Hermetics saw the
universe
in terms of light and dark, good and evil, spirit and matter.
Andre Breton - First Manifesto of Surrealism - 1924
There, everything's order and beauty,
calm, voluptuousness and luxury.
The Invitation to the Voyage (Prose Poem)
There's a magnificent land, a land of Cockaigne, they say,
that I've dreamed of visiting with a dear mistress. A unique land, drowned in our Northern mists, that you might call the Orient of the West, the China of Europe, so freely is warm and capricious Fantasy expressed there, so patiently and thoroughly has she adorned it with learned and luxuriant plants.
A true land of Cockaigne, where all is lovely, rich, tranquil, honest: where luxury delights in reflecting itself as order: where life is full and sweet to breathe: from which disorder, turbulence, the unforeseen are banished: where happiness is married to silence: where the cooking itself is poetic, both rich and exciting: where everything resembles you, my sweet angel.
Do you know that fevered malady that seizes us in our cold misery, that nostalgia for an unknown land, that anguish of curiosity? There's a country you resemble, where everything is lovely, tranquil and honest, where Fantasy has built and adorned a western China, where life is sweet to breathe, where happiness is married to silence. There we must go and live, there we must go to die!
Yes, there we must go to breathe, dream, prolong the hours with an infinity of sensations. Some musician has composed The Invitation to the Waltz: who shall compose The Invitation to the Voyage, one can offer to the beloved, the sister of their choice?
Yes, it would be good to be alive in that atmosphere, - there where the hours that pass more slowly contain more thought, where the clocks chime happiness with a deeper, more significant solemnity.
On shining wall-panels, on walls lined with gilded leather, of sombre richness, blissful paintings live discreetly, calm and deep as the souls of the artists who created them. The sunsets that colour the dining-room, the salon, so richly, are softened by fine fabrics, or those high latticed windows divided in sections by leading. The furniture, vast, curious, bizarre, is armed with locks and secrets like refined souls. The mirrors, metals, fabrics, plate and ceramics play a mute, mysterious symphony for the eyes: and from every object, every corner, the gaps in the drawers, the folds of fabric, a unique perfume escapes: the call of Sumatra, that is like the soul of the apartment.
A true land of Cockaigne, I tell you, where all is rich, clean and bright like a clear conscience, like a splendid battery of kitchenware, like magnificent jewellery, like a multi-coloured gem! The treasures of the world enrich it, as in the home of some hard-working man, who's deserved well of the whole world. A unique land, superior to others, as art is to Nature, re-shaped here by dream, corrected, adorned, remade.
Let them search and search again, tirelessly extending the frontiers of their happiness, those alchemists of the gardener's art! Let them offer sixty, a hundred thousand florins reward to whoever realises their ambitious projects! I though, have found my black tulip, my blue dahlia!
Incomparable bloom, tulip re-found, allegorical dahlia, it is there, is it not, to that beautiful land so calm and full of dreams, that you must go to live and flower? Would you not be surrounded by your own analogue, could you not mirror yourself, to speak as the mystics do, in your own correspondence?
Dreams! Always dreams! And the more aspiring and fastidious the soul, the more its dreams exceed the possible. Every man has within him his does of natural opium, endlessly secreted and renewed, and how many hours do we count, from birth to death, that are filled with positive pleasure, by successful deliberate action? Shall we ever truly live, ever enter this picture my mind has painted, this picture that resembles you?
Those treasures, items of furniture, that luxury, order, those perfumes, miraculous flowers, are you. They are you also, those great rivers and tranquil canals. Those huge ships they carry charged with riches, from which rise monotonous sailors chants, those are my thoughts that sleep or glide over your breast. You conduct them gently towards that sea, the Infinite, while reflecting the depths of the sky in your sweet soul's clarity: - and when, wearied by the swell, gorged with Oriental wares, they re-enter their home port, they are my thoughts still, enriched, returning from the Infinite to you.
The Irreparable
Can we stifle the old, long-lived Remorse,
that lives, writhes, heaves,
feeds on us, like a worm on a corpse,
like oak-gall on the oak-trees?
Can we stifle the old, long-lived Remorse?
In what potion, in what wine, in what brew,
shall we drown this old enemy.
greedy, destructive as a prostitute,
ant-like always filled with tenacity?
In what potion? - In what wine? - In what brew?
Tell us, lovely witch, oh, tell us, if you know,
tell the spirit filled with anguish
as if dying crushed by the wounded, oh,
crumpled beneath the horses,
tell us, lovely witch, oh, tell us, if you know,
tell the one in agony the wolf's already scented
whom the raven now surveys,
tell the shattered soldier! Say, if he's intended
to despair of cross and grave:
poor soul in agony the wolf's already scented!
