brought the wreck of both soul and body to his
God should not be a subject for comment. He was an extraordinary poet
with a bad conscience, who lived miserably and was buried with honours.
Then it was that his worth was discovered (funeral orations over a
genius are a species of public staircase-wit). His reputation waxes with
the years. He is an exotic gem in the crown of French poetry. Of him
Swinburne has chanted Ave Atque Vale:
Shall I strew on thee rose or rue or laurel,
Brother, on this that was the veil of thee?
* * * * *
THE FLOWERS OF EVIL
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,
Palls 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 vertebrae.
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,
Recks 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 Antinous, 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 foetus 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 witness 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.
EXOTIC PERFUME.
When with closed eyes in autumn's eves of gold
I breathe the burning odours of your breast,
Before my eyes the hills of happy rest
Bathed in the sun's monotonous fires, unfold.
Islands of Lethe where exotic boughs
Bend with their burden of strange fruit bowed down.
Where men are upright, maids have never grown
Unkind, but bear a light upon their brows.
Led by that perfume to these lands of ease,
I see a port where many ships have flown
With sails outwearied of the wandering seas;
While the faint odours from green tamarisks blown,
Float to my soul and in my senses throng,
And mingle vaguely with the sailor's song.
BEAUTY. r
I am as lovely as a dream in stone,
And this my heart where each finds death in turn,
Inspires the poet with a love as lone
As clay eternal and as taciturn.
Swan-white of heart, a sphinx no mortal knows,
My throne is in the heaven's azure deep;
I hate all movements that disturb my pose,
I smile not ever, neither do I weep.
Before my monumental attitudes,
That breathe a soul into the plastic arts,
My poets pray in austere studious moods,
For I, to fold enchantment round their hearts,
Have pools of light where beauty flames and dies,
The placid mirrors of my luminous eyes.
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 ails 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 Minturne?
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 Phoebus 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 jeste 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 IRREPARABLE.
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 accursed hearts?
Say, do you know the reprobate?
Know you Remorse, whose venomed darts
Make souls the targets for their hate?
Witch, do you know accursed 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.
Shivering with woe, chaste Elvira the while,
Near him untrue to all but her till now,
Seemed to beseech him for one farewell smile
Lit with the sweetness of the first soft vow.
And clad in armour, a tall man of stone
Held firm the helm, and clove the gloomy flood;
But, staring at the vessel's track alone,
Bent on his sword the unmoved hero stood.
THE LIVING FLAME.
They pass before me, these Eyes full of light,
Eyes made magnetic by some angel wise;
The holy brothers pass before my sight,
And cast their diamond fires in my dim eyes.
They keep me from all sin and error grave,
They set me in the path whence Beauty came;
They are my servants, and I am their slave,
And all my soul obeys the living flame.
Beautiful Eyes that gleam with mystic light
As candles lighted at full noon; the sun
Dims not your flame phantastical and bright.
You sing the dawn; they celebrate life done;
Marching you chaunt my soul's awakening hymn,
Stars that no sun has ever made grow dim!
CORRESPONDENCES.
In Nature's temple living pillars rise,
And words are murmured none have understood.
And man must wander through a tangled wood
Of symbols watching him with friendly eyes.
As long-drawn echoes heard far-off and dim
Mingle to one deep sound and fade away;
Vast as the night and brilliant as the day,
Colour and sound and perfume speak to him.
Some perfumes are as fragrant as a child,
Sweet as the sound of hautboys, meadow-green;
Others, corrupted, rich, exultant, wild,
Have all the expansion of things infinite:
As amber, incense, musk, and benzoin,
Which sing the sense's and the soul's delight.
THE FLASK.
There are some powerful odours that can pass
Out of the stoppered flagon; even glass
To them is porous. Oft when some old box
Brought from the East is opened and the locks
And hinges creak and cry; or in a press
In some deserted house, where the sharp stress
Of odours old and dusty fills the brain;
An ancient flask is brought to light again,
And forth the ghosts of long-dead odours creep.
There, softly trembling in the shadows, sleep
A thousand thoughts, funereal chrysalides,
Phantoms of old the folding darkness hides,
Who make faint flutterings as their wings unfold,
Rose-washed and azure-tinted, shot with gold.
A memory that brings languor flutters here:
The fainting eyelids droop, and giddy Fear
Thrusts with both hands the soul towards the pit
Where, like a Lazarus from his winding-sheet,
Arises from the gulf of sleep a ghost
Of an old passion, long since loved and lost.
So I, when vanished from man's memory
Deep in some dark and sombre chest I lie.
An empty flagon they have cast aside,
Broken and soiled, the dust upon my pride,
Will be your shroud, beloved pestilence!
