When he shines on the town, a poet that sings,
he redeems the fate of the meanest things,
like a king he enters, no servants, alone,
all palaces, all hospitals where men moan.
he redeems the fate of the meanest things,
like a king he enters, no servants, alone,
all palaces, all hospitals where men moan.
Andre Breton - First Manifesto of Surrealism - 1924
'N'est ce pas qu'il est doux'
Is it not pleasant, now we are tired,
and tarnished, like other men, to search for those fires
in the furthest East, where, again, we might see
morning's new dawn, and, in mad history,
hear the echoes, that vanish behind us, the sighs
of the young loves, God gives, at the start of our lives?
'Il aimait a la voir'
It was in her white skirts that he loved to see
her run straight through the branches and leaves, gracefully,
but still gauche, and hiding her leg from the light,
when she tore her dress, on the briars, in her flight.
Incompatibility
Higher there, higher, far from the ways,
from the farms and the valleys, beyond the trees,
beyond the hills and the grasses' haze,
far from the herd-trampled tapestries,
you discover a sombre pool in the deep
that a few bare snow-covered mountains form.
The lake, in light's, and night's sublime sleep,
is never disturbed in its silent storm.
In that mournful waste, to the unsure ear,
come faint drawn-out sounds, more dead than the bell,
of some far-off cow, the echoes unclear,
as it grazes the slope, of a distant dell.
On those hills where the wind effaces all signs,
on those glaciers, fired by the sun's pure light,
on those rocks, where dizziness threatens the mind,
in that lake's vermilion presage of night,
under my feet, and above my head,
silence, that makes you wish to escape;
that eternal silence, of the mountainous bed
of motionless air, where everything waits.
You would say that the sky, in its loneliness,
gazed at itself in the glass, and, up there,
the mountains listened, in grave watchfulness
to the mystery nothing that's human can hear.
And when, by chance, a wandering cloud
darkens the silent lake, moving by,
you might think that you saw some spirit's robe,
or else its clear shadow, travelling, over the sky.
To A Creole Lady
In a perfumed land caressed by the sun
I found, beneath the trees' crimson canopy,
palms from which languor pours on one's
eyes, the veiled charms of a Creole lady.
Her hue pale, but warm, a dark-haired enchantress,
she shows in her neck's poise the noblest of manners:
slender and tall, she strides by like a huntress,
tranquil her smile, her eyes full of assurance.
If you travelled, my Lady, to the land of true glory,
the banks of the Seine or green Loire, a Beauty
worthy of gracing the manors of olden days,
you'd inspire, among arbours' shadowy secrets,
a thousand sonnets in the hearts of the poets,
whom, more than your blacks, your vast eyes would enslave.
To A Woman of Malabar
Your feet are as slender as hands, your hips, to me,
wide enough for the sweetest white girl's envy:
to the wise artist your body is sweet and dear,
and your great velvet eyes black without peer.
In the hot blue lands where God gave you your nature
your task is to light a pipe for your master,
to fill up the vessels with cool fragrance
and chase the mosquitoes away when they dance,
and when dawn sings in the plane-trees, afar,
fetch bananas and pineapples from the bazaar.
All day your bare feet go where they wish
as you hum old lost melodies under your breath,
and when evening's red cloak descends overhead
you lie down sweetly on a straw bed,
where humming birds fill your floating dreams,
as graceful and flowery as you it seems.
Happy child, why do you long to see France
our suffering, and over-crowded land,
and trusting your life to the sailors, your friends,
say a fond goodbye to your dear tamarinds?
Scantily dressed, in muslins, frail,
shivering under the snow and hail,
how you'd pine for your leisure, sweet and free,
body pinned in a corset's brutality,
if you'd to glean supper amongst our vile harms,
selling the scent of exotic charms,
sad pensive eyes searching our fog-bound sleaze,
for the lost ghosts of your coconut-trees!
The Albatross
Often, for their amusement, bored sailors
take albatrosses, vast sea-birds, that sleep
in the air, indolent fellow travellers,
following the ship skimming the deep.
No sooner are they set down on the boards,
than those kings of the azure, maladroit, shamefully
let their vast white wings, like oars,
trail along their sides, piteously.
Winged traveller, gauche, gross, useless, laughable,
now, one of them, with a pipe stem, prods you,
who, a moment ago, were beautiful:
another, limping, mimics the cripple who flew.
The Poet bears a likeness to that prince of the air,
who mocks at slingshots, and haunts the winds:
on earth, an exile among the scornful, where
he is hampered, in walking, by his giant wings.
Bertha's Eyes
You can scorn more illustrious eyes,
sweet eyes of my child, through which there takes flight
something as good or as tender as night.
Turn to mine your charmed shadows, sweet eyes!
Great eyes of a child, adorable secrets,
you resemble those grottoes of magic
where, behind the dark and lethargic,
shine vague treasures the world forgets.
My child has veiled eyes, profound and vast,
and shining like you, Night, immense, above!
Their fires are of Trust, mixed with thoughts of Love,
that glitter in depths, voluptuous or chaste.
'Je n'ai pas oublie, voisine de la ville,'
I've not forgotten, near to the town,
our white house, small but alone:
its Pomona of plaster, its Venus of old
hiding nude limbs in the meagre grove,
and the sun, superb, at evening, streaming,
behind the glass, where its sheaves were bursting,
a huge eye in a curious heaven, present
to gaze at our meal, lengthy and silent,
spreading its beautiful candle glimmer
on the frugal cloth and the rough curtain.
'La servante au grand coeur dont vous etiez jalouse,'
The great-hearted servant of whom you were jealous,
sleeping her sleep in the humble grass,
shouldn't we take her a few flowers?
The dead, the poor dead, have grief like ours,
and when October sighs, clipper of trees,
round their marble tombs, with its mournful breeze,
they must find the living, ungratefully, wed,
snug in sleep, to the warmth of their bed,
while they, devoured by dark reflection,
without bedfellow, or sweet conversation,
old skeletons riddled with worms, deep frozen,
feel the winter snows trickling round them,
and the years flow by without kin or friend
to replace the wreaths at their railing's end.
If some night, when the logs whistle and flare,
seeing her sitting calm, in that chair,
if on a December night, cold and blue,
I might find her there placed in the room,
solemn, and come from her bed, eternal,
to guard the grown child with her eye, maternal,
what could I answer that pious spirit,
seeing tears under her hollow eyelid?
Landscape
In order to write my chaste verses I'll lie
like an astrologer near to the sky
and, by the bell-towers, listen in dream
to their solemn hymns on the air-stream.
Hands on chin, from my attic's height
I'll see the workshops of song and light,
the gutters, the belfries those masts of the city,
the vast skies that yield dreams of eternity
It is sweet to see stars being born in the blue,
through the mists, the lamps at the windows, too,
the rivers of smoke climbing the firmament,
and the moon pouring out her pale enchantment.
I'll see the springs, summers, autumns' glow,
and when winter brings the monotonous snow
I'll close all my doors and shutters tight
and build palaces of faery in the night.
Then I'll dream of blue-wet horizons,
weeping fountains of alabaster, gardens,
kisses, birdsong at morning or twilight,
all in the Idyll that is most childlike.
The mob that are beating in vain on the glass,
won't make me raise my head as they pass.
Since I'll be plunged deep in the thrill
of evoking the springtime through my own will,
raising the sun out of my own heart,
making sweet air from my burning thought.
The Sun
Through the streets where at windows of old houses
the persian blinds hide secret luxuries,
when the cruel sun strikes with redoubled fury
on the roofs and fields, the meadows and city,
I go alone in my crazy sword-play
scenting a chance rhyme on every road-way,
stumbling on words and over the pavement
finding verses I often dreamed might be sent.
This nurturing father, anaemia's foe
stirs, in the fields, the worm and the rose,
makes our cares evaporate into the blue,
fills the hives and our brains with honey-dew.
It is he who gives youth to the old man, the cripple,
makes them like young girls, happy and gentle,
and commands the crops to grow ripe in an hour
of the immortal heart, that so longs to flower.
When he shines on the town, a poet that sings,
he redeems the fate of the meanest things,
like a king he enters, no servants, alone,
all palaces, all hospitals where men moan.
Sorrows of the Moon
The moon dreams more languidly this evening:
like a sweet woman, in the pillows, at rest,
with her light hand, discretely stroking,
before she sleeps, the curve of her breast,
dying, she gives herself to deep trance,
and casts her eyes over snow-white bowers,
on the satined slope of a soft avalanche,
rising up into the blue, like flowers.
When she sometimes lets fall a furtive tear,
in her secret languor, on our world here,
a pious poet, enemy of sleep's art,
takes that pale tear in the hollow of his palm,
its rainbow glitter like an opal shard,
and far from the sun sets it in his heart.
Don Juan in Hell
When Don Juan went down to Hell's charms,
and paid Charon his obol's fare,
he, a sombre beggar with Antisthenes' glare,
gripped the oars with strong avenging arms.
Showing their sagging breasts through open robes
the women writhed under the black firmament
and, like a crowd of sacred victims, broke
behind him into long incessant lament.
Sganarelle laughing demanded his score,
while Don Luis, with trembling hand,
showed the wandering dead, along the shore,
the insolent son who spurned his command.
By the treacherous spouse, who was her lover,
chaste, skinny Elvira shivered in mourning dress,
seeming to ask a last smile of him, where
there might shine his first vow's tenderness.
Gripping the helm cutting the black wave,
erect in armour, stood a giant of stone,
but the hero, leaning, quiet, on his sword-blade,
scornful of all things, gazed at the sea's foam.
On Tasso in Prison (Eugene Delacroix's painting)
The poet in his cell, unkempt and sick,
who crushes underfoot a manuscript,
measures, with a gaze that horror has inflamed,
the stair of madness where his soul was maimed.
The intoxicating laughter that fills his prison
with the absurd and the strange, swamps his reason.
Doubt surrounds him, and ridiculous fear,
hideous and multiform, circles near.
That genius pent up in a foul sty,
those spectres, those grimaces, the cries,
whirling, in a swarm, about his hair,
that dreamer, whom his lodging's terrors bare,
such are your emblems, Soul, singer of songs obscure,
whom Reality suffocates behind four walls!
Femmes Damnees
Like pensive cattle, lying on the sands,
they turn their eyes towards the sea's far hills,
and, feet searching each other's, touching hands,
know sweet languor and the bitterest thrills.
Some, where the stream babbles, deep in the woods,
their hearts enamoured of long intimacies,
go spelling out the loves of their own girlhoods,
and carving the green bark of young trees.
Others, like Sisters, walk, gravely and slow,
among the rocks, full of apparitions,
where Saint Anthony saw, like lava flows,
the bared crimson breasts of his temptations.
There are those, in the melting candle's glimmer,
who in mute hollows of caves still pagan,
call on you to relieve their groaning fever,
O Bacchus, to soothe the remorse of the ancients!
And others, whose throats love scapularies,
who, hiding whips under their long vestment,
in the sombre groves of the night, solitaries,
blend the sweats of joy with the tears of torment.
O virgins, o demons, o monsters, o martyrs,
great spirits, despisers of reality,
now full of cries, now full of tears,
pious and lustful, seeking infinity,
you, whom my soul has pursued to your hell,
poor sisters, I adore you as much as I weep,
for your dismal sufferings, thirsts that swell,
and the vessels of love, where your great hearts steep!
The Litanies of Satan
O you, the most knowing, and loveliest of Angels,
a god fate betrayed, deprived of praises,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
O, Prince of exile to whom wrong has been done,
who, vanquished, always recovers more strongly,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You who know everything, king of the underworld,
the familiar healer of human distress,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You who teach even lepers, accursed pariahs,
through love itself the taste for Paradise,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
O you who on Death, your ancient true lover,
engendered Hope - that lunatic charmer!
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You who grant the condemned that calm, proud look
that damns a whole people crowding the scaffold,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You who know in what corners of envious countries
a jealous God hid those stones that are precious,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You whose clear eye knows the deep caches
where, buried, the race of metals slumbers,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You whose huge hands hide the precipice,
from the sleepwalker on the sky-scraper's cliff,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You who make magically supple the bones
of the drunkard, out late, who's trampled by horses,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You who taught us to mix saltpetre with sulphur
to console the frail human being who suffers,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You who set your mark, o subtle accomplice,
on the forehead of Croesus, the vile and pitiless,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You who set in the hearts and eyes of young girls
the cult of the wound, adoration of rags,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
The exile's staff, the light of invention,
confessor to those to be hanged, to conspirators,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
Father, adopting those whom God the Father
drove in dark anger from the earthly paradise,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
Note: Croesus was the king of Lydia (c560-546BC), famed for his wealth. He was defeated and captured by Cyrus of Persia at the taking of Sardis, and rescued by his conqueror from the pyre (Herodotus 1. 86)
Beauty
O mortals, I am beautiful, like a stone dream,
and my breast, where each man has bruised his soul,
is created to inspire in poets a goal
as eternal and mute as matter might seem.
An inscrutable Sphinx, I am throned in blue sky:
I unite the swan's white with a heart of snow:
I hate all movement that ruffles the flow,
and I never cry and I never smile.
The poets, in front of my poses, so grand
they seem borrowed from ancient tomb-covers,
will exhaust their days in studying a hand,
since I, to fascinate my docile lovers,
have pure mirrors that magnify everything's beauty:
my eyes, my huge eyes, bright with eternity.
Letter to Sainte-Beuve
On the old oak benches, more shiny and polished
than links of a chain that were, each day, burnished
rubbed by our human flesh, we, still un-bearded,
trailed our ennui, hunched, round-shouldered,
under the four-square heaven of solitude,
where a child drinks study's tart ten-year brew.
It was in those days, outstanding and memorable,
when the teachers, forced to loosen our classical
fetters, yet all still hostile to your rhyming,
succumbed to the pressure of our mad duelling,
and allowed a triumphant, mutinous, pupil
to make Triboulet howl in Latin, at will.
Which of us in those days of pale adolescence
didn't share the weary torpor of confinement,
- eyes lost in the dreary blue of a summer sky
or the snowfall's whiteness, we were dazzled by,
ears pricked, eager, waiting - a pack of hounds
drinking some book's far echo, a riot's sound?
Most of all in summer, that melted the leads,
the walls high, blackened, filled with dread,
with the scorching heat, or when autumn haze
lit the sky with its one monotonous blaze
and made the screeching falcons fall asleep,
white pigeons' terrors, in their slender keep:
the season of reverie when the Muse clings
through the endless day to some bell that rings:
when Melancholy at noon when all is drowsing
at the corridor's end, chin in hand, dragging -
eyes bluer and darker than Diderot's Nun,
that sad, obscene tale known to everyone,
- her feet weighed down by premature ennui,
her brow from night's moist languor un-free.