Can we illuminate a black and muddied sky?
can we pierce the shadowy evening,
denser than pitch, with neither day or night,
star-less, with no funereal lightning?
Can we illuminate a black and muddied sky?
The Hope that shone in the Tavern window
is quenched, is dead forever!
How to find without sunlight, without moon-glow,
for the foul road's martyrs, ah, shelter!
The Devil's quenched all in the Tavern window!
Adorable witch, do you love the damned?
Say, do you know the unforgivable?
Do you understand Remorse, its poisoned hand,
for which our heart serves as target?
Adorable witch, do you love the damned?
The Irreparable, with its accursed tooth bites
at our soul, this pitiful monument,
and often gnaws away like a termite,
below the foundations of the battlement.
The Irreparable, with its accursed tooth, bites!
- Sometimes on the boards of a cheap stage
lit up by the sonorous orchestra,
I've seen a fairy kindling miraculous day,
in the infernal sky above her:
sometimes on the boards of a cheap stage,
a being, who is nothing but light, gold, gauze,
flooring the enormous Satan:
but my heart, that no ecstasy ever saw,
is a stage where ever and again
one awaits in vain the Being with wings of gauze!
The Poison
Wine can clothe the most sordid hole
in miraculous luxury,
and let many a fabulous portico float free
in the gold of its red glow,
like a setting sun in the sky's cloudy sea.
Opium expands things without boundaries,
extends the limitless,
makes time profounder, deepens voluptuousness,
fills the soul beyond its capacities,
with the pleasures of gloom and of darkness.
None of that equals the poison that flows
from your eyes, your eyes of green,
lakes where, mirrored, my trembling soul is seen. . .
my dreams come flocking, a host,
to quench their thirst in the bitter stream.
None of that equals the dreadful marvel though
of your saliva's venom,
that plunges my soul, remorseless, into oblivion,
and causing vertigo,
rolls it swooning towards the shores of doom!
Clouded Sky
One would say your gaze was a misted screen:
your strange eyes (are they blue, grey or green? )
changeable, tender, dreamy, cruel, and again
echoing the indolence and pallor of heaven.
You bring me those blank days, mild and hazy,
that melt bewitched hearts into weeping,
when twisted, stirred by some unknown hurt,
our over-stretched nerves mock the numbed spirit.
Often you resemble the loveliest horizons
lit by the suns of foggy seasons. . . .
how splendid you are, a dew-wet country,
inflamed by the rays of a misted sky!
O dangerous woman, o seductive glow,
will I someday adore your frost and snow,
and learn to draw, from implacable winter
sharp-edged as steel or ice, new pleasure?
The Cat
I
A fine cat prowls about in my brain,
as if in his own apartment,
he's charming, gentle, confident,
when he mews you have to strain
to hear the discreet and tender tone:
whether it soothes or scolds its sound
is always rich, always profound.
It's his secret charm, and his alone.
This voice which purls and filters
to the darkest depths of my being
swells in me like verse multiplying
and delights me like a magic philtre.
It comprehends all ecstasy,
calms my cruellest suffering:
and has no need of words to sing
the longest sentences to me.
No, there's no bow that gliding
over my heart's pure instrument,
could make its most sensitive string
deliver more noble tidings,
than your voice, which as
in an angel, cat of mystery,
seraphic, extraordinary,
is as subtle as it's harmonious!
II
From its light-brownish fur, such
a sweet perfume gathers,
I was scented by it after
stroking it once, one touch.
It's the room's familiar spirit:
it judges, presides, inspires,
all things within its empire:
a god perhaps, a faery is it?
When my eyes are obediently
drawn to this cat I love,
like a magnet, and I look
into myself profoundly,
I see with pure amazement
the fire of his pale pupils,
bright lamps, living opals,
fixed on me, in contemplation.
Monologue
You are a lovely autumn sky, rose-clear!
But sadness is flowing in me like the sea,
And leaves on my sullen lip, as it disappears,
of its bitter slime the painful memory.
- Your hand glides over my numb breast in vain:
what it seeks, dear friend, is a place made raw
by woman's ferocious fang and claw, refrain:
seek this heart, the wild beasts tear, no more.
My heart is a palace defiled by the rabble,
they drink, and murder, and clutch each other's hair!
- About your naked throat a perfume hovers! . . .
O Beauty, harsh scourge of souls, this is your care!
With your eyes of fire, dazzling as at our feasts,
Burn these scraps to ashes, spared by the beasts!
Autumn Song
I
Soon we'll plunge into the bitter shadows:
Goodbye bright sunlit summers, all too short!
Already I can hear the gloomy blows:
the wood reverberates in some paved court.