The witness of your might and virulence,
Sweet poison mixed by angels; bitter cup
Of life and death my heart has drunken up!
REVERSIBILITY.
Angel of gaiety, have you tasted grief?
Shame and remorse and sobs and weary spite,
And the vague terrors of the fearful night
That crush the heart up like a crumpled leaf?
Angel of gaiety, have you tasted grief?
Angel of kindness, have you tasted hate?
With hands clenched in the shade and tears of gall,
When Vengeance beats her hellish battle-call,
And makes herself the captain of our fate,
Angel of kindness, have you tasted hate?
Angel of health, did ever you know pain,
Which like an exile trails his tired footfalls
The cold length of the white infirmary walls,
With lips compressed, seeking the sun in vain?
Angel of health, did ever you know pain?
Angel of beauty, do you wrinkles know?
Know you the fear of age, the torment vile
Of reading secret horror in the smile
Of eyes your eyes have loved since long ago?
Angel of beauty, do you wrinkles know?
Angel of happiness, and joy, and light,
Old David would have asked for youth afresh
From the pure touch of your enchanted flesh;
I but implore your prayers to aid my plight,
Angel of happiness, and joy, and light.
THE EYES OF BEAUTY.
You are a sky of autumn, pale and rose;
But all the sea of sadness in my blood
Surges, and ebbing, leaves my lips morose,
Salt with the memory of the bitter flood.
In vain your hand glides my faint bosom o'er,
That which you seek, beloved, is desecrate
By woman's tooth and talon; ah, no more
Seek in me for a heart which those dogs ate.
It is a ruin where the jackals rest,
And rend and tear and glut themselves and slay--
A perfume swims about your naked breast!
Beauty, hard scourge of spirits, have your way!
With flame-like eyes that at bright feasts have flared
Burn up these tatters that the beasts have spared!
SONNET OF AUTUMN.
They say to me, thy clear and crystal eyes:
"Why dost thou love me so, strange lover mine? "
Be sweet, be still! My heart and soul despise
All save that antique brute-like faith of thine;
And will not bare the secret of their shame
To thee whose hand soothes me to slumbers long,
Nor their black legend write for thee in flame!
Passion I hate, a spirit does me wrong.
Let us love gently. Love, from his retreat,
Ambushed and shadowy, bends his fatal bow,
And I too well his ancient arrows know:
Crime, horror, folly. O pale marguerite,
Thou art as I, a bright sun fallen low,
O my so white, my so cold Marguerite.
THE REMORSE OF THE DEAD.
O shadowy Beauty mine, when thou shalt sleep
In the deep heart of a black marble tomb;
When thou for mansion and for bower shalt keep
Only one rainy cave of hollow gloom;
And when the stone upon thy trembling breast,
And on thy straight sweet body's supple grace,
Crushes thy will and keeps thy heart at rest,
And holds those feet from their adventurous race;
Then the deep grave, who shares my reverie,
(For the deep grave is aye the poet's friend)
During long nights when sleep is far from thee,
Shall whisper: "Ah, thou didst not comprehend
The dead wept thus, thou woman frail and weak"--
And like remorse the worm shall gnaw thy cheek.
THE GHOST.
Softly as brown-eyed Angels rove
I will return to thy alcove.
And glide upon the night to thee,
Treading the shadows silently.
And I will give to thee, my own,
Kisses as icy as the moon,
And the caresses of a snake
Cold gliding in the thorny brake.
And when returns the livid morn
Thou shalt find all my place forlorn
And chilly, till the falling night.
Others would rule by tenderness
Over thy life and youthfulness,
But I would conquer thee by fright!
TO A MADONNA.
(_An Ex-Voto in the Spanish taste_. )
Madonna, mistress. I would build for thee
An altar deep in the sad soul of me;
And in the darkest corner of my heart,
From mortal hopes and mocking eyes apart,
Carve of enamelled blue and gold a shrine
For thee to stand erect in, Image divine!
And with a mighty Crown thou shalt be crowned
Wrought of the gold of my smooth Verse, set round
With starry crystal rhymes; and I will make,
O mortal maid, a Mantle for thy sake,
And weave it of my jealousy, a gown
Heavy, barbaric, stiff, and weighted down
With my distrust, and broider round the hem
Not pearls, but all my tears in place of them.
And then thy wavering, trembling robe shall be
All the desires that rise and fall in me
From mountain-peaks to valleys of repose,
Kissing thy lovely body's white and rose.
For thy humiliated feet divine,
Of my Respect I'll make thee Slippers fine
Which, prisoning them within a gentle fold,
Shall keep their imprint like a faithful mould.