- and unhealthy evenings, then, feverish nights,
that make young girls love their bodies outright,
and, sterile pleasure, gaze in their mirrors to see
the ripening fruits of their own nubility: -
Italian evenings of thoughtless lethargy,
when knowledge of false delights is revealed
when sombre Venus, on her high black balcony,
out of cool censers, waves of musk sets free.
In this war of enervating circumstances,
matured by your sonnets, prepared by your stanzas,
one evening, having sensed the soul of your art,
I transported Amaury's story into my heart.
Every mystical void is but two steps away
from doubt. - The potion, drop by drop, day by day,
filtering through me, I, drawn to the abyss since I
was fifteen, who swiftly deciphered Rene's sigh,
I parched by some strange thirst for the unknown,
within the smallest of arteries, made its home.
I absorbed it all, the perfumes, the miasmas,
the long-vanished memories' sweetest whispers,
the drawn-out tangle of phrases, their symbols,
the rosaries murmuring in mystical madrigals,
- a voluptuous book, if ever one was brewed.
Now, whether I'm deep in some leafy refuge,
or in the sun of a second hemispheres' days,
the eternal swell swaying the ocean waves,
the view of endless horizons always re-born,
draw my heart to the dream divine, once more,
be it in heavy languor of burning summer,
or shivering idleness of early December,
beneath tobacco-smoke clouds, hiding the ceiling,
through the book's subtle mystery, always leafing,
a book so dear to those numb souls whose destiny
has, one and all, stamped them with that same malady,
in front of the mirror, I've perfected the cruelty
of the art that, at birth, some demon granted me,
- art of that pain that creates true voluptuousness, -
scratching the wound, to draw blood from my distress.
Poet, is it an insult, or a well-turned compliment?
For regarding you I'm like a lover, to all intent,
faced with a ghost whose gestures are caresses,
with hand, eye of unknown charms, who blesses,
in order to drain one's strength. - All loved beings
are cups of venom one drinks with eyes unseeing,
and the heart that's once transfixed, seduced by pain,
finds death, while still blessing the arrow, every day.
Notes: Baudelaire in 1844 sent this poem to Saint-Beuve, whose novel Volupte has Amaury as its hero. Triboulet (c1479-1536), was the court jester of Louis XII, and Francois 1st, who inspired a scene in Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel. Diderot was the author of La Religieuse, Chateaubriand of Rene.
Elevation
High over the ponds, high over the vales,
the mountains, clouds, woods and meres,
beyond the sun, beyond the ethereal veils,
beyond the confines of the starry spheres,
you ride, my spirit, ride with agility,
swooning with joy, at the wave, strong swimmer
and take your ineffable masculine pleasure,
cutting through that endless immensity.
Fly far away from this deathly miasma:
go, purify yourself in the upper air,
and drink like a pure and divine liquor,
what fills limpid space, that lucid fire.
Behind him the boredoms, the vast distress,
that imposes its weight on fog-bound beings,
happy the man, who on vigorous wings
mounts towards fields, serene and luminous!
He whose thoughts, like larks, go soaring,
flying freely towards dawn air, -
who glides above life: grasps, easily, there,
the language of flowers and silent Things!
Correspondences
Nature is a temple, where, from living pillars, a flux
of confused words is, sometimes, allowed to fall:
Man travels it, through forests of symbols, that all
observe him, with familiar looks.
Like far echoes that distantly congregate,
in a shadowy and profound unity,
vast as the night air, in its clarity,
perfumes, colours, sounds reverberate.
There are fresh perfumes, like the flesh of children,
mellow as oboes, green as prairies,
- and others, rich, glorious and forbidden,
having the expansive power of infinities,
amber, musk, benjamin and incense,
that sing of the ecstasies of spirit and sense.
The Jewels
My sweetheart was naked, knowing my desire,
she wore only her tinkling jewellery,
whose splendour yields her the rich conquering fire
of Moorish slave-girls in the days of their beauty.
When, dancing, it gives out its sharp sound of mockery,
that glistening world of metal and stone,
I am ravished by ecstasy, love like fury
those things where light mingles with sound.
So she lay there, let herself be loved,
and, from the tall bed, she smiled with delight
on my love deep and sweet as the sea is moved,
rising to her as toward a cliff's height.
Like a tamed tigress, her eyes fixed on me
with a vague dreamy air, she tried out her poses,
so wantonly and so innocently,
it gave a new charm to her metamorphoses:
and her arm and her leg, and her back and her thigh,
shining like oil, undulating like a swan's,
passed in front of my calm, clairvoyant eye:
and her belly and breasts, those vine-clustered ones,
thrust out, more seductively than Angels of evil,
to trouble the repose where my soul had its throne,
and topple it from the crystal hill,
where it was seated, calm and alone.
I thought I saw Antiope's hips placed
on a youth's bust, with a new design's grace,
her pelvis accentuated so by her waist.
The rouge was superb on that wild, tawny face!
- And the lamp resigning itself to dying,
as only the fire in the hearth lit the chamber,
each time it gave out a flame in sighing,
it flooded with blood that skin of amber!
The Snake That Dances
How I love to watch, dear indolence,
like a bright shimmer,
of fabric, the skin of your elegant
body glimmer!
Over the bitter-tasting perfume,
the depths of your hair,
odorous, restless spume,
blue, and brown, waves, there,
like a vessel that stirs, awake
when dawn winds rise,
my dreaming soul sets sail
for those distant skies.
Your eyes where nothing's revealed
either acrid or sweet,
are two cold jewels where steel
and gold both meet.
Seeing your rhythmic advance,
your fine abandon,
one might speak of a snake that danced
at the end of the branch it's on.
Under its burden of languidness,
your head at a child-like slant,
rocks with weak listlessness
like a young elephant's,
and your body heels and stretches
like some trim vessel,
that, rocking from side to side, plunges
its yards in the swell.
As when the groaning glacier's thaw
fills the flowing stream,
so when your mouth's juices pour
to the tip of your teeth,
I fancy I'm drinking overpowering, bitter,
Bohemian wine,
that over my heart will scatter
its stars, a liquid sky!
'Je t'adore a l'egal de la voute nocturne'
I adore you, the nocturnal vault's likeness,
o vast taciturnity, o vase of sadness:
I love you, my beauty, the more you flee,
grace of my nights, the more you seem,
to multiply distances, ah ironically,
that bar my arms from the blue immensity.
I advance to the attack, climb to the assault
like a swarm of worms attacking a corpse,
and I cherish, o creature cruel, and implacable,
your coldness that makes you, for me, more beautiful!
A Rotting Carcase
My soul, do you remember the object we saw
on what was a fine summer's day:
at the path's far corner, a shameful corpse
on the gravel-bed, darkly lay,
legs in the air, like a lecherous woman,
burning and oozing with poisons,
revealing, with nonchalance, cynicism,
the belly ripe with its exhalations.
The sun shone down on that rot and mould,
as if to grill it completely,
and render to Nature a hundredfold
what she'd once joined so sweetly:
and the sky gazed at that noble carcass,
like a flower, now blossoming.
The stench was so great, that there, on the grass,
you almost considered fainting.
The flies buzzed away on its putrid belly,
from which black battalions slid,
larvae, that flowed in thickening liquid
the length of those seething shreds.
All of the thing rose and fell like a wave,
surging and glittering:
you'd have said the corpse, swollen with vague
breath, multiplied, was living.
And that 'world' gave off a strange music,
like the wind, or the flowing river,
or the grain, tossed and turned with a rhythmic
motion, by the winnower.
Its shape was vanishing, no more than a dream,
a slowly-formed rough sketch
on forgotten canvas, the artist's gleam
of memory alone perfects.
From behind the rocks a restless bitch
glared with an angry eye,
judging the right moment to snatch
some morsel she'd passed by.
- And yet you too will resemble that ordure,
that terrible corruption,
star of my eyes, sun of my nature,
my angel, and my passion!
Yes! Such you'll become, o queen of grace,
after the final sacraments,
when you go under the flowering grass
to rot among the skeletons.
O my beauty! Tell the worms, then, as
with kisses they eat you away,
how I preserved the form, divine essence
of my loves in their decay !
Beatrice
Through fields of ash, burnt, without verdure,
where I was complaining one day to Nature,
and slowly sharpened the knife of my thought,
as I wandered aimlessly, against my heart,
I saw descend, at noon, on my brow,
a storm-filled and sinister cloud,
holding a vicious demonic horde,
resembling cruel, and curious dwarfs.
Gazing at me, considering me, as cool
as passers-by admiring a fool,
I heard them laughing and whispering in synch,
exchanging many a nudge and a wink:
' Let's contemplate this caricature,
this Hamlet's shadow, echoing his posture,
his indecisive looks, and wild hair.
It's a shame to see that epicure there,
that pauper, that actor on holiday, that droll
fellow, because he can play a fine role,
trying to interest with his tears
the eagles, the grasshoppers, streams and flowers,
and even proclaiming his public tirades
to us who invented those ancient parades? '
I might (since my pride, high as the mountains,
overtops clouds and the cries of demons)
simply have turned my regal head,
if I'd not seen, to that obscene crowd wed,
a crime that failed to make the sun rock,
the queen of my heart, with her matchless look,
laughing with them at my dark distress,
and now and then yielding a filthy caress.
The Balcony
Mother of memories, mistress of mistresses,
O you, all my pleasures! O you, all my learning!
You will remember the joy of caresses,
the sweetness of home and the beauty of evening,
Mother of memories, mistress of mistresses!
On evenings lit by the glow of the ashes
and on the balcony, veiled, rose-coloured, misted,
how gentle your breast was, how good your heart to me!
We have said things meant for eternity,
on evenings lit by the glow of the ashes.
How lovely the light is on sultry evenings!
How deep the void grows! How powerful the heart is!
As I leaned towards you, queen of adored ones
I thought I breathed perfume from your blood's kiss.
How lovely the light is on sultry evenings!
The night it was thickening and closing around us,
and my eyes in the dark were divining your glance,
and I drank your nectar. Oh sweetness! Oh poison!
your feet held, here, in these fraternal hands.
The night it was thickening and closing around us.
I know how to summon up happiest moments,
and relive my past, there, curled, touching your knees.
What good to search for your languorous beauties
but in your dear body, and your heart so sweet?
I know how to summon up happiest moments!
Those vows, those perfumes, those infinite kisses,
will they be reborn, from gulfs beyond soundings,
as the suns that are young again climb in the sky,
after they've passed through the deepest of drownings?
- O vows! O perfumes! O infinite kisses!
Exotic Perfume
When, in Autumn, on a sultry evening,
eyes closed, I breathe your warm breasts' odour,
I see the shore of bliss uncovered,
in the monotonous sun's fierce gleaming:
a languorous island where Nature has come,
bringing rare trees and luscious fruits:
the bodies of lean and vigorous brutes,
and women with eyes of astounding freedom.
Led by your odour to magic climes
I see a harbour, of masts, sails, lines,
worn down by the sea's waves still,
while the green tamarinds' perfume mounts,
circling in air, and filling my nostrils,
and blends, in my soul, with the sailors' chants.
The Head of Hair
O fleece, billowing down to the shoulders!
O curls! O perfume charged with languor!
Ecstasy! To populate love's dark alcove,
with memories sleeping tonight in your hair,
I'd wave it, like a handkerchief, in the air!
Languid Asia and burning Africa,
absent worlds, far-off, almost dead,
live in your forest-depths of aromas!
As music floats other spirits away,
mine, my love, sails your fragrance instead.
I'll go where, full of sap, trees and men
Swoon endlessly in that ardent climate:
Thick tresses, be my tide! You contain,
O sea of ebony, the dazzling dream,
of masts, flames, sails, and oarsmen:
an echoing port where my soul's a drinker
of sound, colour, scent in rolling waves:
where vessels, gliding through silk and amber,
open wide their arms to clasp the splendour
of a pure sky quivering with eternal day.
I'll plunge my head, in love with drunkenness,
in this dark ocean which encloses the other:
and my subtle spirit the breakers caress
will know how to find you, fertile indolence!
Infinite lullaby, full of the balm of leisure!
Hair of blue, that hangs like a shadowy tent,
you bring me the round, immense sky's azure:
in your plaited tresses' feathery descent
I grow fervently drunk with the mingled scent
of coconut-oil, of musk, and coal-tar.
Now! Always! My hand in your heavy mane sowing
jewels, the sapphire, the pearl, and the ruby,
so that you'll not remain deaf to my longing!
Oasis of dream, the gourd where I'm drinking,
of you, long draughts of the wine of memory?
A Phantom II: The Perfume
Reader, have you ever breathed deeply,
with slow savour and intoxicated sense,
a church's saturating grain of incense,
or the long-lasting musk in a sachet?
Profound magical spell where we
are drunk on the past restored in the present.
So lovers on an adored body scent
the exquisite flower of memory.
From her pliant and heavy hair,
living sachet, censer of the alcoves,
a fragrance, wild and savage, rose,
and from her clothes, velvet or muslin, there,
impregnated with her pure years,
emanated a perfume of furs.
Afternoon Song
Though your eyebrows surprise,
and give you an air of strangeness,
which isn't that of the angels,
witch with seductive eyes,
I adore my frivolous girl,
my terrible passion,
with the devotion
of a priest for his idol!
The forest and the desert
perfume your wild hair:
your head has an air
of the enigma, the secret.
Round your flesh, perfume sweet
swirls like a censer's cloud:
you bewitch like the twilight's shroud,
nymph of shadows and heat.
Ah! The strongest potions made
can't match your idleness,
and you know the caress
that resurrects the dead.
Your hips are enamoured
of your back and your breasts,
and the cushions are ravished
with your poses, so languid.
Sometimes to appease
your rage, mysteriously,
you lavish, gravely
your bites and your kisses.
You tear me, my dark-haired one,
with a mocking smile's art,
and then cast on my heart
your gaze sweet as the moon.
Under your shoes so satiny,
your graceful silken feet,
I lay my genius, my wit,
my joy, and my destiny,
restorer of my health's sweetness,
you, all colour and light,
explosion of warmth, bright
in my Siberian darkness.
The Death of Lovers
We will have beds filled with light scent, and
couches deep as a tomb,
and strange flowers in the room,
blooming for us under skies so pleasant.
Vying to exhaust their last fires
our hearts will be two vast flares,
reflecting their double glares
in our two spirits, twin mirrors.
One evening of mystic blue and rose
we'll exchange a single brief glow
like a long sob, heavy with goodbye,
and later, opening the doors, the angel who came
faithful and joyful, will revive
the lustreless mirrors, and the lifeless flame.
The Flawed Bell
It's bitter, yet sweet, on wintry nights,
near to the fire that crackles and fumes,
listening while, far-off, slow memories rise
to echoing chimes that ring through the gloom.
Lucky indeed, the loud-tongued bell
still hale and hearty despite its age,
repeating its pious call, true and well,
like an old trooper in the sentry's cage!
My soul is flawed: when, at boredom's sigh,
it would fill the chill night air with its cry,
it often happens that its voice, enfeebled,
thickens like a wounded man's death-rattle
by a lake of blood, vast heaps of the dying,
who ends, without moving, despite his trying.