Winter once more will enter in my being: anger,
shuddering, horror, hate, forced labour's shock,
like the sun in its deep hell, northern, polar,
my heart no more than a red, frozen block.
Trembling, I hear every log that falls:
building a scaffold makes no duller echoes.
My spirit's like a shattered tower, its walls
split by the battering ram's slow tireless blows.
Rocked by monotonous thuds, I feel it's done,
a coffin's being nailed in haste somewhere.
For whom? - Yesterday summer, now it's autumn!
The mysterious noise rings of departure there.
II
I love the greenish light of your almond eyes,
gentle beauty, but all's bitter to me today,
and nothing, your love, the boudoir, your fire,
matches the sun, for me, glittering on the waves.
Yet tender heart, love me still! Be like a mother
however ungrateful, however unworthy I am:
be the short-lived sweetness, sister or lover,
of a glorious autumn or the setting sun.
Short task! The grave waits: it is greedy!
Ah, let me rest my forehead on your knees,
regretting summer, white and torrid, let me
enjoy the late season's gentle yellow rays!
Autumn Sonnet
Your eyes, clear as crystal, ask me: 'Strange lover,
what do I mean to you? '- Hush, and be charming!
My heart, irritated by all but the one thing,
the primitive creature's absolute candour,
is unwilling to show its infernal secret to you,
cradler whose hand invites to deep slumber,
and its black inscription written in fire,
I hate passion, the spirit sickens me too!
Let us love gently. Love in hiding, discreet,
in shadowy ambush, bends his fatal bow.
The weapons of his ancient arsenal I know:
Crime, horror, madness! - My pale marguerite!
are you not, as I am, an autumn sun though,
O my so white, my so cold Marguerite?
To She Who Is Too Light-hearted
Your head, your gesture, your air,
are lovely, like a lovely landscape:
laughter's alive, in your face,
a fresh breeze in a clear atmosphere.
The dour passer-by you brush past there,
is dazzled by health in flight,
flashing like a brilliant light
from your arms and shoulders.
The resounding colours
with which you sprinkle your dress,
inspire the spirits of poets
with thoughts of dancing flowers.
Those wild clothes are the emblem
of your brightly-hued mind:
madcap by whom I'm terrified,
I hate you, and love you, the same!
Sometimes in a lovely garden
where I trailed my listlessness,
I've felt the sunlight sear my breast
like some ironic weapon:
and Spring's green presence
brought such humiliation
I've levied retribution on
a flower, for Nature's insolence.
So through some night, when the hour
of sensual pleasure sounds,
I'd like to slink, mute coward, bound
for your body's treasure,
to bruise your sorry breast,
to punish your joyful flesh,
form in your startled side, a fresh
wound's yawning depth,
and - breath-taking rapture! -
through those lips, new and full
more vivid and more beautiful
infuse my venom, my sister!
Reversibility
Angel of joyfulness, do you know anguish,
shame, remorse, sobbing, despondency,
those dreadful nights of vague anxiety,
when, like crumpled paper, the heart's crushed?
Angel of joyfulness, do you know anguish,
Angel of goodness, do you know hatred,
fists clenched in the darkness, tears of gall,
when vengeance taps out its infernal call,
and takes control of thoughts in the head?
Angel of goodness, do you know hatred?
Angel of health, do you know the fevers,
that the length of the dingy workhouse wall,
like exiles, dragging their feet along, all
moving their lips, seek absent summers?
Angel of health, do you know the fevers?
Angel of beauty, do you know those furrows,
and fears of old-age, and the hideous torture
of reading devotion's intimate horror,
in eyes where for years our greedy eyes burrowed?
Angel of beauty, do you know those furrows?
Angel of happiness, of joy's bright flares,
King David would have found life, near the tomb,
in your enchanted body's perfume:
but, angel, all I ask of you is your prayers,
Angel of happiness, of joy's bright flares!
Note: The servants of King David sought for a young virgin to warm him in his old age, because he could get no heat. See The First Book of Kings 1-4.
Confession
Once, once only, sweet and lovable woman,
you leant your smooth arm on mine
(that memory has never faded a moment
from the shadowy depths of my mind):
it was late: the full moon spread its light
like a freshly minted disc,
and like a river, the solemnity of night
flowed over sleeping Paris.
Along the houses, under carriage gates,
cats crept past furtively,
ears pricked, or else like familiar shades,
accompanied us slowly.
Suddenly, in our easy intimacy,
that flower of the pale light,
from you, rich, sonorous instrument, eternally
quivering gaily, bright,
from you, clear and joyous as a fanfare
in the glittering dawn
a strange, plaintive sigh escaped
a faltering tone
as from some stunted child, detestable, sullen, foul,
whose family in shame
hide it for years, to conceal it from the world
in the cellar's dark cave.