And if my art, unwearying and discreet,
Can make no Moon of Silver for thy feet
To have for Footstool, then thy heel shall rest
Upon the snake that gnaws within my breast,
Victorious Queen of whom our hope is born!
And thou shalt trample down and make a scorn
Of the vile reptile swollen up with hate.
And thou shalt see my thoughts, all consecrate,
Like candles set before thy flower-strewn shrine,
O Queen of Virgins, and the taper-shine
Shall glimmer star-like in the vault of blue,
With eyes of flame for ever watching you.
While all the love and worship in my sense
Will be sweet smoke of myrrh and frankincense.
Ceaselessly up to thee, white peak of snow,
My stormy spirit will in vapours go!
And last, to make thy drama all complete,
That love and cruelty may mix and meet,
I, thy remorseful torturer, will take
All the Seven Deadly Sins, and from them make
In darkest joy, Seven Knives, cruel-edged and keen,
And like a juggler choosing, O my Queen,
That spot profound whence love and mercy start,
I'll plunge them all within thy panting heart!
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 Croesus 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.
the mother was twenty-seven, the father sixty-two, at the birth of their
only child. By his first marriage the elder Baudelaire had one son,
Claude, who, like his half-brother Charles, died of paralysis, though a
steady man of business. That great modern neurosis, called Commerce, has
its mental wrecks, too, and no one pays attention; but when a poet falls
by the wayside is the chase begun by neurologists and other soul-hunters
seeking victims. After the death of Baudelaire's father, the widow,
within a year, married the handsome, ambitious Aupick, then chef de
bataillon, lieutenant-colonel, decorated with the Legion of Honour, and
later general and ambassador to Madrid, Constantinople, and London.
Charles was a nervous, frail youth, but unlike most children of genius,
he was a scholar and won brilliant honours at school. His stepfather was
proud of him. From the Royal College of Lyons, Charles went to the Lycee
Louis-le-Grand, Paris, but was expelled in 1839, on various
discreditable charges. Troubles soon began at home. He was irascible,
vain, precocious, and given to dissipation. He quarreled with General
Aupick, and disdained his mother. But she was to blame, she has
confessed; she had quite forgotten the boy in the flush of her second
love. He could not forget, or forgive what he called her infidelity to
the memory of his father. Hamlet-like, he was inconsolable. The good
Bishop of Montpellier, who knew the family, said that Charles was a
little crazy--second marriages usually bring woe in their train. "When a
mother has such a son, she doesn't re-marry," said the young poet
Charles signed himself Baudelaire-Dufays, or sometimes Dufais. He wrote
in his journal: "My ancestors, idiots or maniacs . . . all victims of
terrible passions"; which was one of his exaggerations. His grandfather
on the paternal side was a Champenois peasant, his mother's family
presumably Norman, but not much is known of her forbears. Charles
believed himself lost from the time his half-brother was stricken. He
also believed that his instability of temperament--and he studied his
"case" as would a surgeon--was the result of his parents' disparity in
years.
After his return from the East, where he did not learn English as has
been said--his mother taught him as a boy to converse in and write the
language--he came into his little inheritance, about fifteen thousand
dollars. Two years later he was so heavily in debt that his family asked
for a guardian on the ground of incompetency. He had been swindled,
being young and green. How had he squandered his money? Not exactly on
opera-glasses, like Gerard de Nerval, but on clothes, pictures,
furniture, books. The remnant was set aside to pay his debts. Charles
would be both poet and dandy. He dressed expensively but soberly, in the
English fashion; his linen dazzling, the prevailing hue of his
habiliments black. In height he was medium, his eyes brown, searching,
luminous, the eye of a nyctalops, "eyes like ravens"; nostrils
palpitating, cleft chin, mouth expressive, sensual jaw, strong and
square. His hair was black, curly, glossy, his forehead high, square and
white. In the Deroy portrait he wears a beard; he is there what Catulle
Mendes nicknamed him: "His Excellence, Monseigneur Brummel! " Later he
was the elegiac Satan, the author of L'Imitation de N. S. le Diable; or
the Baudelaire of George Moore: "the clean-shaven face of the mock
priest, the slow cold eyes and the sharp cunning sneer of the cynical
libertine who will be tempted that he may better know the worthlessness
of temptation. " In the heyday of his blood he was perverse and
deliberate. Let us credit him with contradicting the Byronic notion that
ennui could best be cured by dissipation; in sin Baudelaire found the
saddest of all consolations. Mendes laughs at the legend of Baudelaire's
violence, of his being given to explosive phrases. Despite Gautier's
stories about the Hotel Pimodan and its club of hasheesh-eaters, M.