The Owls
Among the black yews, their shelter,
the owls are ranged in a row,
like alien deities, the glow,
of their red eyes pierces. They ponder.
They perch there without moving,
till that melancholy moment
when quenching the falling sun,
the shadows are growing.
Their stance teaches the wise
to fear, in this world of ours,
all tumult, and all movement:
Mankind, drunk on brief shadows,
always incurs a punishment
for his longing to stir, and go.
To A Red-headed Beggar-girl
Pale girl with fiery hair,
whose tattered dress shows there
glimpses of your poverty
and your beauty,
a wretched poet, for me,
your young skinny body
with its freckled brownness
has its sweetness.
You wear, more stylishly
than a queen in story
wears her velvet shoe
your heavy two.
Instead of your dress, ripped, short,
may a fine robe of court
trail in long folds to greet
your slender feet:
in place of your torn hose
may daggers of gold,
down your legs, blaze
for the eyes of roues:
may ribbons loosely tied
unveil in your pride
your two lovely breasts, bright
as your eyes:
may your arms be coaxed too,
to sweetly undress you,
and with pert blows
discourage those
impish fingers, pearls that glow,
sonnets of master Belleau,
by your captive lovers,
endlessly offered.
The poets, in pursuit,
dedicating to you their fruit,
and gazing at your shoes, there
from beneath the stair:
many a page-boy's game,
many a famous name,
would spy, still hoping,
on your cool lodging!
You, in your bed, would count
more kisses than lilies no doubt,
and subject to your law
a Valois or more!
When he shines on the town, a poet that sings,
he redeems the fate of the meanest things,
like a king he enters, no servants, alone,
all palaces, all hospitals where men moan.
Sorrows of the Moon
The moon dreams more languidly this evening:
like a sweet woman, in the pillows, at rest,
with her light hand, discretely stroking,
before she sleeps, the curve of her breast,
dying, she gives herself to deep trance,
and casts her eyes over snow-white bowers,
on the satined slope of a soft avalanche,
rising up into the blue, like flowers.
When she sometimes lets fall a furtive tear,
in her secret languor, on our world here,
a pious poet, enemy of sleep's art,
takes that pale tear in the hollow of his palm,
its rainbow glitter like an opal shard,
and far from the sun sets it in his heart.
Don Juan in Hell
When Don Juan went down to Hell's charms,
and paid Charon his obol's fare,
he, a sombre beggar with Antisthenes' glare,
gripped the oars with strong avenging arms.
Showing their sagging breasts through open robes
the women writhed under the black firmament
and, like a crowd of sacred victims, broke
behind him into long incessant lament.
Sganarelle laughing demanded his score,
while Don Luis, with trembling hand,
showed the wandering dead, along the shore,
the insolent son who spurned his command.
By the treacherous spouse, who was her lover,
chaste, skinny Elvira shivered in mourning dress,
seeming to ask a last smile of him, where
there might shine his first vow's tenderness.
Gripping the helm cutting the black wave,
erect in armour, stood a giant of stone,
but the hero, leaning, quiet, on his sword-blade,
scornful of all things, gazed at the sea's foam.
On Tasso in Prison (Eugene Delacroix's painting)
The poet in his cell, unkempt and sick,
who crushes underfoot a manuscript,
measures, with a gaze that horror has inflamed,
the stair of madness where his soul was maimed.
The intoxicating laughter that fills his prison
with the absurd and the strange, swamps his reason.
Doubt surrounds him, and ridiculous fear,
hideous and multiform, circles near.
That genius pent up in a foul sty,
those spectres, those grimaces, the cries,
whirling, in a swarm, about his hair,
that dreamer, whom his lodging's terrors bare,
such are your emblems, Soul, singer of songs obscure,
whom Reality suffocates behind four walls!
Femmes Damnees
Like pensive cattle, lying on the sands,
they turn their eyes towards the sea's far hills,
and, feet searching each other's, touching hands,
know sweet languor and the bitterest thrills.
Some, where the stream babbles, deep in the woods,
their hearts enamoured of long intimacies,
go spelling out the loves of their own girlhoods,
and carving the green bark of young trees.
Others, like Sisters, walk, gravely and slow,
among the rocks, full of apparitions,
where Saint Anthony saw, like lava flows,
the bared crimson breasts of his temptations.
There are those, in the melting candle's glimmer,
who in mute hollows of caves still pagan,
call on you to relieve their groaning fever,
O Bacchus, to soothe the remorse of the ancients!
And others, whose throats love scapularies,
who, hiding whips under their long vestment,
in the sombre groves of the night, solitaries,
blend the sweats of joy with the tears of torment.
O virgins, o demons, o monsters, o martyrs,
great spirits, despisers of reality,
now full of cries, now full of tears,
pious and lustful, seeking infinity,
you, whom my soul has pursued to your hell,
poor sisters, I adore you as much as I weep,
for your dismal sufferings, thirsts that swell,
and the vessels of love, where your great hearts steep!
The Litanies of Satan
O you, the most knowing, and loveliest of Angels,
a god fate betrayed, deprived of praises,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
O, Prince of exile to whom wrong has been done,
who, vanquished, always recovers more strongly,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You who know everything, king of the underworld,
the familiar healer of human distress,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You who teach even lepers, accursed pariahs,
through love itself the taste for Paradise,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
O you who on Death, your ancient true lover,
engendered Hope - that lunatic charmer!
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You who grant the condemned that calm, proud look
that damns a whole people crowding the scaffold,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You who know in what corners of envious countries
a jealous God hid those stones that are precious,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You whose clear eye knows the deep caches
where, buried, the race of metals slumbers,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You whose huge hands hide the precipice,
from the sleepwalker on the sky-scraper's cliff,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You who make magically supple the bones
of the drunkard, out late, who's trampled by horses,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You who taught us to mix saltpetre with sulphur
to console the frail human being who suffers,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You who set your mark, o subtle accomplice,
on the forehead of Croesus, the vile and pitiless,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You who set in the hearts and eyes of young girls
the cult of the wound, adoration of rags,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
The exile's staff, the light of invention,
confessor to those to be hanged, to conspirators,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
Father, adopting those whom God the Father
drove in dark anger from the earthly paradise,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
Note: Croesus was the king of Lydia (c560-546BC), famed for his wealth. He was defeated and captured by Cyrus of Persia at the taking of Sardis, and rescued by his conqueror from the pyre (Herodotus 1. 86)
Beauty
O mortals, I am beautiful, like a stone dream,
and my breast, where each man has bruised his soul,
is created to inspire in poets a goal
as eternal and mute as matter might seem.
An inscrutable Sphinx, I am throned in blue sky:
I unite the swan's white with a heart of snow:
I hate all movement that ruffles the flow,
and I never cry and I never smile.
The poets, in front of my poses, so grand
they seem borrowed from ancient tomb-covers,
will exhaust their days in studying a hand,
since I, to fascinate my docile lovers,
have pure mirrors that magnify everything's beauty:
my eyes, my huge eyes, bright with eternity.
Letter to Sainte-Beuve
On the old oak benches, more shiny and polished
than links of a chain that were, each day, burnished
rubbed by our human flesh, we, still un-bearded,
trailed our ennui, hunched, round-shouldered,
under the four-square heaven of solitude,
where a child drinks study's tart ten-year brew.
It was in those days, outstanding and memorable,
when the teachers, forced to loosen our classical
fetters, yet all still hostile to your rhyming,
succumbed to the pressure of our mad duelling,
and allowed a triumphant, mutinous, pupil
to make Triboulet howl in Latin, at will.
Which of us in those days of pale adolescence
didn't share the weary torpor of confinement,
- eyes lost in the dreary blue of a summer sky
or the snowfall's whiteness, we were dazzled by,
ears pricked, eager, waiting - a pack of hounds
drinking some book's far echo, a riot's sound?
Most of all in summer, that melted the leads,
the walls high, blackened, filled with dread,
with the scorching heat, or when autumn haze
lit the sky with its one monotonous blaze
and made the screeching falcons fall asleep,
white pigeons' terrors, in their slender keep:
the season of reverie when the Muse clings
through the endless day to some bell that rings:
when Melancholy at noon when all is drowsing
at the corridor's end, chin in hand, dragging -
eyes bluer and darker than Diderot's Nun,
that sad, obscene tale known to everyone,
- her feet weighed down by premature ennui,
her brow from night's moist languor un-free.
- and unhealthy evenings, then, feverish nights,
that make young girls love their bodies outright,
and, sterile pleasure, gaze in their mirrors to see
the ripening fruits of their own nubility: -
Italian evenings of thoughtless lethargy,
when knowledge of false delights is revealed
when sombre Venus, on her high black balcony,
out of cool censers, waves of musk sets free.
In this war of enervating circumstances,
matured by your sonnets, prepared by your stanzas,
one evening, having sensed the soul of your art,
I transported Amaury's story into my heart.
Every mystical void is but two steps away
from doubt. - The potion, drop by drop, day by day,
filtering through me, I, drawn to the abyss since I
was fifteen, who swiftly deciphered Rene's sigh,
I parched by some strange thirst for the unknown,
within the smallest of arteries, made its home.
I absorbed it all, the perfumes, the miasmas,
the long-vanished memories' sweetest whispers,
the drawn-out tangle of phrases, their symbols,
the rosaries murmuring in mystical madrigals,
- a voluptuous book, if ever one was brewed.
Now, whether I'm deep in some leafy refuge,
or in the sun of a second hemispheres' days,
the eternal swell swaying the ocean waves,
the view of endless horizons always re-born,
draw my heart to the dream divine, once more,
be it in heavy languor of burning summer,
or shivering idleness of early December,
beneath tobacco-smoke clouds, hiding the ceiling,
through the book's subtle mystery, always leafing,
a book so dear to those numb souls whose destiny
has, one and all, stamped them with that same malady,
in front of the mirror, I've perfected the cruelty
of the art that, at birth, some demon granted me,
- art of that pain that creates true voluptuousness, -
scratching the wound, to draw blood from my distress.
Poet, is it an insult, or a well-turned compliment?
For regarding you I'm like a lover, to all intent,
faced with a ghost whose gestures are caresses,
with hand, eye of unknown charms, who blesses,
in order to drain one's strength. - All loved beings
are cups of venom one drinks with eyes unseeing,
and the heart that's once transfixed, seduced by pain,
finds death, while still blessing the arrow, every day.
Notes: Baudelaire in 1844 sent this poem to Saint-Beuve, whose novel Volupte has Amaury as its hero. Triboulet (c1479-1536), was the court jester of Louis XII, and Francois 1st, who inspired a scene in Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel. Diderot was the author of La Religieuse, Chateaubriand of Rene.
Elevation
High over the ponds, high over the vales,
the mountains, clouds, woods and meres,
beyond the sun, beyond the ethereal veils,
beyond the confines of the starry spheres,
you ride, my spirit, ride with agility,
swooning with joy, at the wave, strong swimmer
and take your ineffable masculine pleasure,
cutting through that endless immensity.
Fly far away from this deathly miasma:
go, purify yourself in the upper air,
and drink like a pure and divine liquor,
what fills limpid space, that lucid fire.
Behind him the boredoms, the vast distress,
that imposes its weight on fog-bound beings,
happy the man, who on vigorous wings
mounts towards fields, serene and luminous!
He whose thoughts, like larks, go soaring,
flying freely towards dawn air, -
who glides above life: grasps, easily, there,
the language of flowers and silent Things!
Correspondences
Nature is a temple, where, from living pillars, a flux
of confused words is, sometimes, allowed to fall:
Man travels it, through forests of symbols, that all
observe him, with familiar looks.
Like far echoes that distantly congregate,
in a shadowy and profound unity,
vast as the night air, in its clarity,
perfumes, colours, sounds reverberate.
There are fresh perfumes, like the flesh of children,
mellow as oboes, green as prairies,
- and others, rich, glorious and forbidden,
having the expansive power of infinities,
amber, musk, benjamin and incense,
that sing of the ecstasies of spirit and sense.
The Jewels
My sweetheart was naked, knowing my desire,
she wore only her tinkling jewellery,
whose splendour yields her the rich conquering fire
of Moorish slave-girls in the days of their beauty.
When, dancing, it gives out its sharp sound of mockery,
that glistening world of metal and stone,
I am ravished by ecstasy, love like fury
those things where light mingles with sound.
So she lay there, let herself be loved,
and, from the tall bed, she smiled with delight
on my love deep and sweet as the sea is moved,
rising to her as toward a cliff's height.
Like a tamed tigress, her eyes fixed on me
with a vague dreamy air, she tried out her poses,
so wantonly and so innocently,
it gave a new charm to her metamorphoses:
and her arm and her leg, and her back and her thigh,
shining like oil, undulating like a swan's,
passed in front of my calm, clairvoyant eye:
and her belly and breasts, those vine-clustered ones,
thrust out, more seductively than Angels of evil,
to trouble the repose where my soul had its throne,
and topple it from the crystal hill,
where it was seated, calm and alone.
I thought I saw Antiope's hips placed
on a youth's bust, with a new design's grace,
her pelvis accentuated so by her waist.
The rouge was superb on that wild, tawny face!
- And the lamp resigning itself to dying,
as only the fire in the hearth lit the chamber,
each time it gave out a flame in sighing,
it flooded with blood that skin of amber!
The Snake That Dances
How I love to watch, dear indolence,
like a bright shimmer,
of fabric, the skin of your elegant
body glimmer!
Over the bitter-tasting perfume,
the depths of your hair,
odorous, restless spume,
blue, and brown, waves, there,
like a vessel that stirs, awake
when dawn winds rise,
my dreaming soul sets sail
for those distant skies.
Your eyes where nothing's revealed
either acrid or sweet,
are two cold jewels where steel
and gold both meet.
Seeing your rhythmic advance,
your fine abandon,
one might speak of a snake that danced
at the end of the branch it's on.
Under its burden of languidness,
your head at a child-like slant,
rocks with weak listlessness
like a young elephant's,
and your body heels and stretches
like some trim vessel,
that, rocking from side to side, plunges
its yards in the swell.
As when the groaning glacier's thaw
fills the flowing stream,
so when your mouth's juices pour
to the tip of your teeth,
I fancy I'm drinking overpowering, bitter,
Bohemian wine,
that over my heart will scatter
its stars, a liquid sky!
'Je t'adore a l'egal de la voute nocturne'
I adore you, the nocturnal vault's likeness,
o vast taciturnity, o vase of sadness:
I love you, my beauty, the more you flee,
grace of my nights, the more you seem,
to multiply distances, ah ironically,
that bar my arms from the blue immensity.
I advance to the attack, climb to the assault
like a swarm of worms attacking a corpse,
and I cherish, o creature cruel, and implacable,
your coldness that makes you, for me, more beautiful!