Mendes denies that Baudelaire was a victim of the hemp. What the
majority of mankind does not know concerning the habits of literary
workers is this prime fact: men who work hard, writing verse--and there
is no mental toil comparable to it--cannot drink, or indulge in opium,
without inevitable collapse. The old-fashioned ideas of "inspiration,"
spontaneity, easy improvisation, the sudden bolt from heaven, are
delusions still hugged by the world. To be told that Chopin filed
at his music for years, that Beethoven in his smithy forged his
thunderbolts by the sweat of his brow, that Manet toiled like a
labourer on the dock, that Baudelaire was a mechanic in his devotion
to poetic work, that Gautier was a hard-working journalist, are
disillusions for the sentimental. Minerva springing full-fledged from
Jupiter's skull to the desk of the poet is a pretty fancy; but Balsac
and Flaubert did not encourage this fancy. Work literally killed Poe, as
it killed Jules de Goncourt, Flaubert and Daudet. Maupassant went insane
because he would work and he would play the same day. Baudelaire worked
and worried. His debts haunted him his life long. His constitution was
flawed--Sainte-Beuve told him that he had worn out his nerves--from the
start, he was detraque; but that his entire life was one huge debauch is
a nightmare of the moral police in some red cotton nightcap country.
His period of mental production was not brief nor barren. He was a
student. Du Camp's charge that he was an ignorant man is disproved by
the variety and quality of his published work. His range of sympathies
was large. His mistake, in the eyes of his colleagues, was to write so
well about the seven arts. Versatility is seldom given its real
name--which is protracted labour. Baudelaire was one of the elect, an
aristocrat, who dealt with the quintessence of art; his delicate air of
a bishop, his exquisite manners, his modulated voice, aroused unusual
interest and admiration. He was a humanist of distinction; he has left a
hymn to Saint Francis in the Latin of the decadence. Baudelaire, like
Chopin, made more poignant the phrase, raised to a higher intensity the
expressiveness of art.
Women played a commanding role in his life. They always do with any poet
worthy of the name, though few have been so frank in acknowledging this
as Baudelaire. Yet he was in love more with Woman than the individual.
The legend of the beautiful creature he brought from the East resolves
itself into the dismal affair with Jeanne Duval. He met her in Paris,
after he had been in the East. She sang at a cafe concert in Paris. She
was more brown than black. She was not handsome, not intelligent, not
good; yet he idealized her, for she was the source of half his
inspiration. To her were addressed those marvellous evocations of the
Orient, of perfume, tresses, delicious dawns on strange far-away seas
and "superb Byzant," domes that devils built. Baudelaire is the poet of
perfumes; he is also the patron saint of ennui. No one has so chanted
the praise of odours. His soul swims on perfume as do other souls on
music, he has sung. As he grew older he seemed to hunt for more acrid
odours; he often presents an elaborately chased vase the carving of
which transports us, but from which the head is quickly averted. Jeanne,
whom he never loved, no matter what may be said, was a sorceress. But
she was impossible; she robbed, betrayed him; he left her a dozen times
only to return. He was a capital draughtsman with a strong nervous line
and made many pen-and-ink drawings of her. They are not prepossessing.
In her rapid decline she was not allowed to want. Madame Aupick paid her
expenses in the hospital. A sordid history. She was a veritable flower
of evil for Baudelaire. Yet poetry, like music, would be colourless,
scentless, if it sounded no dissonances. Fancy art reduced to the
beatific and banal chord of C major!
He fell in love with the celebrated Madame Sabatier, a reigning beauty,
at whose salon artistic Paris assembled. She had been christened by
Gautier Madame la Presidente, and her sumptuous beauty was portrayed by
Ricard in his La Femme au Chien. She returned Baudelaire's love. They
soon parted. Again a riddle which the published letters hardly solve.
One letter, however, does show that Baudelaire had tried to be faithful,
and failed. He could not extort from his exhausted soul the sentiment;
but he put its music on paper. His most seductive lyrics were addressed
to Madame Sabatier: "A la tres chere, a la tres-belle," a hymn saturated
with love. Music, spleen, perfumes--"colour, sound, perfumes call to
each other as deep to deep; perfumes like the flesh of children, soft as
hautboys, green as the meadows"--criminals, outcasts, the charm of
childhood, the horrors of love, pride, and rebellion, Eastern
landscapes, cats, soothing and false; cats, the true companions of
lonely poets; haunted clocks, shivering dusks, and gloomier
dawns--Paris in a hundred phases--these and many other themes this
strange-souled poet, this "Dante, pacer of the shore," of Paris has
celebrated in finely wrought verse and profound phrases. In a single
line he contrives atmosphere; the very shape of his sentence, the ring
of the syllables, arouse the deepest emotion. A master of harmonic
undertones is Baudelaire. His successors have excelled him in making
their music more fluid, more lyrical, more vapourous--many young French
poets pass through their Baudelarian green-sickness--but he alone knows
the secrets of moulding those metallic, free sonnets, which have the
resistance of bronze; and of the despairing music that flames from the
mouths of lost souls trembling on the wharves of hell. He is the supreme
master of irony and troubled voluptuousness.