A Rotting Carcase
My soul, do you remember the object we saw
on what was a fine summer's day:
at the path's far corner, a shameful corpse
on the gravel-bed, darkly lay,
legs in the air, like a lecherous woman,
burning and oozing with poisons,
revealing, with nonchalance, cynicism,
the belly ripe with its exhalations.
The sun shone down on that rot and mould,
as if to grill it completely,
and render to Nature a hundredfold
what she'd once joined so sweetly:
and the sky gazed at that noble carcass,
like a flower, now blossoming.
The stench was so great, that there, on the grass,
you almost considered fainting.
The flies buzzed away on its putrid belly,
from which black battalions slid,
larvae, that flowed in thickening liquid
the length of those seething shreds.
All of the thing rose and fell like a wave,
surging and glittering:
you'd have said the corpse, swollen with vague
breath, multiplied, was living.
And that 'world' gave off a strange music,
like the wind, or the flowing river,
or the grain, tossed and turned with a rhythmic
motion, by the winnower.
Its shape was vanishing, no more than a dream,
a slowly-formed rough sketch
on forgotten canvas, the artist's gleam
of memory alone perfects.
From behind the rocks a restless bitch
glared with an angry eye,
judging the right moment to snatch
some morsel she'd passed by.
- And yet you too will resemble that ordure,
that terrible corruption,
star of my eyes, sun of my nature,
my angel, and my passion!
Yes! Such you'll become, o queen of grace,
after the final sacraments,
when you go under the flowering grass
to rot among the skeletons.
O my beauty! Tell the worms, then, as
with kisses they eat you away,
how I preserved the form, divine essence
of my loves in their decay !
Beatrice
Through fields of ash, burnt, without verdure,
where I was complaining one day to Nature,
and slowly sharpened the knife of my thought,
as I wandered aimlessly, against my heart,
I saw descend, at noon, on my brow,
a storm-filled and sinister cloud,
holding a vicious demonic horde,
resembling cruel, and curious dwarfs.
Gazing at me, considering me, as cool
as passers-by admiring a fool,
I heard them laughing and whispering in synch,
exchanging many a nudge and a wink:
' Let's contemplate this caricature,
this Hamlet's shadow, echoing his posture,
his indecisive looks, and wild hair.
It's a shame to see that epicure there,
that pauper, that actor on holiday, that droll
fellow, because he can play a fine role,
trying to interest with his tears
the eagles, the grasshoppers, streams and flowers,
and even proclaiming his public tirades
to us who invented those ancient parades? '
I might (since my pride, high as the mountains,
overtops clouds and the cries of demons)
simply have turned my regal head,
if I'd not seen, to that obscene crowd wed,
a crime that failed to make the sun rock,
the queen of my heart, with her matchless look,
laughing with them at my dark distress,
and now and then yielding a filthy caress.
The Balcony
Mother of memories, mistress of mistresses,
O you, all my pleasures! O you, all my learning!
You will remember the joy of caresses,
the sweetness of home and the beauty of evening,
Mother of memories, mistress of mistresses!
On evenings lit by the glow of the ashes
and on the balcony, veiled, rose-coloured, misted,
how gentle your breast was, how good your heart to me!
We have said things meant for eternity,
on evenings lit by the glow of the ashes.
How lovely the light is on sultry evenings!
How deep the void grows! How powerful the heart is!
As I leaned towards you, queen of adored ones
I thought I breathed perfume from your blood's kiss.
How lovely the light is on sultry evenings!
The night it was thickening and closing around us,
and my eyes in the dark were divining your glance,
and I drank your nectar. Oh sweetness! Oh poison!
your feet held, here, in these fraternal hands.
The night it was thickening and closing around us.
I know how to summon up happiest moments,
and relive my past, there, curled, touching your knees.
What good to search for your languorous beauties
but in your dear body, and your heart so sweet?
I know how to summon up happiest moments!
Those vows, those perfumes, those infinite kisses,
will they be reborn, from gulfs beyond soundings,
as the suns that are young again climb in the sky,
after they've passed through the deepest of drownings?
- O vows! O perfumes! O infinite kisses!
Exotic Perfume
When, in Autumn, on a sultry evening,
eyes closed, I breathe your warm breasts' odour,
I see the shore of bliss uncovered,
in the monotonous sun's fierce gleaming:
a languorous island where Nature has come,
bringing rare trees and luscious fruits:
the bodies of lean and vigorous brutes,
and women with eyes of astounding freedom.
Led by your odour to magic climes
I see a harbour, of masts, sails, lines,
worn down by the sea's waves still,
while the green tamarinds' perfume mounts,
circling in air, and filling my nostrils,
and blends, in my soul, with the sailors' chants.
The Head of Hair
O fleece, billowing down to the shoulders!
O curls! O perfume charged with languor!
Ecstasy! To populate love's dark alcove,
with memories sleeping tonight in your hair,
I'd wave it, like a handkerchief, in the air!
Languid Asia and burning Africa,
absent worlds, far-off, almost dead,
live in your forest-depths of aromas!
As music floats other spirits away,
mine, my love, sails your fragrance instead.
I'll go where, full of sap, trees and men
Swoon endlessly in that ardent climate:
Thick tresses, be my tide! You contain,
O sea of ebony, the dazzling dream,
of masts, flames, sails, and oarsmen:
an echoing port where my soul's a drinker
of sound, colour, scent in rolling waves:
where vessels, gliding through silk and amber,
open wide their arms to clasp the splendour
of a pure sky quivering with eternal day.
I'll plunge my head, in love with drunkenness,
in this dark ocean which encloses the other:
and my subtle spirit the breakers caress
will know how to find you, fertile indolence!
Infinite lullaby, full of the balm of leisure!
Hair of blue, that hangs like a shadowy tent,
you bring me the round, immense sky's azure:
in your plaited tresses' feathery descent
I grow fervently drunk with the mingled scent
of coconut-oil, of musk, and coal-tar.
Now! Always! My hand in your heavy mane sowing
jewels, the sapphire, the pearl, and the ruby,
so that you'll not remain deaf to my longing!
Oasis of dream, the gourd where I'm drinking,
of you, long draughts of the wine of memory?
A Phantom II: The Perfume
Reader, have you ever breathed deeply,
with slow savour and intoxicated sense,
a church's saturating grain of incense,
or the long-lasting musk in a sachet?
Profound magical spell where we
are drunk on the past restored in the present.
So lovers on an adored body scent
the exquisite flower of memory.
From her pliant and heavy hair,
living sachet, censer of the alcoves,
a fragrance, wild and savage, rose,
and from her clothes, velvet or muslin, there,
impregnated with her pure years,
emanated a perfume of furs.
Afternoon Song
Though your eyebrows surprise,
and give you an air of strangeness,
which isn't that of the angels,
witch with seductive eyes,
I adore my frivolous girl,
my terrible passion,
with the devotion
of a priest for his idol!
The forest and the desert
perfume your wild hair:
your head has an air
of the enigma, the secret.
Round your flesh, perfume sweet
swirls like a censer's cloud:
you bewitch like the twilight's shroud,
nymph of shadows and heat.
Ah! The strongest potions made
can't match your idleness,
and you know the caress
that resurrects the dead.
Your hips are enamoured
of your back and your breasts,
and the cushions are ravished
with your poses, so languid.
Sometimes to appease
your rage, mysteriously,
you lavish, gravely
your bites and your kisses.
You tear me, my dark-haired one,
with a mocking smile's art,
and then cast on my heart
your gaze sweet as the moon.
Under your shoes so satiny,
your graceful silken feet,
I lay my genius, my wit,
my joy, and my destiny,
restorer of my health's sweetness,
you, all colour and light,
explosion of warmth, bright
in my Siberian darkness.
The Death of Lovers
We will have beds filled with light scent, and
couches deep as a tomb,
and strange flowers in the room,
blooming for us under skies so pleasant.
Vying to exhaust their last fires
our hearts will be two vast flares,
reflecting their double glares
in our two spirits, twin mirrors.
One evening of mystic blue and rose
we'll exchange a single brief glow
like a long sob, heavy with goodbye,
and later, opening the doors, the angel who came
faithful and joyful, will revive
the lustreless mirrors, and the lifeless flame.
The Flawed Bell
It's bitter, yet sweet, on wintry nights,
near to the fire that crackles and fumes,
listening while, far-off, slow memories rise
to echoing chimes that ring through the gloom.
Lucky indeed, the loud-tongued bell
still hale and hearty despite its age,
repeating its pious call, true and well,
like an old trooper in the sentry's cage!
My soul is flawed: when, at boredom's sigh,
it would fill the chill night air with its cry,
it often happens that its voice, enfeebled,
thickens like a wounded man's death-rattle
by a lake of blood, vast heaps of the dying,
who ends, without moving, despite his trying.
The Owls
Among the black yews, their shelter,
the owls are ranged in a row,
like alien deities, the glow,
of their red eyes pierces. They ponder.
They perch there without moving,
till that melancholy moment
when quenching the falling sun,
the shadows are growing.
Their stance teaches the wise
to fear, in this world of ours,
all tumult, and all movement:
Mankind, drunk on brief shadows,
always incurs a punishment
for his longing to stir, and go.
To A Red-headed Beggar-girl
Pale girl with fiery hair,
whose tattered dress shows there
glimpses of your poverty
and your beauty,
a wretched poet, for me,
your young skinny body
with its freckled brownness
has its sweetness.
You wear, more stylishly
than a queen in story
wears her velvet shoe
your heavy two.
Instead of your dress, ripped, short,
may a fine robe of court
trail in long folds to greet
your slender feet:
in place of your torn hose
may daggers of gold,
down your legs, blaze
for the eyes of roues:
may ribbons loosely tied
unveil in your pride
your two lovely breasts, bright
as your eyes:
may your arms be coaxed too,
to sweetly undress you,
and with pert blows
discourage those
impish fingers, pearls that glow,
sonnets of master Belleau,
by your captive lovers,
endlessly offered.
The poets, in pursuit,
dedicating to you their fruit,
and gazing at your shoes, there
from beneath the stair:
many a page-boy's game,
many a famous name,
would spy, still hoping,
on your cool lodging!
You, in your bed, would count
more kisses than lilies no doubt,
and subject to your law
a Valois or more!
- Meanwhile you go seeking
any old scraps, cadging,
outside the back door
of some shabby store:
you go gazing, from afar,
at valueless beads that are
still, alas, so much more
than I can afford!
Go then, with no ornament,
perfume, pearl or diamond,
only your slender nudity,
O my beauty!
Wandering Gypsies
The prophetic tribe with burning eyes
yesterday took to the highway, carrying
children slung on their backs, or offering
proud hunger the breast's ever-ripe prize.
The men go on foot, with shining weapons,
by the carts where their folk huddle together,
sweeping the heavens, eyes grown heavier
with mournful regret for absent visions.
The cricket, deep in his sandy retreat,
redoubles his call, on seeing their passing feet:
Cybele, who loves them, re-leafs the glades,
makes the rocks gush, the desert bloom,
before these voyagers, thrown wide to whom
is the intimate kingdom of future shades.
Note: Cybele was the Phrygian great goddess, personifying the earth in its savage state, worshipped in caves and on mountaintops.
Bad Luck
To roll the rock you fought
takes your courage, Sisyphus!
No matter what effort from us,
Art is long, and Time is short.
Far from the grave of celebrity,
my heart, like a muffled drum,
taps out its funereal thrum
towards some lonely cemetery.
- Many a long-buried gem
sleeps in shadowy oblivion
far from pickaxes and drills:
in profound solitude set,
many a flower, with regret,
its sweet perfume spills.
The Death of the Poor
It is Death, alas, persuades us to keep on living:
the goal of life and the only hope we have,
like an elixir, rousing, intoxicating, giving
the strength to march on towards the grave:
through the frost and snow and storm-wind, look
it's the vibrant light on our black horizon:
the fabulous inn, written of in the book,
where one can eat, and sleep and sit oneself down:
it's an Angel, who holds in his magnetic beams,
sleep and the gift of ecstatic dreams,
who makes the bed where the poor and naked lie:
it's the glory of the Gods, the mystic granary,
it's the poor man's purse, his ancient country,
it's the doorway opening on an unknown sky!
Music
Music, like an ocean, often carries me away!
Through the ether far,
or under a canopy of mist, I set sail
for my pale star.
Breasting the waves, my lungs swollen
like a ship's canvas,
night veils from me the long rollers,
I ride their backs:
I sense all a suffering vessel's passions
vibrating within me:
while fair winds or the storm's convulsions
on the immense deep
cradle me. Or else flat calm, vast mirror there
of my despair!
The Ransom
Man, with which to pay his ransom,
has two fields of deep rich earth,
which he must dig and bring to birth,
with the iron blade of reason.
To obtain the smallest rose,
to garner a few ears of wheat,
he must wet them without cease,
with briny tears from his grey brow.
One is Art: Love is the other.
- To render his propitiation,
on the day of conflagration,
when the last strict reckoning's here,
full of crops' and flowers' displays
he will have to show his barns,
with those colours and those forms
that gain the Angels' praise.
Voyage to Cythera
My heart soared with joy, like a bird in flight,
haunting the rigging sliding by:
the ship swayed under a cloudless sky,
like an angel, dazed by radiant light.
What island is that, dark and sad? - Cythera,
in verse, it's famous you understand,
every aged child's golden land.
Look, after all, there's nothing here.
- Isle of sweet secrets and the heart's delight!
Ancient Venus's marvellous shadow,
like perfume, covers the sea, around you,
fills the mind with love, and the languorous night.
Isle of green myrtle and flowers, wide open,
beautiful, revered by every nation,
where the sighs, of the heart's adoration,
glide like incense, over a rose garden,
or are cooing, like doves, in scented air!
- Cythera, now a desert, to mock,
full of piercing calls, a barren rock.
But I saw a strange thing there!
It was not a temple, shaded by trees,
where the young priestess, with flower-like desires,
her body alight with secret fires,
goes, opening her robes to the passing breeze.
But a shore where our white sails moving by
disturbed the birds, and we saw, like jet,
the black of a cypress tree's silhouette,
a three-branched gibbet, against the sky.
A fierce bird, perching, on the head
of a hanged man, rent him, surely,
planting its impure beak, in fury,
in the bloody corners of the dead.
The eyes were two holes: from the cavernous belly
the weight of his guts poured down his sides,
and his torturers, gorged on hideous delights,
had castrated him, most efficiently.
Beneath his feet, circling, spun a jealous pack
their muzzles lifted, of whirling beasts,
one large one, leaping in their midst,
an executioner, with cohorts at his back.
Inhabitant of Cythera, son, of that lovely sky,
you suffered their insults, silently,
to expiate your infamy,
lacking the tomb your crimes deny.
Hanged man, grotesque sufferer, your pain is mine!
I felt at the sight of your dangling limbs,
the long stream of gall, old sufferings,
rise to my teeth like acid bile.
Before you, poor devil, of dear memory,
I felt all the beaks, and ravening claws,
of swooping ravens, dark panthers' jaws,
that were once so fond of tearing at me.
- The sky was entrancing, so calm the sea,
but, to me, all was dark, and smeared with blood.
Alas!
Is it not pleasant, now we are tired,
and tarnished, like other men, to search for those fires
in the furthest East, where, again, we might see
morning's new dawn, and, in mad history,
hear the echoes, that vanish behind us, the sighs
of the young loves, God gives, at the start of our lives?
'Il aimait a la voir'
It was in her white skirts that he loved to see
her run straight through the branches and leaves, gracefully,
but still gauche, and hiding her leg from the light,
when she tore her dress, on the briars, in her flight.
Incompatibility
Higher there, higher, far from the ways,
from the farms and the valleys, beyond the trees,
beyond the hills and the grasses' haze,
far from the herd-trampled tapestries,
you discover a sombre pool in the deep
that a few bare snow-covered mountains form.
The lake, in light's, and night's sublime sleep,
is never disturbed in its silent storm.
In that mournful waste, to the unsure ear,
come faint drawn-out sounds, more dead than the bell,
of some far-off cow, the echoes unclear,
as it grazes the slope, of a distant dell.
On those hills where the wind effaces all signs,
on those glaciers, fired by the sun's pure light,
on those rocks, where dizziness threatens the mind,
in that lake's vermilion presage of night,
under my feet, and above my head,
silence, that makes you wish to escape;
that eternal silence, of the mountainous bed
of motionless air, where everything waits.
You would say that the sky, in its loneliness,
gazed at itself in the glass, and, up there,
the mountains listened, in grave watchfulness
to the mystery nothing that's human can hear.
And when, by chance, a wandering cloud
darkens the silent lake, moving by,
you might think that you saw some spirit's robe,
or else its clear shadow, travelling, over the sky.
To A Creole Lady
In a perfumed land caressed by the sun
I found, beneath the trees' crimson canopy,
palms from which languor pours on one's
eyes, the veiled charms of a Creole lady.
Her hue pale, but warm, a dark-haired enchantress,
she shows in her neck's poise the noblest of manners:
slender and tall, she strides by like a huntress,
tranquil her smile, her eyes full of assurance.
If you travelled, my Lady, to the land of true glory,
the banks of the Seine or green Loire, a Beauty
worthy of gracing the manors of olden days,
you'd inspire, among arbours' shadowy secrets,
a thousand sonnets in the hearts of the poets,
whom, more than your blacks, your vast eyes would enslave.
To A Woman of Malabar
Your feet are as slender as hands, your hips, to me,
wide enough for the sweetest white girl's envy:
to the wise artist your body is sweet and dear,
and your great velvet eyes black without peer.
In the hot blue lands where God gave you your nature
your task is to light a pipe for your master,
to fill up the vessels with cool fragrance
and chase the mosquitoes away when they dance,
and when dawn sings in the plane-trees, afar,
fetch bananas and pineapples from the bazaar.
All day your bare feet go where they wish
as you hum old lost melodies under your breath,
and when evening's red cloak descends overhead
you lie down sweetly on a straw bed,
where humming birds fill your floating dreams,
as graceful and flowery as you it seems.
Happy child, why do you long to see France
our suffering, and over-crowded land,
and trusting your life to the sailors, your friends,
say a fond goodbye to your dear tamarinds?
Scantily dressed, in muslins, frail,
shivering under the snow and hail,
how you'd pine for your leisure, sweet and free,
body pinned in a corset's brutality,
if you'd to glean supper amongst our vile harms,
selling the scent of exotic charms,
sad pensive eyes searching our fog-bound sleaze,
for the lost ghosts of your coconut-trees!
The Albatross
Often, for their amusement, bored sailors
take albatrosses, vast sea-birds, that sleep
in the air, indolent fellow travellers,
following the ship skimming the deep.
No sooner are they set down on the boards,
than those kings of the azure, maladroit, shamefully
let their vast white wings, like oars,
trail along their sides, piteously.
Winged traveller, gauche, gross, useless, laughable,
now, one of them, with a pipe stem, prods you,
who, a moment ago, were beautiful:
another, limping, mimics the cripple who flew.
The Poet bears a likeness to that prince of the air,
who mocks at slingshots, and haunts the winds:
on earth, an exile among the scornful, where
he is hampered, in walking, by his giant wings.
Bertha's Eyes
You can scorn more illustrious eyes,
sweet eyes of my child, through which there takes flight
something as good or as tender as night.
Turn to mine your charmed shadows, sweet eyes!
Great eyes of a child, adorable secrets,
you resemble those grottoes of magic
where, behind the dark and lethargic,
shine vague treasures the world forgets.
My child has veiled eyes, profound and vast,
and shining like you, Night, immense, above!
Their fires are of Trust, mixed with thoughts of Love,
that glitter in depths, voluptuous or chaste.
'Je n'ai pas oublie, voisine de la ville,'
I've not forgotten, near to the town,
our white house, small but alone:
its Pomona of plaster, its Venus of old
hiding nude limbs in the meagre grove,
and the sun, superb, at evening, streaming,
behind the glass, where its sheaves were bursting,
a huge eye in a curious heaven, present
to gaze at our meal, lengthy and silent,
spreading its beautiful candle glimmer
on the frugal cloth and the rough curtain.
'La servante au grand coeur dont vous etiez jalouse,'
The great-hearted servant of whom you were jealous,
sleeping her sleep in the humble grass,
shouldn't we take her a few flowers?
The dead, the poor dead, have grief like ours,
and when October sighs, clipper of trees,
round their marble tombs, with its mournful breeze,
they must find the living, ungratefully, wed,
snug in sleep, to the warmth of their bed,
while they, devoured by dark reflection,
without bedfellow, or sweet conversation,
old skeletons riddled with worms, deep frozen,
feel the winter snows trickling round them,
and the years flow by without kin or friend
to replace the wreaths at their railing's end.
If some night, when the logs whistle and flare,
seeing her sitting calm, in that chair,
if on a December night, cold and blue,
I might find her there placed in the room,
solemn, and come from her bed, eternal,
to guard the grown child with her eye, maternal,
what could I answer that pious spirit,
seeing tears under her hollow eyelid?
Landscape
In order to write my chaste verses I'll lie
like an astrologer near to the sky
and, by the bell-towers, listen in dream
to their solemn hymns on the air-stream.
Hands on chin, from my attic's height
I'll see the workshops of song and light,
the gutters, the belfries those masts of the city,
the vast skies that yield dreams of eternity
It is sweet to see stars being born in the blue,
through the mists, the lamps at the windows, too,
the rivers of smoke climbing the firmament,
and the moon pouring out her pale enchantment.
I'll see the springs, summers, autumns' glow,
and when winter brings the monotonous snow
I'll close all my doors and shutters tight
and build palaces of faery in the night.
Then I'll dream of blue-wet horizons,
weeping fountains of alabaster, gardens,
kisses, birdsong at morning or twilight,
all in the Idyll that is most childlike.
The mob that are beating in vain on the glass,
won't make me raise my head as they pass.
Since I'll be plunged deep in the thrill
of evoking the springtime through my own will,
raising the sun out of my own heart,
making sweet air from my burning thought.
The Sun
Through the streets where at windows of old houses
the persian blinds hide secret luxuries,
when the cruel sun strikes with redoubled fury
on the roofs and fields, the meadows and city,
I go alone in my crazy sword-play
scenting a chance rhyme on every road-way,
stumbling on words and over the pavement
finding verses I often dreamed might be sent.
This nurturing father, anaemia's foe
stirs, in the fields, the worm and the rose,
makes our cares evaporate into the blue,
fills the hives and our brains with honey-dew.
It is he who gives youth to the old man, the cripple,
makes them like young girls, happy and gentle,
and commands the crops to grow ripe in an hour
of the immortal heart, that so longs to flower.
When he shines on the town, a poet that sings,
he redeems the fate of the meanest things,
like a king he enters, no servants, alone,
all palaces, all hospitals where men moan.
Sorrows of the Moon
The moon dreams more languidly this evening:
like a sweet woman, in the pillows, at rest,
with her light hand, discretely stroking,
before she sleeps, the curve of her breast,
dying, she gives herself to deep trance,
and casts her eyes over snow-white bowers,
on the satined slope of a soft avalanche,
rising up into the blue, like flowers.
When she sometimes lets fall a furtive tear,
in her secret languor, on our world here,
a pious poet, enemy of sleep's art,
takes that pale tear in the hollow of his palm,
its rainbow glitter like an opal shard,
and far from the sun sets it in his heart.
Don Juan in Hell
When Don Juan went down to Hell's charms,
and paid Charon his obol's fare,
he, a sombre beggar with Antisthenes' glare,
gripped the oars with strong avenging arms.
Showing their sagging breasts through open robes
the women writhed under the black firmament
and, like a crowd of sacred victims, broke
behind him into long incessant lament.
Sganarelle laughing demanded his score,
while Don Luis, with trembling hand,
showed the wandering dead, along the shore,
the insolent son who spurned his command.
By the treacherous spouse, who was her lover,
chaste, skinny Elvira shivered in mourning dress,
seeming to ask a last smile of him, where
there might shine his first vow's tenderness.
Gripping the helm cutting the black wave,
erect in armour, stood a giant of stone,
but the hero, leaning, quiet, on his sword-blade,
scornful of all things, gazed at the sea's foam.
On Tasso in Prison (Eugene Delacroix's painting)
The poet in his cell, unkempt and sick,
who crushes underfoot a manuscript,
measures, with a gaze that horror has inflamed,
the stair of madness where his soul was maimed.
The intoxicating laughter that fills his prison
with the absurd and the strange, swamps his reason.
Doubt surrounds him, and ridiculous fear,
hideous and multiform, circles near.
That genius pent up in a foul sty,
those spectres, those grimaces, the cries,
whirling, in a swarm, about his hair,
that dreamer, whom his lodging's terrors bare,
such are your emblems, Soul, singer of songs obscure,
whom Reality suffocates behind four walls!
Femmes Damnees
Like pensive cattle, lying on the sands,
they turn their eyes towards the sea's far hills,
and, feet searching each other's, touching hands,
know sweet languor and the bitterest thrills.
Some, where the stream babbles, deep in the woods,
their hearts enamoured of long intimacies,
go spelling out the loves of their own girlhoods,
and carving the green bark of young trees.
Others, like Sisters, walk, gravely and slow,
among the rocks, full of apparitions,
where Saint Anthony saw, like lava flows,
the bared crimson breasts of his temptations.
There are those, in the melting candle's glimmer,
who in mute hollows of caves still pagan,
call on you to relieve their groaning fever,
O Bacchus, to soothe the remorse of the ancients!
And others, whose throats love scapularies,
who, hiding whips under their long vestment,
in the sombre groves of the night, solitaries,
blend the sweats of joy with the tears of torment.
O virgins, o demons, o monsters, o martyrs,
great spirits, despisers of reality,
now full of cries, now full of tears,
pious and lustful, seeking infinity,
you, whom my soul has pursued to your hell,
poor sisters, I adore you as much as I weep,
for your dismal sufferings, thirsts that swell,
and the vessels of love, where your great hearts steep!
The Litanies of Satan
O you, the most knowing, and loveliest of Angels,
a god fate betrayed, deprived of praises,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
O, Prince of exile to whom wrong has been done,
who, vanquished, always recovers more strongly,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You who know everything, king of the underworld,
the familiar healer of human distress,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You who teach even lepers, accursed pariahs,
through love itself the taste for Paradise,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
O you who on Death, your ancient true lover,
engendered Hope - that lunatic charmer!
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You who grant the condemned that calm, proud look
that damns a whole people crowding the scaffold,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You who know in what corners of envious countries
a jealous God hid those stones that are precious,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You whose clear eye knows the deep caches
where, buried, the race of metals slumbers,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You whose huge hands hide the precipice,
from the sleepwalker on the sky-scraper's cliff,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You who make magically supple the bones
of the drunkard, out late, who's trampled by horses,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You who taught us to mix saltpetre with sulphur
to console the frail human being who suffers,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You who set your mark, o subtle accomplice,
on the forehead of Croesus, the vile and pitiless,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You who set in the hearts and eyes of young girls
the cult of the wound, adoration of rags,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
The exile's staff, the light of invention,
confessor to those to be hanged, to conspirators,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
Father, adopting those whom God the Father
drove in dark anger from the earthly paradise,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
Note: Croesus was the king of Lydia (c560-546BC), famed for his wealth. He was defeated and captured by Cyrus of Persia at the taking of Sardis, and rescued by his conqueror from the pyre (Herodotus 1. 86)
Beauty
O mortals, I am beautiful, like a stone dream,
and my breast, where each man has bruised his soul,
is created to inspire in poets a goal
as eternal and mute as matter might seem.
An inscrutable Sphinx, I am throned in blue sky:
I unite the swan's white with a heart of snow:
I hate all movement that ruffles the flow,
and I never cry and I never smile.
The poets, in front of my poses, so grand
they seem borrowed from ancient tomb-covers,
will exhaust their days in studying a hand,
since I, to fascinate my docile lovers,
have pure mirrors that magnify everything's beauty:
my eyes, my huge eyes, bright with eternity.
Letter to Sainte-Beuve
On the old oak benches, more shiny and polished
than links of a chain that were, each day, burnished
rubbed by our human flesh, we, still un-bearded,
trailed our ennui, hunched, round-shouldered,
under the four-square heaven of solitude,
where a child drinks study's tart ten-year brew.
It was in those days, outstanding and memorable,
when the teachers, forced to loosen our classical
fetters, yet all still hostile to your rhyming,
succumbed to the pressure of our mad duelling,
and allowed a triumphant, mutinous, pupil
to make Triboulet howl in Latin, at will.
Which of us in those days of pale adolescence
didn't share the weary torpor of confinement,
- eyes lost in the dreary blue of a summer sky
or the snowfall's whiteness, we were dazzled by,
ears pricked, eager, waiting - a pack of hounds
drinking some book's far echo, a riot's sound?
Most of all in summer, that melted the leads,
the walls high, blackened, filled with dread,
with the scorching heat, or when autumn haze
lit the sky with its one monotonous blaze
and made the screeching falcons fall asleep,
white pigeons' terrors, in their slender keep:
the season of reverie when the Muse clings
through the endless day to some bell that rings:
when Melancholy at noon when all is drowsing
at the corridor's end, chin in hand, dragging -
eyes bluer and darker than Diderot's Nun,
that sad, obscene tale known to everyone,
- her feet weighed down by premature ennui,
her brow from night's moist languor un-free.
- and unhealthy evenings, then, feverish nights,
that make young girls love their bodies outright,
and, sterile pleasure, gaze in their mirrors to see
the ripening fruits of their own nubility: -
Italian evenings of thoughtless lethargy,
when knowledge of false delights is revealed
when sombre Venus, on her high black balcony,
out of cool censers, waves of musk sets free.