Baudelaire is a masculine poet. He carved rather than sang; the plastic
arts spoke to his soul. A lover and maker of images. Like Poe, his
emotions transformed themselves into ideas. Bourget classified him as
mystic, libertine, and analyst. He was born with a wound in his soul, to
use the phrase of Pere Lacordaire. (Curiously enough, he actually
contemplated, in 1861, becoming a candidate for Lacordaire's vacant seat
in the French Academy. Sainte-Beuve dissuaded him from this folly. )
Recall Baudelaire's prayer: "Thou, O Lord, my God, grant me the grace to
produce some fine lines which will prove to myself that I am not the
last of men, that I am not inferior to those I contemn. " Individualist,
egoist, anarchist, his only thought was letters. Jules Laforgue thus
described Baudelaire: "Cat, Hindoo, Yankee, Episcopal, Alchemist. " Yes,
an alchemist who suffocated in the fumes he created. He was of Gothic
imagination, and could have said with Rolla: "Je suis venu trop tard
dans un monde trop vieux. " He had an unassuaged thirst for the absolute.
The human soul was his stage, he its interpreting orchestra.
In 1857 The Flowers of Evil was published by Poulet-Malassis, who
afterward went into bankruptcy--a warning to publishers with a taste for
fine literature. The titles contemplated were Limbes, or Lesbiennes.
Hippolyte Babou suggested the one we know. These poems were suppressed
on account of six, and poet and publisher summoned. As the municipal
government had made a particular ass of itself in the prosecution of
Gustave Flaubert and his Madame Bovary, the Baudelaire matter was
disposed of in haste. He was condemned to a fine of three hundred
francs, a fine which was never paid, as the objectionable poems were
removed. They were printed in the Belgian edition, and may be read in
the new volume, OEuvres. Posthumes.
Baudelaire was infuriated over the judgment, for he knew that his book
was dramatic in expression. He had expected, like Flaubert, to emerge
from the trial with flying colours; therefore to be classed as one who
wrote objectionable literature was a shock. "Flaubert had the Empress
back of him," he complained; which was true; the Empress Eugenie, also
the Princess Mathilde. But he worked as ever and put forth those
polished intaglios called Poems in Prose, for the form of which he had
taken a hint from Aloys Bertrand's Gaspard de la Nuit. He filled this
form with a new content; not alone pictures, but moods, are to be found
in those miniatures. Pity is their keynote, a tenderness for the abject
and lowly, a revelation of sensibility that surprised those critics who
had discerned in Baudelaire only a sculptor of evil. In one of his poems
he described a landscape of metal, of marble and water; a babel of
staircases and arcades, a palace of infinity, surrounded by the silence
of eternity. This depressing yet magical dream was utilized by Huysmans
in his A Rebours. But in the tiny landscapes of the Prose Poems there is
nothing rigid or artificial. Indeed, the poet's deliberate attitude of
artificiality is dropped. He is human. Not that the deep fundamental
note of humanity is ever absent in his poems; the eternal diapason is
there even when least overheard. Baudelaire is more human than Poe. His
range of sympathy is wider. In this he transcends him as a poet, though
his subject-matter often issues from the very dregs of life. Brother to
pitiable wanderers, there are, nevertheless, no traces of cant, no
"Russian pity" a la Dostoievsky, no humanitarian or socialistic
rhapsodies in his work. Baudelaire is an egoist He hated the sentimental
sapping of altruism. His prose-poem, Crowds, with its "bath of
multitude," may have been suggested by Poe; but in Charles Lamb we find
the idea: "Are there no solitudes out of caves and the desert? or
cannot the heart, in the midst of crowds, feel frightfully alone? "
His best critical work is the Richard Wagner and Tannhauser, as
significant an essay as Nietzsche's Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. And
Baudelaire's polemic appeared at a more critical period in Wagner's
career. Wagner sent a brief hearty letter of thanks to the critic, and
later made his acquaintance. To Wagner, Baudelaire introduced a young
Wagnerian, Villiers de l'Isle Adam. This Wagner letter is included in
the volume of Crepet; but there are no letters published from Baudelaire
to Franz Liszt, though they were friends. In Weimar I saw at the Liszt
Museum several from Baudelaire which should have been included in the
Letters. The poet understood Liszt and his reforms as he understood
Wagner. The German composer admired the French poet, and his Kundry, in
the sultry second act of Parsifal, has a Baudelairian hue, especially in
the temptation scene.