In this war of enervating circumstances,
matured by your sonnets, prepared by your stanzas,
one evening, having sensed the soul of your art,
I transported Amaury's story into my heart.
Every mystical void is but two steps away
from doubt. - The potion, drop by drop, day by day,
filtering through me, I, drawn to the abyss since I
was fifteen, who swiftly deciphered Rene's sigh,
I parched by some strange thirst for the unknown,
within the smallest of arteries, made its home.
I absorbed it all, the perfumes, the miasmas,
the long-vanished memories' sweetest whispers,
the drawn-out tangle of phrases, their symbols,
the rosaries murmuring in mystical madrigals,
- a voluptuous book, if ever one was brewed.
Now, whether I'm deep in some leafy refuge,
or in the sun of a second hemispheres' days,
the eternal swell swaying the ocean waves,
the view of endless horizons always re-born,
draw my heart to the dream divine, once more,
be it in heavy languor of burning summer,
or shivering idleness of early December,
beneath tobacco-smoke clouds, hiding the ceiling,
through the book's subtle mystery, always leafing,
a book so dear to those numb souls whose destiny
has, one and all, stamped them with that same malady,
in front of the mirror, I've perfected the cruelty
of the art that, at birth, some demon granted me,
- art of that pain that creates true voluptuousness, -
scratching the wound, to draw blood from my distress.
Poet, is it an insult, or a well-turned compliment?
For regarding you I'm like a lover, to all intent,
faced with a ghost whose gestures are caresses,
with hand, eye of unknown charms, who blesses,
in order to drain one's strength. - All loved beings
are cups of venom one drinks with eyes unseeing,
and the heart that's once transfixed, seduced by pain,
finds death, while still blessing the arrow, every day.
Notes: Baudelaire in 1844 sent this poem to Saint-Beuve, whose novel Volupte has Amaury as its hero. Triboulet (c1479-1536), was the court jester of Louis XII, and Francois 1st, who inspired a scene in Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel. Diderot was the author of La Religieuse, Chateaubriand of Rene.
Elevation
High over the ponds, high over the vales,
the mountains, clouds, woods and meres,
beyond the sun, beyond the ethereal veils,
beyond the confines of the starry spheres,
you ride, my spirit, ride with agility,
swooning with joy, at the wave, strong swimmer
and take your ineffable masculine pleasure,
cutting through that endless immensity.
Fly far away from this deathly miasma:
go, purify yourself in the upper air,
and drink like a pure and divine liquor,
what fills limpid space, that lucid fire.
Behind him the boredoms, the vast distress,
that imposes its weight on fog-bound beings,
happy the man, who on vigorous wings
mounts towards fields, serene and luminous!
He whose thoughts, like larks, go soaring,
flying freely towards dawn air, -
who glides above life: grasps, easily, there,
the language of flowers and silent Things!
Correspondences
Nature is a temple, where, from living pillars, a flux
of confused words is, sometimes, allowed to fall:
Man travels it, through forests of symbols, that all
observe him, with familiar looks.
Like far echoes that distantly congregate,
in a shadowy and profound unity,
vast as the night air, in its clarity,
perfumes, colours, sounds reverberate.
There are fresh perfumes, like the flesh of children,
mellow as oboes, green as prairies,
- and others, rich, glorious and forbidden,
having the expansive power of infinities,
amber, musk, benjamin and incense,
that sing of the ecstasies of spirit and sense.
The Jewels
My sweetheart was naked, knowing my desire,
she wore only her tinkling jewellery,
whose splendour yields her the rich conquering fire
of Moorish slave-girls in the days of their beauty.
When, dancing, it gives out its sharp sound of mockery,
that glistening world of metal and stone,
I am ravished by ecstasy, love like fury
those things where light mingles with sound.
So she lay there, let herself be loved,
and, from the tall bed, she smiled with delight
on my love deep and sweet as the sea is moved,
rising to her as toward a cliff's height.
Like a tamed tigress, her eyes fixed on me
with a vague dreamy air, she tried out her poses,
so wantonly and so innocently,
it gave a new charm to her metamorphoses:
and her arm and her leg, and her back and her thigh,
shining like oil, undulating like a swan's,
passed in front of my calm, clairvoyant eye:
and her belly and breasts, those vine-clustered ones,
thrust out, more seductively than Angels of evil,
to trouble the repose where my soul had its throne,
and topple it from the crystal hill,
where it was seated, calm and alone.
I thought I saw Antiope's hips placed
on a youth's bust, with a new design's grace,
her pelvis accentuated so by her waist.
The rouge was superb on that wild, tawny face!
- And the lamp resigning itself to dying,
as only the fire in the hearth lit the chamber,
each time it gave out a flame in sighing,
it flooded with blood that skin of amber!
The Snake That Dances
How I love to watch, dear indolence,
like a bright shimmer,
of fabric, the skin of your elegant
body glimmer!
Over the bitter-tasting perfume,
the depths of your hair,
odorous, restless spume,
blue, and brown, waves, there,
like a vessel that stirs, awake
when dawn winds rise,
my dreaming soul sets sail
for those distant skies.
Your eyes where nothing's revealed
either acrid or sweet,
are two cold jewels where steel
and gold both meet.
Seeing your rhythmic advance,
your fine abandon,
one might speak of a snake that danced
at the end of the branch it's on.
Under its burden of languidness,
your head at a child-like slant,
rocks with weak listlessness
like a young elephant's,
and your body heels and stretches
like some trim vessel,
that, rocking from side to side, plunges
its yards in the swell.
As when the groaning glacier's thaw
fills the flowing stream,
so when your mouth's juices pour
to the tip of your teeth,
I fancy I'm drinking overpowering, bitter,
Bohemian wine,
that over my heart will scatter
its stars, a liquid sky!
'Je t'adore a l'egal de la voute nocturne'
I adore you, the nocturnal vault's likeness,
o vast taciturnity, o vase of sadness:
I love you, my beauty, the more you flee,
grace of my nights, the more you seem,
to multiply distances, ah ironically,
that bar my arms from the blue immensity.
I advance to the attack, climb to the assault
like a swarm of worms attacking a corpse,
and I cherish, o creature cruel, and implacable,
your coldness that makes you, for me, more beautiful!
A Rotting Carcase
My soul, do you remember the object we saw
on what was a fine summer's day:
at the path's far corner, a shameful corpse
on the gravel-bed, darkly lay,
legs in the air, like a lecherous woman,
burning and oozing with poisons,
revealing, with nonchalance, cynicism,
the belly ripe with its exhalations.
The sun shone down on that rot and mould,
as if to grill it completely,
and render to Nature a hundredfold
what she'd once joined so sweetly:
and the sky gazed at that noble carcass,
like a flower, now blossoming.
The stench was so great, that there, on the grass,
you almost considered fainting.
The flies buzzed away on its putrid belly,
from which black battalions slid,
larvae, that flowed in thickening liquid
the length of those seething shreds.
All of the thing rose and fell like a wave,
surging and glittering:
you'd have said the corpse, swollen with vague
breath, multiplied, was living.
And that 'world' gave off a strange music,
like the wind, or the flowing river,
or the grain, tossed and turned with a rhythmic
motion, by the winnower.
Its shape was vanishing, no more than a dream,
a slowly-formed rough sketch
on forgotten canvas, the artist's gleam
of memory alone perfects.
From behind the rocks a restless bitch
glared with an angry eye,
judging the right moment to snatch
some morsel she'd passed by.
- And yet you too will resemble that ordure,
that terrible corruption,
star of my eyes, sun of my nature,
my angel, and my passion!
Yes! Such you'll become, o queen of grace,
after the final sacraments,
when you go under the flowering grass
to rot among the skeletons.
O my beauty! Tell the worms, then, as
with kisses they eat you away,
how I preserved the form, divine essence
of my loves in their decay !
Beatrice
Through fields of ash, burnt, without verdure,
where I was complaining one day to Nature,
and slowly sharpened the knife of my thought,
as I wandered aimlessly, against my heart,
I saw descend, at noon, on my brow,
a storm-filled and sinister cloud,
holding a vicious demonic horde,
resembling cruel, and curious dwarfs.
Gazing at me, considering me, as cool
as passers-by admiring a fool,
I heard them laughing and whispering in synch,
exchanging many a nudge and a wink:
' Let's contemplate this caricature,
this Hamlet's shadow, echoing his posture,
his indecisive looks, and wild hair.
It's a shame to see that epicure there,
that pauper, that actor on holiday, that droll
fellow, because he can play a fine role,
trying to interest with his tears
the eagles, the grasshoppers, streams and flowers,
and even proclaiming his public tirades
to us who invented those ancient parades? '
I might (since my pride, high as the mountains,
overtops clouds and the cries of demons)
simply have turned my regal head,
if I'd not seen, to that obscene crowd wed,
a crime that failed to make the sun rock,
the queen of my heart, with her matchless look,
laughing with them at my dark distress,
and now and then yielding a filthy caress.
The Balcony
Mother of memories, mistress of mistresses,
O you, all my pleasures! O you, all my learning!
You will remember the joy of caresses,
the sweetness of home and the beauty of evening,
Mother of memories, mistress of mistresses!
On evenings lit by the glow of the ashes
and on the balcony, veiled, rose-coloured, misted,
how gentle your breast was, how good your heart to me!
We have said things meant for eternity,
on evenings lit by the glow of the ashes.
How lovely the light is on sultry evenings!
How deep the void grows! How powerful the heart is!
As I leaned towards you, queen of adored ones
I thought I breathed perfume from your blood's kiss.
How lovely the light is on sultry evenings!
The night it was thickening and closing around us,
and my eyes in the dark were divining your glance,
and I drank your nectar. Oh sweetness! Oh poison!
your feet held, here, in these fraternal hands.
The night it was thickening and closing around us.
I know how to summon up happiest moments,
and relive my past, there, curled, touching your knees.
What good to search for your languorous beauties
but in your dear body, and your heart so sweet?
I know how to summon up happiest moments!
Those vows, those perfumes, those infinite kisses,
will they be reborn, from gulfs beyond soundings,
as the suns that are young again climb in the sky,
after they've passed through the deepest of drownings?
- O vows! O perfumes! O infinite kisses!
Exotic Perfume
When, in Autumn, on a sultry evening,
eyes closed, I breathe your warm breasts' odour,
I see the shore of bliss uncovered,
in the monotonous sun's fierce gleaming:
a languorous island where Nature has come,
bringing rare trees and luscious fruits:
the bodies of lean and vigorous brutes,
and women with eyes of astounding freedom.
Led by your odour to magic climes
I see a harbour, of masts, sails, lines,
worn down by the sea's waves still,
while the green tamarinds' perfume mounts,
circling in air, and filling my nostrils,
and blends, in my soul, with the sailors' chants.
The Head of Hair
O fleece, billowing down to the shoulders!
O curls! O perfume charged with languor!
Ecstasy! To populate love's dark alcove,
with memories sleeping tonight in your hair,
I'd wave it, like a handkerchief, in the air!
Languid Asia and burning Africa,
absent worlds, far-off, almost dead,
live in your forest-depths of aromas!
As music floats other spirits away,
mine, my love, sails your fragrance instead.
I'll go where, full of sap, trees and men
Swoon endlessly in that ardent climate:
Thick tresses, be my tide! You contain,
O sea of ebony, the dazzling dream,
of masts, flames, sails, and oarsmen:
an echoing port where my soul's a drinker
of sound, colour, scent in rolling waves:
where vessels, gliding through silk and amber,
open wide their arms to clasp the splendour
of a pure sky quivering with eternal day.
I'll plunge my head, in love with drunkenness,
in this dark ocean which encloses the other:
and my subtle spirit the breakers caress
will know how to find you, fertile indolence!
Infinite lullaby, full of the balm of leisure!
Hair of blue, that hangs like a shadowy tent,
you bring me the round, immense sky's azure:
in your plaited tresses' feathery descent
I grow fervently drunk with the mingled scent
of coconut-oil, of musk, and coal-tar.
Now! Always! My hand in your heavy mane sowing
jewels, the sapphire, the pearl, and the ruby,
so that you'll not remain deaf to my longing!
Oasis of dream, the gourd where I'm drinking,
of you, long draughts of the wine of memory?
A Phantom II: The Perfume
Reader, have you ever breathed deeply,
with slow savour and intoxicated sense,
a church's saturating grain of incense,
or the long-lasting musk in a sachet?
Profound magical spell where we
are drunk on the past restored in the present.
So lovers on an adored body scent
the exquisite flower of memory.
From her pliant and heavy hair,
living sachet, censer of the alcoves,
a fragrance, wild and savage, rose,
and from her clothes, velvet or muslin, there,
impregnated with her pure years,
emanated a perfume of furs.
Afternoon Song
Though your eyebrows surprise,
and give you an air of strangeness,
which isn't that of the angels,
witch with seductive eyes,
I adore my frivolous girl,
my terrible passion,
with the devotion
of a priest for his idol!
The forest and the desert
perfume your wild hair:
your head has an air
of the enigma, the secret.
Round your flesh, perfume sweet
swirls like a censer's cloud:
you bewitch like the twilight's shroud,
nymph of shadows and heat.
Ah! The strongest potions made
can't match your idleness,
and you know the caress
that resurrects the dead.
Your hips are enamoured
of your back and your breasts,
and the cushions are ravished
with your poses, so languid.
Sometimes to appease
your rage, mysteriously,
you lavish, gravely
your bites and your kisses.
You tear me, my dark-haired one,
with a mocking smile's art,
and then cast on my heart
your gaze sweet as the moon.
Under your shoes so satiny,
your graceful silken feet,
I lay my genius, my wit,
my joy, and my destiny,
restorer of my health's sweetness,
you, all colour and light,
explosion of warmth, bright
in my Siberian darkness.
The Death of Lovers
We will have beds filled with light scent, and
couches deep as a tomb,
and strange flowers in the room,
blooming for us under skies so pleasant.
Vying to exhaust their last fires
our hearts will be two vast flares,
reflecting their double glares
in our two spirits, twin mirrors.
One evening of mystic blue and rose
we'll exchange a single brief glow
like a long sob, heavy with goodbye,
and later, opening the doors, the angel who came
faithful and joyful, will revive
the lustreless mirrors, and the lifeless flame.
The Flawed Bell
It's bitter, yet sweet, on wintry nights,
near to the fire that crackles and fumes,
listening while, far-off, slow memories rise
to echoing chimes that ring through the gloom.
Lucky indeed, the loud-tongued bell
still hale and hearty despite its age,
repeating its pious call, true and well,
like an old trooper in the sentry's cage!
My soul is flawed: when, at boredom's sigh,
it would fill the chill night air with its cry,
it often happens that its voice, enfeebled,
thickens like a wounded man's death-rattle
by a lake of blood, vast heaps of the dying,
who ends, without moving, despite his trying.
The Owls
Among the black yews, their shelter,
the owls are ranged in a row,
like alien deities, the glow,
of their red eyes pierces. They ponder.
They perch there without moving,
till that melancholy moment
when quenching the falling sun,
the shadows are growing.
Their stance teaches the wise
to fear, in this world of ours,
all tumult, and all movement:
Mankind, drunk on brief shadows,
always incurs a punishment
for his longing to stir, and go.
To A Red-headed Beggar-girl
Pale girl with fiery hair,
whose tattered dress shows there
glimpses of your poverty
and your beauty,
a wretched poet, for me,
your young skinny body
with its freckled brownness
has its sweetness.
You wear, more stylishly
than a queen in story
wears her velvet shoe
your heavy two.
Instead of your dress, ripped, short,
may a fine robe of court
trail in long folds to greet
your slender feet:
in place of your torn hose
may daggers of gold,
down your legs, blaze
for the eyes of roues:
may ribbons loosely tied
unveil in your pride
your two lovely breasts, bright
as your eyes:
may your arms be coaxed too,
to sweetly undress you,
and with pert blows
discourage those
impish fingers, pearls that glow,
sonnets of master Belleau,
by your captive lovers,
endlessly offered.
The poets, in pursuit,
dedicating to you their fruit,
and gazing at your shoes, there
from beneath the stair:
many a page-boy's game,
many a famous name,
would spy, still hoping,
on your cool lodging!
You, in your bed, would count
more kisses than lilies no doubt,
and subject to your law
a Valois or more!
When he shines on the town, a poet that sings,
he redeems the fate of the meanest things,
like a king he enters, no servants, alone,
all palaces, all hospitals where men moan.
Sorrows of the Moon
The moon dreams more languidly this evening:
like a sweet woman, in the pillows, at rest,
with her light hand, discretely stroking,
before she sleeps, the curve of her breast,
dying, she gives herself to deep trance,
and casts her eyes over snow-white bowers,
on the satined slope of a soft avalanche,
rising up into the blue, like flowers.
When she sometimes lets fall a furtive tear,
in her secret languor, on our world here,
a pious poet, enemy of sleep's art,
takes that pale tear in the hollow of his palm,
its rainbow glitter like an opal shard,
and far from the sun sets it in his heart.
Don Juan in Hell
When Don Juan went down to Hell's charms,
and paid Charon his obol's fare,
he, a sombre beggar with Antisthenes' glare,
gripped the oars with strong avenging arms.
Showing their sagging breasts through open robes
the women writhed under the black firmament
and, like a crowd of sacred victims, broke
behind him into long incessant lament.
Sganarelle laughing demanded his score,
while Don Luis, with trembling hand,
showed the wandering dead, along the shore,
the insolent son who spurned his command.
By the treacherous spouse, who was her lover,
chaste, skinny Elvira shivered in mourning dress,
seeming to ask a last smile of him, where
there might shine his first vow's tenderness.
Gripping the helm cutting the black wave,
erect in armour, stood a giant of stone,
but the hero, leaning, quiet, on his sword-blade,
scornful of all things, gazed at the sea's foam.
On Tasso in Prison (Eugene Delacroix's painting)
The poet in his cell, unkempt and sick,
who crushes underfoot a manuscript,
measures, with a gaze that horror has inflamed,
the stair of madness where his soul was maimed.
The intoxicating laughter that fills his prison
with the absurd and the strange, swamps his reason.
Doubt surrounds him, and ridiculous fear,
hideous and multiform, circles near.
That genius pent up in a foul sty,
those spectres, those grimaces, the cries,
whirling, in a swarm, about his hair,
that dreamer, whom his lodging's terrors bare,
such are your emblems, Soul, singer of songs obscure,
whom Reality suffocates behind four walls!
Femmes Damnees
Like pensive cattle, lying on the sands,
they turn their eyes towards the sea's far hills,
and, feet searching each other's, touching hands,
know sweet languor and the bitterest thrills.
Some, where the stream babbles, deep in the woods,
their hearts enamoured of long intimacies,
go spelling out the loves of their own girlhoods,
and carving the green bark of young trees.
Others, like Sisters, walk, gravely and slow,
among the rocks, full of apparitions,
where Saint Anthony saw, like lava flows,
the bared crimson breasts of his temptations.
There are those, in the melting candle's glimmer,
who in mute hollows of caves still pagan,
call on you to relieve their groaning fever,
O Bacchus, to soothe the remorse of the ancients!
And others, whose throats love scapularies,
who, hiding whips under their long vestment,
in the sombre groves of the night, solitaries,
blend the sweats of joy with the tears of torment.
O virgins, o demons, o monsters, o martyrs,
great spirits, despisers of reality,
now full of cries, now full of tears,
pious and lustful, seeking infinity,
you, whom my soul has pursued to your hell,
poor sisters, I adore you as much as I weep,
for your dismal sufferings, thirsts that swell,
and the vessels of love, where your great hearts steep!
The Litanies of Satan
O you, the most knowing, and loveliest of Angels,
a god fate betrayed, deprived of praises,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
O, Prince of exile to whom wrong has been done,
who, vanquished, always recovers more strongly,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You who know everything, king of the underworld,
the familiar healer of human distress,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You who teach even lepers, accursed pariahs,
through love itself the taste for Paradise,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
O you who on Death, your ancient true lover,
engendered Hope - that lunatic charmer!
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You who grant the condemned that calm, proud look
that damns a whole people crowding the scaffold,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You who know in what corners of envious countries
a jealous God hid those stones that are precious,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You whose clear eye knows the deep caches
where, buried, the race of metals slumbers,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You whose huge hands hide the precipice,
from the sleepwalker on the sky-scraper's cliff,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You who make magically supple the bones
of the drunkard, out late, who's trampled by horses,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You who taught us to mix saltpetre with sulphur
to console the frail human being who suffers,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You who set your mark, o subtle accomplice,
on the forehead of Croesus, the vile and pitiless,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
You who set in the hearts and eyes of young girls
the cult of the wound, adoration of rags,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
The exile's staff, the light of invention,
confessor to those to be hanged, to conspirators,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
Father, adopting those whom God the Father
drove in dark anger from the earthly paradise,
O Satan, take pity on my long misery!
Note: Croesus was the king of Lydia (c560-546BC), famed for his wealth. He was defeated and captured by Cyrus of Persia at the taking of Sardis, and rescued by his conqueror from the pyre (Herodotus 1. 86)
Beauty
O mortals, I am beautiful, like a stone dream,
and my breast, where each man has bruised his soul,
is created to inspire in poets a goal
as eternal and mute as matter might seem.
An inscrutable Sphinx, I am throned in blue sky:
I unite the swan's white with a heart of snow:
I hate all movement that ruffles the flow,
and I never cry and I never smile.
The poets, in front of my poses, so grand
they seem borrowed from ancient tomb-covers,
will exhaust their days in studying a hand,
since I, to fascinate my docile lovers,
have pure mirrors that magnify everything's beauty:
my eyes, my huge eyes, bright with eternity.
Letter to Sainte-Beuve
On the old oak benches, more shiny and polished
than links of a chain that were, each day, burnished
rubbed by our human flesh, we, still un-bearded,
trailed our ennui, hunched, round-shouldered,
under the four-square heaven of solitude,
where a child drinks study's tart ten-year brew.
It was in those days, outstanding and memorable,
when the teachers, forced to loosen our classical
fetters, yet all still hostile to your rhyming,
succumbed to the pressure of our mad duelling,
and allowed a triumphant, mutinous, pupil
to make Triboulet howl in Latin, at will.
Which of us in those days of pale adolescence
didn't share the weary torpor of confinement,
- eyes lost in the dreary blue of a summer sky
or the snowfall's whiteness, we were dazzled by,
ears pricked, eager, waiting - a pack of hounds
drinking some book's far echo, a riot's sound?
Most of all in summer, that melted the leads,
the walls high, blackened, filled with dread,
with the scorching heat, or when autumn haze
lit the sky with its one monotonous blaze
and made the screeching falcons fall asleep,
white pigeons' terrors, in their slender keep:
the season of reverie when the Muse clings
through the endless day to some bell that rings:
when Melancholy at noon when all is drowsing
at the corridor's end, chin in hand, dragging -
eyes bluer and darker than Diderot's Nun,
that sad, obscene tale known to everyone,
- her feet weighed down by premature ennui,
her brow from night's moist languor un-free.
- and unhealthy evenings, then, feverish nights,
that make young girls love their bodies outright,
and, sterile pleasure, gaze in their mirrors to see
the ripening fruits of their own nubility: -
Italian evenings of thoughtless lethargy,
when knowledge of false delights is revealed
when sombre Venus, on her high black balcony,
out of cool censers, waves of musk sets free.
In this war of enervating circumstances,
matured by your sonnets, prepared by your stanzas,
one evening, having sensed the soul of your art,
I transported Amaury's story into my heart.
Every mystical void is but two steps away
from doubt. - The potion, drop by drop, day by day,
filtering through me, I, drawn to the abyss since I
was fifteen, who swiftly deciphered Rene's sigh,
I parched by some strange thirst for the unknown,
within the smallest of arteries, made its home.
I absorbed it all, the perfumes, the miasmas,
the long-vanished memories' sweetest whispers,
the drawn-out tangle of phrases, their symbols,
the rosaries murmuring in mystical madrigals,
- a voluptuous book, if ever one was brewed.
Now, whether I'm deep in some leafy refuge,
or in the sun of a second hemispheres' days,
the eternal swell swaying the ocean waves,
the view of endless horizons always re-born,
draw my heart to the dream divine, once more,
be it in heavy languor of burning summer,
or shivering idleness of early December,
beneath tobacco-smoke clouds, hiding the ceiling,
through the book's subtle mystery, always leafing,
a book so dear to those numb souls whose destiny
has, one and all, stamped them with that same malady,
in front of the mirror, I've perfected the cruelty
of the art that, at birth, some demon granted me,
- art of that pain that creates true voluptuousness, -
scratching the wound, to draw blood from my distress.
Poet, is it an insult, or a well-turned compliment?
For regarding you I'm like a lover, to all intent,
faced with a ghost whose gestures are caresses,
with hand, eye of unknown charms, who blesses,
in order to drain one's strength. - All loved beings
are cups of venom one drinks with eyes unseeing,
and the heart that's once transfixed, seduced by pain,
finds death, while still blessing the arrow, every day.
Notes: Baudelaire in 1844 sent this poem to Saint-Beuve, whose novel Volupte has Amaury as its hero. Triboulet (c1479-1536), was the court jester of Louis XII, and Francois 1st, who inspired a scene in Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel. Diderot was the author of La Religieuse, Chateaubriand of Rene.
Elevation
High over the ponds, high over the vales,
the mountains, clouds, woods and meres,
beyond the sun, beyond the ethereal veils,
beyond the confines of the starry spheres,
you ride, my spirit, ride with agility,
swooning with joy, at the wave, strong swimmer
and take your ineffable masculine pleasure,
cutting through that endless immensity.
Fly far away from this deathly miasma:
go, purify yourself in the upper air,
and drink like a pure and divine liquor,
what fills limpid space, that lucid fire.
Behind him the boredoms, the vast distress,
that imposes its weight on fog-bound beings,
happy the man, who on vigorous wings
mounts towards fields, serene and luminous!
He whose thoughts, like larks, go soaring,
flying freely towards dawn air, -
who glides above life: grasps, easily, there,
the language of flowers and silent Things!
Correspondences
Nature is a temple, where, from living pillars, a flux
of confused words is, sometimes, allowed to fall:
Man travels it, through forests of symbols, that all
observe him, with familiar looks.
Like far echoes that distantly congregate,
in a shadowy and profound unity,
vast as the night air, in its clarity,
perfumes, colours, sounds reverberate.
There are fresh perfumes, like the flesh of children,
mellow as oboes, green as prairies,
- and others, rich, glorious and forbidden,
having the expansive power of infinities,
amber, musk, benjamin and incense,
that sing of the ecstasies of spirit and sense.
The Jewels
My sweetheart was naked, knowing my desire,
she wore only her tinkling jewellery,
whose splendour yields her the rich conquering fire
of Moorish slave-girls in the days of their beauty.
When, dancing, it gives out its sharp sound of mockery,
that glistening world of metal and stone,
I am ravished by ecstasy, love like fury
those things where light mingles with sound.
So she lay there, let herself be loved,
and, from the tall bed, she smiled with delight
on my love deep and sweet as the sea is moved,
rising to her as toward a cliff's height.
Like a tamed tigress, her eyes fixed on me
with a vague dreamy air, she tried out her poses,
so wantonly and so innocently,
it gave a new charm to her metamorphoses:
and her arm and her leg, and her back and her thigh,
shining like oil, undulating like a swan's,
passed in front of my calm, clairvoyant eye:
and her belly and breasts, those vine-clustered ones,
thrust out, more seductively than Angels of evil,
to trouble the repose where my soul had its throne,
and topple it from the crystal hill,
where it was seated, calm and alone.
I thought I saw Antiope's hips placed
on a youth's bust, with a new design's grace,
her pelvis accentuated so by her waist.
The rouge was superb on that wild, tawny face!
- And the lamp resigning itself to dying,
as only the fire in the hearth lit the chamber,
each time it gave out a flame in sighing,
it flooded with blood that skin of amber!
The Snake That Dances
How I love to watch, dear indolence,
like a bright shimmer,
of fabric, the skin of your elegant
body glimmer!
Over the bitter-tasting perfume,
the depths of your hair,
odorous, restless spume,
blue, and brown, waves, there,
like a vessel that stirs, awake
when dawn winds rise,
my dreaming soul sets sail
for those distant skies.
Your eyes where nothing's revealed
either acrid or sweet,
are two cold jewels where steel
and gold both meet.
Seeing your rhythmic advance,
your fine abandon,
one might speak of a snake that danced
at the end of the branch it's on.
Under its burden of languidness,
your head at a child-like slant,
rocks with weak listlessness
like a young elephant's,
and your body heels and stretches
like some trim vessel,
that, rocking from side to side, plunges
its yards in the swell.
As when the groaning glacier's thaw
fills the flowing stream,
so when your mouth's juices pour
to the tip of your teeth,
I fancy I'm drinking overpowering, bitter,
Bohemian wine,
that over my heart will scatter
its stars, a liquid sky!
'Je t'adore a l'egal de la voute nocturne'
I adore you, the nocturnal vault's likeness,
o vast taciturnity, o vase of sadness:
I love you, my beauty, the more you flee,
grace of my nights, the more you seem,
to multiply distances, ah ironically,
that bar my arms from the blue immensity.
I advance to the attack, climb to the assault
like a swarm of worms attacking a corpse,
and I cherish, o creature cruel, and implacable,
your coldness that makes you, for me, more beautiful!
A Rotting Carcase
My soul, do you remember the object we saw
on what was a fine summer's day:
at the path's far corner, a shameful corpse
on the gravel-bed, darkly lay,
legs in the air, like a lecherous woman,
burning and oozing with poisons,
revealing, with nonchalance, cynicism,
the belly ripe with its exhalations.