The end was at hand. Baudelaire had been steadily, rather, unsteadily,
going downhill; a desperate figure, a dandy in shabby attire. He went
out only after dark, he haunted the exterior boulevards, associated
with birds of nocturnal plumage. He drank without thirst, ate without
hunger, as he has said. A woeful decadence for this aristocrat of life
and letters. Most sorrowful of sinners, a morose delectation scourged
his nerves and extorted the darkest music from his lyre. He fled to
Brussels, there to rehabilitate his dwindling fortunes. He gave a few
lectures, and met Rops, Lemonnier, drank to forget, and forgot to work.
He abused Brussels, Belgium, its people. A country, he cried, where the
trees are black, the flowers without odour, and where there is no
conversation! He, the brilliant causeur, the chief blaguer of a circle
in which young James McNeill Whistler was reduced to the role of a
listener--this most spiritual among artists, found himself a failure in
the Belgian capital. It may not be amiss to remind ourselves that
Baudelaire was the creator of many of the paradoxes attributed, not only
to Whistler, but to an entire school--if one may employ such a phrase.
The frozen imperturbability of the poet, his cutting enunciation, his
power of blasphemy, his hatred of Nature, his love of the artificial,
have been copied by the aesthetic blades of our day. He it was who first
taunted Nature with being an imitator of art, with always being the
same. Oh, the imitative sunsets! Oh, the quotidian eating and drinking!
And as pessimist, too, he led the mode. Baudelaire, like Flaubert,
grasped the murky torch of pessimism once held by Chateaubriand,
Benjamin Constant, and Senancour. Doubtless, all this stemmed from
Byronism. And now it is as stale as Byronism.
His health failed, and he lacked money enough to pay for doctor's
prescriptions; he even owed for the room in his hotel. At Namur, where
he was visiting the father-in-law of Felician Rops (March, 1866), he
suffered from an attack of paralysis. He was removed to Brussels. His
mother, who lived at Honneur, in mourning for her husband, came to his
aid. Taken to France, he was placed in a sanatorium. Aphasia set in. He
could only ejaculate a mild oath, and when he caught sight of himself in
the mirror he would bow pleasantly as if to a stranger. His friends
rallied, and they were among the most distinguished people in Paris, the
elite of souls. Ladies visited him, one or two playing Wagner on the
piano--which must have added a fresh nuance to death--and they brought
him flowers. He expressed his love for flowers and music to the last. He
could not bear the sight of his mother; she revived in him some painful
memories, but that passed, and he clamoured for her when she was absent.
If anyone mentioned the names of Wagner or Manet, he smiled. And with a
fixed stare, as if peering through some invisible window opening upon
eternity, he died, August 31, 1867, aged forty-six.
Barbey d'Aurevilly himself a Satanist and dandy (oh, those comical old
attitudes of literature), had prophesied that the author of Fleurs du
Mal would either blow out his brains or prostrate himself at the foot of
the cross. (Later he said the same of Huysmans. ) Baudelaire had the
alternative course forced upon him by fate after he had attempted
spiritual suicide for how many years? (He once tried actual suicide, but
the slight cut in his throat looked so ugly to him that he went no
farther. ) His soul had been a battle-field for the powers of good and
evil. That at the end he brought the wreck of both soul and body to his
God should not be a subject for comment. He was an extraordinary poet
with a bad conscience, who lived miserably and was buried with honours.
Then it was that his worth was discovered (funeral orations over a
genius are a species of public staircase-wit). His reputation waxes with
the years. He is an exotic gem in the crown of French poetry. Of him
Swinburne has chanted Ave Atque Vale:
Shall I strew on thee rose or rue or laurel,
Brother, on this that was the veil of thee?
* * * * *
THE FLOWERS OF EVIL
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,
Palls 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 vertebrae.
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,
Recks 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 Antinous, 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 foetus 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 witness 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.
EXOTIC PERFUME.
When with closed eyes in autumn's eves of gold
I breathe the burning odours of your breast,
Before my eyes the hills of happy rest
Bathed in the sun's monotonous fires, unfold.
Islands of Lethe where exotic boughs
Bend with their burden of strange fruit bowed down.
Where men are upright, maids have never grown
Unkind, but bear a light upon their brows.
Led by that perfume to these lands of ease,
I see a port where many ships have flown
With sails outwearied of the wandering seas;
While the faint odours from green tamarisks blown,
Float to my soul and in my senses throng,
And mingle vaguely with the sailor's song.
BEAUTY. r
I am as lovely as a dream in stone,
And this my heart where each finds death in turn,
Inspires the poet with a love as lone
As clay eternal and as taciturn.
Swan-white of heart, a sphinx no mortal knows,
My throne is in the heaven's azure deep;
I hate all movements that disturb my pose,
I smile not ever, neither do I weep.
Before my monumental attitudes,
That breathe a soul into the plastic arts,
My poets pray in austere studious moods,
For I, to fold enchantment round their hearts,
Have pools of light where beauty flames and dies,
The placid mirrors of my luminous eyes.
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 ails 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 Minturne?
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 Phoebus 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 jeste 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 IRREPARABLE.
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 accursed hearts?
Say, do you know the reprobate?
Know you Remorse, whose venomed darts
Make souls the targets for their hate?
Witch, do you know accursed 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.
Shivering with woe, chaste Elvira the while,
Near him untrue to all but her till now,
Seemed to beseech him for one farewell smile
Lit with the sweetness of the first soft vow.
And clad in armour, a tall man of stone
Held firm the helm, and clove the gloomy flood;
But, staring at the vessel's track alone,
Bent on his sword the unmoved hero stood.
THE LIVING FLAME.
They pass before me, these Eyes full of light,
Eyes made magnetic by some angel wise;
The holy brothers pass before my sight,
And cast their diamond fires in my dim eyes.
They keep me from all sin and error grave,
They set me in the path whence Beauty came;
They are my servants, and I am their slave,
And all my soul obeys the living flame.
Beautiful Eyes that gleam with mystic light
As candles lighted at full noon; the sun
Dims not your flame phantastical and bright.
You sing the dawn; they celebrate life done;
Marching you chaunt my soul's awakening hymn,
Stars that no sun has ever made grow dim!
CORRESPONDENCES.
In Nature's temple living pillars rise,
And words are murmured none have understood.
And man must wander through a tangled wood
Of symbols watching him with friendly eyes.
As long-drawn echoes heard far-off and dim
Mingle to one deep sound and fade away;
Vast as the night and brilliant as the day,
Colour and sound and perfume speak to him.
Some perfumes are as fragrant as a child,
Sweet as the sound of hautboys, meadow-green;
Others, corrupted, rich, exultant, wild,
Have all the expansion of things infinite:
As amber, incense, musk, and benzoin,
Which sing the sense's and the soul's delight.
THE FLASK.
There are some powerful odours that can pass
Out of the stoppered flagon; even glass
To them is porous. Oft when some old box
Brought from the East is opened and the locks
And hinges creak and cry; or in a press
In some deserted house, where the sharp stress
Of odours old and dusty fills the brain;
An ancient flask is brought to light again,
And forth the ghosts of long-dead odours creep.
There, softly trembling in the shadows, sleep
A thousand thoughts, funereal chrysalides,
Phantoms of old the folding darkness hides,
Who make faint flutterings as their wings unfold,
Rose-washed and azure-tinted, shot with gold.
A memory that brings languor flutters here:
The fainting eyelids droop, and giddy Fear
Thrusts with both hands the soul towards the pit
Where, like a Lazarus from his winding-sheet,
Arises from the gulf of sleep a ghost
Of an old passion, long since loved and lost.
So I, when vanished from man's memory
Deep in some dark and sombre chest I lie.
An empty flagon they have cast aside,
Broken and soiled, the dust upon my pride,
Will be your shroud, beloved pestilence!
The witness of your might and virulence,
Sweet poison mixed by angels; bitter cup
Of life and death my heart has drunken up!
REVERSIBILITY.
Angel of gaiety, have you tasted grief?
Shame and remorse and sobs and weary spite,
And the vague terrors of the fearful night
That crush the heart up like a crumpled leaf?
Angel of gaiety, have you tasted grief?
Angel of kindness, have you tasted hate?
With hands clenched in the shade and tears of gall,
When Vengeance beats her hellish battle-call,
And makes herself the captain of our fate,
Angel of kindness, have you tasted hate?
Angel of health, did ever you know pain,
Which like an exile trails his tired footfalls
The cold length of the white infirmary walls,
With lips compressed, seeking the sun in vain?
Angel of health, did ever you know pain?
Angel of beauty, do you wrinkles know?
Know you the fear of age, the torment vile
Of reading secret horror in the smile
Of eyes your eyes have loved since long ago?
Angel of beauty, do you wrinkles know?