The sun shone down on that rot and mould,
as if to grill it completely,
and render to Nature a hundredfold
what she'd once joined so sweetly:
and the sky gazed at that noble carcass,
like a flower, now blossoming.
The stench was so great, that there, on the grass,
you almost considered fainting.
The flies buzzed away on its putrid belly,
from which black battalions slid,
larvae, that flowed in thickening liquid
the length of those seething shreds.
All of the thing rose and fell like a wave,
surging and glittering:
you'd have said the corpse, swollen with vague
breath, multiplied, was living.
And that 'world' gave off a strange music,
like the wind, or the flowing river,
or the grain, tossed and turned with a rhythmic
motion, by the winnower.
Its shape was vanishing, no more than a dream,
a slowly-formed rough sketch
on forgotten canvas, the artist's gleam
of memory alone perfects.
From behind the rocks a restless bitch
glared with an angry eye,
judging the right moment to snatch
some morsel she'd passed by.
- And yet you too will resemble that ordure,
that terrible corruption,
star of my eyes, sun of my nature,
my angel, and my passion!
Yes! Such you'll become, o queen of grace,
after the final sacraments,
when you go under the flowering grass
to rot among the skeletons.
O my beauty! Tell the worms, then, as
with kisses they eat you away,
how I preserved the form, divine essence
of my loves in their decay !
Beatrice
Through fields of ash, burnt, without verdure,
where I was complaining one day to Nature,
and slowly sharpened the knife of my thought,
as I wandered aimlessly, against my heart,
I saw descend, at noon, on my brow,
a storm-filled and sinister cloud,
holding a vicious demonic horde,
resembling cruel, and curious dwarfs.
Gazing at me, considering me, as cool
as passers-by admiring a fool,
I heard them laughing and whispering in synch,
exchanging many a nudge and a wink:
' Let's contemplate this caricature,
this Hamlet's shadow, echoing his posture,
his indecisive looks, and wild hair.
It's a shame to see that epicure there,
that pauper, that actor on holiday, that droll
fellow, because he can play a fine role,
trying to interest with his tears
the eagles, the grasshoppers, streams and flowers,
and even proclaiming his public tirades
to us who invented those ancient parades? '
I might (since my pride, high as the mountains,
overtops clouds and the cries of demons)
simply have turned my regal head,
if I'd not seen, to that obscene crowd wed,
a crime that failed to make the sun rock,
the queen of my heart, with her matchless look,
laughing with them at my dark distress,
and now and then yielding a filthy caress.
The Balcony
Mother of memories, mistress of mistresses,
O you, all my pleasures! O you, all my learning!
You will remember the joy of caresses,
the sweetness of home and the beauty of evening,
Mother of memories, mistress of mistresses!
On evenings lit by the glow of the ashes
and on the balcony, veiled, rose-coloured, misted,
how gentle your breast was, how good your heart to me!
We have said things meant for eternity,
on evenings lit by the glow of the ashes.
How lovely the light is on sultry evenings!
How deep the void grows! How powerful the heart is!
As I leaned towards you, queen of adored ones
I thought I breathed perfume from your blood's kiss.
How lovely the light is on sultry evenings!
The night it was thickening and closing around us,
and my eyes in the dark were divining your glance,
and I drank your nectar. Oh sweetness! Oh poison!
your feet held, here, in these fraternal hands.
The night it was thickening and closing around us.
I know how to summon up happiest moments,
and relive my past, there, curled, touching your knees.
What good to search for your languorous beauties
but in your dear body, and your heart so sweet?
I know how to summon up happiest moments!
Those vows, those perfumes, those infinite kisses,
will they be reborn, from gulfs beyond soundings,
as the suns that are young again climb in the sky,
after they've passed through the deepest of drownings?
- O vows! O perfumes! O infinite kisses!
Exotic Perfume
When, in Autumn, on a sultry evening,
eyes closed, I breathe your warm breasts' odour,
I see the shore of bliss uncovered,
in the monotonous sun's fierce gleaming:
a languorous island where Nature has come,
bringing rare trees and luscious fruits:
the bodies of lean and vigorous brutes,
and women with eyes of astounding freedom.
Led by your odour to magic climes
I see a harbour, of masts, sails, lines,
worn down by the sea's waves still,
while the green tamarinds' perfume mounts,
circling in air, and filling my nostrils,
and blends, in my soul, with the sailors' chants.
The Head of Hair
O fleece, billowing down to the shoulders!
O curls! O perfume charged with languor!
Ecstasy! To populate love's dark alcove,
with memories sleeping tonight in your hair,
I'd wave it, like a handkerchief, in the air!
Languid Asia and burning Africa,
absent worlds, far-off, almost dead,
live in your forest-depths of aromas!
As music floats other spirits away,
mine, my love, sails your fragrance instead.
I'll go where, full of sap, trees and men
Swoon endlessly in that ardent climate:
Thick tresses, be my tide! You contain,
O sea of ebony, the dazzling dream,
of masts, flames, sails, and oarsmen:
an echoing port where my soul's a drinker
of sound, colour, scent in rolling waves:
where vessels, gliding through silk and amber,
open wide their arms to clasp the splendour
of a pure sky quivering with eternal day.
I'll plunge my head, in love with drunkenness,
in this dark ocean which encloses the other:
and my subtle spirit the breakers caress
will know how to find you, fertile indolence!
Infinite lullaby, full of the balm of leisure!
Hair of blue, that hangs like a shadowy tent,
you bring me the round, immense sky's azure:
in your plaited tresses' feathery descent
I grow fervently drunk with the mingled scent
of coconut-oil, of musk, and coal-tar.
Now! Always! My hand in your heavy mane sowing
jewels, the sapphire, the pearl, and the ruby,
so that you'll not remain deaf to my longing!
Oasis of dream, the gourd where I'm drinking,
of you, long draughts of the wine of memory?
A Phantom II: The Perfume
Reader, have you ever breathed deeply,
with slow savour and intoxicated sense,
a church's saturating grain of incense,
or the long-lasting musk in a sachet?
Profound magical spell where we
are drunk on the past restored in the present.
So lovers on an adored body scent
the exquisite flower of memory.
From her pliant and heavy hair,
living sachet, censer of the alcoves,
a fragrance, wild and savage, rose,
and from her clothes, velvet or muslin, there,
impregnated with her pure years,
emanated a perfume of furs.
Afternoon Song
Though your eyebrows surprise,
and give you an air of strangeness,
which isn't that of the angels,
witch with seductive eyes,
I adore my frivolous girl,
my terrible passion,
with the devotion
of a priest for his idol!
The forest and the desert
perfume your wild hair:
your head has an air
of the enigma, the secret.
Round your flesh, perfume sweet
swirls like a censer's cloud:
you bewitch like the twilight's shroud,
nymph of shadows and heat.
Ah! The strongest potions made
can't match your idleness,
and you know the caress
that resurrects the dead.
Your hips are enamoured
of your back and your breasts,
and the cushions are ravished
with your poses, so languid.
Sometimes to appease
your rage, mysteriously,
you lavish, gravely
your bites and your kisses.
You tear me, my dark-haired one,
with a mocking smile's art,
and then cast on my heart
your gaze sweet as the moon.
Under your shoes so satiny,
your graceful silken feet,
I lay my genius, my wit,
my joy, and my destiny,
restorer of my health's sweetness,
you, all colour and light,
explosion of warmth, bright
in my Siberian darkness.
The Death of Lovers
We will have beds filled with light scent, and
couches deep as a tomb,
and strange flowers in the room,
blooming for us under skies so pleasant.
Vying to exhaust their last fires
our hearts will be two vast flares,
reflecting their double glares
in our two spirits, twin mirrors.
One evening of mystic blue and rose
we'll exchange a single brief glow
like a long sob, heavy with goodbye,
and later, opening the doors, the angel who came
faithful and joyful, will revive
the lustreless mirrors, and the lifeless flame.
The Flawed Bell
It's bitter, yet sweet, on wintry nights,
near to the fire that crackles and fumes,
listening while, far-off, slow memories rise
to echoing chimes that ring through the gloom.
Lucky indeed, the loud-tongued bell
still hale and hearty despite its age,
repeating its pious call, true and well,
like an old trooper in the sentry's cage!
My soul is flawed: when, at boredom's sigh,
it would fill the chill night air with its cry,
it often happens that its voice, enfeebled,
thickens like a wounded man's death-rattle
by a lake of blood, vast heaps of the dying,
who ends, without moving, despite his trying.
The Owls
Among the black yews, their shelter,
the owls are ranged in a row,
like alien deities, the glow,
of their red eyes pierces. They ponder.
They perch there without moving,
till that melancholy moment
when quenching the falling sun,
the shadows are growing.
Their stance teaches the wise
to fear, in this world of ours,
all tumult, and all movement:
Mankind, drunk on brief shadows,
always incurs a punishment
for his longing to stir, and go.
To A Red-headed Beggar-girl
Pale girl with fiery hair,
whose tattered dress shows there
glimpses of your poverty
and your beauty,
a wretched poet, for me,
your young skinny body
with its freckled brownness
has its sweetness.
You wear, more stylishly
than a queen in story
wears her velvet shoe
your heavy two.
Instead of your dress, ripped, short,
may a fine robe of court
trail in long folds to greet
your slender feet:
in place of your torn hose
may daggers of gold,
down your legs, blaze
for the eyes of roues:
may ribbons loosely tied
unveil in your pride
your two lovely breasts, bright
as your eyes:
may your arms be coaxed too,
to sweetly undress you,
and with pert blows
discourage those
impish fingers, pearls that glow,
sonnets of master Belleau,
by your captive lovers,
endlessly offered.
The poets, in pursuit,
dedicating to you their fruit,
and gazing at your shoes, there
from beneath the stair:
many a page-boy's game,
many a famous name,
would spy, still hoping,
on your cool lodging!
You, in your bed, would count
more kisses than lilies no doubt,
and subject to your law
a Valois or more!
- Meanwhile you go seeking
any old scraps, cadging,
outside the back door
of some shabby store:
you go gazing, from afar,
at valueless beads that are
still, alas, so much more
than I can afford!
Go then, with no ornament,
perfume, pearl or diamond,
only your slender nudity,
O my beauty!
Wandering Gypsies
The prophetic tribe with burning eyes
yesterday took to the highway, carrying
children slung on their backs, or offering
proud hunger the breast's ever-ripe prize.
The men go on foot, with shining weapons,
by the carts where their folk huddle together,
sweeping the heavens, eyes grown heavier
with mournful regret for absent visions.
The cricket, deep in his sandy retreat,
redoubles his call, on seeing their passing feet:
Cybele, who loves them, re-leafs the glades,
makes the rocks gush, the desert bloom,
before these voyagers, thrown wide to whom
is the intimate kingdom of future shades.
Note: Cybele was the Phrygian great goddess, personifying the earth in its savage state, worshipped in caves and on mountaintops.
Bad Luck
To roll the rock you fought
takes your courage, Sisyphus!
No matter what effort from us,
Art is long, and Time is short.
Far from the grave of celebrity,
my heart, like a muffled drum,
taps out its funereal thrum
towards some lonely cemetery.
- Many a long-buried gem
sleeps in shadowy oblivion
far from pickaxes and drills:
in profound solitude set,
many a flower, with regret,
its sweet perfume spills.
The Death of the Poor
It is Death, alas, persuades us to keep on living:
the goal of life and the only hope we have,
like an elixir, rousing, intoxicating, giving
the strength to march on towards the grave:
through the frost and snow and storm-wind, look
it's the vibrant light on our black horizon:
the fabulous inn, written of in the book,
where one can eat, and sleep and sit oneself down:
it's an Angel, who holds in his magnetic beams,
sleep and the gift of ecstatic dreams,
who makes the bed where the poor and naked lie:
it's the glory of the Gods, the mystic granary,
it's the poor man's purse, his ancient country,
it's the doorway opening on an unknown sky!
Music
Music, like an ocean, often carries me away!
Through the ether far,
or under a canopy of mist, I set sail
for my pale star.
Breasting the waves, my lungs swollen
like a ship's canvas,
night veils from me the long rollers,
I ride their backs:
I sense all a suffering vessel's passions
vibrating within me:
while fair winds or the storm's convulsions
on the immense deep
cradle me. Or else flat calm, vast mirror there
of my despair!
The Ransom
Man, with which to pay his ransom,
has two fields of deep rich earth,
which he must dig and bring to birth,
with the iron blade of reason.
To obtain the smallest rose,
to garner a few ears of wheat,
he must wet them without cease,
with briny tears from his grey brow.
One is Art: Love is the other.
- To render his propitiation,
on the day of conflagration,
when the last strict reckoning's here,
full of crops' and flowers' displays
he will have to show his barns,
with those colours and those forms
that gain the Angels' praise.
Voyage to Cythera
My heart soared with joy, like a bird in flight,
haunting the rigging sliding by:
the ship swayed under a cloudless sky,
like an angel, dazed by radiant light.
What island is that, dark and sad? - Cythera,
in verse, it's famous you understand,
every aged child's golden land.
Look, after all, there's nothing here.
- Isle of sweet secrets and the heart's delight!
Ancient Venus's marvellous shadow,
like perfume, covers the sea, around you,
fills the mind with love, and the languorous night.
Isle of green myrtle and flowers, wide open,
beautiful, revered by every nation,
where the sighs, of the heart's adoration,
glide like incense, over a rose garden,
or are cooing, like doves, in scented air!
- Cythera, now a desert, to mock,
full of piercing calls, a barren rock.
But I saw a strange thing there!
It was not a temple, shaded by trees,
where the young priestess, with flower-like desires,
her body alight with secret fires,
goes, opening her robes to the passing breeze.
But a shore where our white sails moving by
disturbed the birds, and we saw, like jet,
the black of a cypress tree's silhouette,
a three-branched gibbet, against the sky.
A fierce bird, perching, on the head
of a hanged man, rent him, surely,
planting its impure beak, in fury,
in the bloody corners of the dead.
The eyes were two holes: from the cavernous belly
the weight of his guts poured down his sides,
and his torturers, gorged on hideous delights,
had castrated him, most efficiently.
Beneath his feet, circling, spun a jealous pack
their muzzles lifted, of whirling beasts,
one large one, leaping in their midst,
an executioner, with cohorts at his back.
Inhabitant of Cythera, son, of that lovely sky,
you suffered their insults, silently,
to expiate your infamy,
lacking the tomb your crimes deny.
Hanged man, grotesque sufferer, your pain is mine!
I felt at the sight of your dangling limbs,
the long stream of gall, old sufferings,
rise to my teeth like acid bile.
Before you, poor devil, of dear memory,
I felt all the beaks, and ravening claws,
of swooping ravens, dark panthers' jaws,
that were once so fond of tearing at me.
- The sky was entrancing, so calm the sea,
but, to me, all was dark, and smeared with blood.
Alas!