Angel of happiness, and joy, and light,
Old David would have asked for youth afresh
From the pure touch of your enchanted flesh;
I but implore your prayers to aid my plight,
Angel of happiness, and joy, and light.
THE EYES OF BEAUTY.
You are a sky of autumn, pale and rose;
But all the sea of sadness in my blood
Surges, and ebbing, leaves my lips morose,
Salt with the memory of the bitter flood.
In vain your hand glides my faint bosom o'er,
That which you seek, beloved, is desecrate
By woman's tooth and talon; ah, no more
Seek in me for a heart which those dogs ate.
It is a ruin where the jackals rest,
And rend and tear and glut themselves and slay--
A perfume swims about your naked breast!
Beauty, hard scourge of spirits, have your way!
With flame-like eyes that at bright feasts have flared
Burn up these tatters that the beasts have spared!
SONNET OF AUTUMN.
They say to me, thy clear and crystal eyes:
"Why dost thou love me so, strange lover mine? "
Be sweet, be still! My heart and soul despise
All save that antique brute-like faith of thine;
And will not bare the secret of their shame
To thee whose hand soothes me to slumbers long,
Nor their black legend write for thee in flame!
Passion I hate, a spirit does me wrong.
Let us love gently. Love, from his retreat,
Ambushed and shadowy, bends his fatal bow,
And I too well his ancient arrows know:
Crime, horror, folly. O pale marguerite,
Thou art as I, a bright sun fallen low,
O my so white, my so cold Marguerite.
THE REMORSE OF THE DEAD.
O shadowy Beauty mine, when thou shalt sleep
In the deep heart of a black marble tomb;
When thou for mansion and for bower shalt keep
Only one rainy cave of hollow gloom;
And when the stone upon thy trembling breast,
And on thy straight sweet body's supple grace,
Crushes thy will and keeps thy heart at rest,
And holds those feet from their adventurous race;
Then the deep grave, who shares my reverie,
(For the deep grave is aye the poet's friend)
During long nights when sleep is far from thee,
Shall whisper: "Ah, thou didst not comprehend
The dead wept thus, thou woman frail and weak"--
And like remorse the worm shall gnaw thy cheek.
THE GHOST.
Softly as brown-eyed Angels rove
I will return to thy alcove.
And glide upon the night to thee,
Treading the shadows silently.
And I will give to thee, my own,
Kisses as icy as the moon,
And the caresses of a snake
Cold gliding in the thorny brake.
And when returns the livid morn
Thou shalt find all my place forlorn
And chilly, till the falling night.
Others would rule by tenderness
Over thy life and youthfulness,
But I would conquer thee by fright!
TO A MADONNA.
(_An Ex-Voto in the Spanish taste_. )
Madonna, mistress. I would build for thee
An altar deep in the sad soul of me;
And in the darkest corner of my heart,
From mortal hopes and mocking eyes apart,
Carve of enamelled blue and gold a shrine
For thee to stand erect in, Image divine!
And with a mighty Crown thou shalt be crowned
Wrought of the gold of my smooth Verse, set round
With starry crystal rhymes; and I will make,
O mortal maid, a Mantle for thy sake,
And weave it of my jealousy, a gown
Heavy, barbaric, stiff, and weighted down
With my distrust, and broider round the hem
Not pearls, but all my tears in place of them.
And then thy wavering, trembling robe shall be
All the desires that rise and fall in me
From mountain-peaks to valleys of repose,
Kissing thy lovely body's white and rose.
For thy humiliated feet divine,
Of my Respect I'll make thee Slippers fine
Which, prisoning them within a gentle fold,
Shall keep their imprint like a faithful mould.
And if my art, unwearying and discreet,
Can make no Moon of Silver for thy feet
To have for Footstool, then thy heel shall rest
Upon the snake that gnaws within my breast,
Victorious Queen of whom our hope is born!
And thou shalt trample down and make a scorn
Of the vile reptile swollen up with hate.
And thou shalt see my thoughts, all consecrate,
Like candles set before thy flower-strewn shrine,
O Queen of Virgins, and the taper-shine
Shall glimmer star-like in the vault of blue,
With eyes of flame for ever watching you.
While all the love and worship in my sense
Will be sweet smoke of myrrh and frankincense.
Ceaselessly up to thee, white peak of snow,
My stormy spirit will in vapours go!
And last, to make thy drama all complete,
That love and cruelty may mix and meet,
I, thy remorseful torturer, will take
All the Seven Deadly Sins, and from them make
In darkest joy, Seven Knives, cruel-edged and keen,
And like a juggler choosing, O my Queen,
That spot profound whence love and mercy start,
I'll plunge them all within thy panting heart!
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 Croesus 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.