My poor angel, that harsh voice of yours cried:
'That nothing on earth is certain,
and however carefully it's disguised,
human selfishness rips the curtain:
it's a hard life being a lovely woman,
it's the banal occupation
of a cold, crazed dancer who summons
the mechanical smile's occasion:
it's stupid to build on the mortal heart:
everything shatters, love and beauty,
till Oblivion hurls them into its cart,
and returns them to Eternity! '
I've often recalled that enchanted silence,
its moon, and its languor: all
of that dreadful whispered confidence
in the heart's confessional.
For Madame Sabatier
What will you say tonight, poor soul in solitude,
what will you say my heart, withered till now,
to the so beautiful, so sweet, so dear one,
whose divine gaze recreated the flower?
- We will set Pride now to singing her praises:
nothing outdoes her sweet air of authority.
Her spiritual flesh has the perfume of angels,
and her eye surrounds us in robes of infinity.
Whether in the night, and alone, and in solitude,
whether in the street, and among the multitude,
her phantom dances in air, like a flame.
Sometimes it speaks and it says 'I am beautiful.
You, for the love of me, must love beauty alone:
for I am your Madonna, Muse, Guardian Angel.
The Living Torch
They go before me, those Eyes full of light
that some wise Angel has magnetised,
those divine brothers, my brothers, go, bright,
flashing their diamond fires in my eyes.
Leading my steps on Beauty's way,
saving me from snares, from grievous crime,
they are my servants and I am their slave:
all my being obeys that living flame.
Charmed Eyes, you shine with the mystic glow
of candles lighted in broad day, the sun
reddens, fails to quench, their eerie flow:
they celebrate Death: you sing the Resurrection:
you sing the resurrection of my soul,
Stars whose fires no sun can ever cool!
Hymn
To the too-dear, to the too-beautiful,
who fills my heart with clarity,
to the angel, to the immortal idol,
All hail, in immortality!
She flows through my reality,
air, mixed with the salt sea-swell:
into my soul's ecstasy,
pours the essence of the eternal;
Ever-fresh sachet, that scents
the dear corner's atmospheric light,
hidden smoke, of the burning censer,
in the secret paths of night.
How, incorruptible love,
to express your endless verities?
Grain of musk, unseen, above,
in the depths of my infinities!
To the too-dear, to the too-beautiful,
who is my joy and sanity,
to the angel, to the immortal idol,
All hail in immortality!
Moesta et Errabunda
Tell me, does your heart sometimes soar, Agathe,
far from the dark sea of the sordid city,
towards another sea, a blaze of splendour that
is blue, bright, deep as virginity?
Tell me, does your heart sometimes soar, Agathe?
The sea, the vast sea, consoles us for our efforts!
What demon entrusted the sea, that hoarse singer
that accompanies the immense roar of tempests,
with being the sublime sleep-bringer?
The sea, the vast sea, consoles us for our efforts!
Carry me wagons! Take me, frigate!
Far, far! Here the city slime is made of our weeping!
Is it true that your sad heart, Agathe,
cries: 'Far from remorse, from crime, from suffering,
carry me wagons, take me frigate!
How far perfumed paradise, you are removed
from us, where the clear blue is all love and happiness,
where what one loves is worthy of being loved,
where the heart drowns in pure voluptuousness!
How far, perfumed paradise, you are removed!
But the green paradise of childhood's thrill,
the games, the songs, the kisses, and the flowers,
the violin making music behind the hill,
and the wine glass, under the trees, in twilight hours,
- But the green paradise of childhood's thrill,
the innocent paradise full of secret yearning,
is it already further than India or China?
Can we call it back, with cries of longing,
and re-create it, with its voice of silver,
the innocent paradise full of secret yearning?
Note: Moesta et Errabunda: Sad and Restless. 'Agathe' is pronounced as 'Agat', to rhyme with 'that'.
Harmony of Evening
Now those days arrive when, stem throbbing,
each flower sheds its fragrance like a censer:
sounds and scents twine in the evening air:
languorous dizziness, Melancholy dancing!
Each flower sheds its fragrance like a censer:
the violin quivers, a heart that's suffering:
languorous dizziness, Melancholy dancing!
the sky is lovely, sad like a huge altar.
The violin quivers, a heart that's suffering:
a heart, hating the vast black void, so tender!
the sky is lovely, sad like a huge altar:
the sun is drowned, in its own blood congealing.
A heart, hating the vast black void, so tender:
each trace of the luminous past it's gathering!
The sun is drowned, in its own blood congealing. . .
A vessel of the host, your memory shines there.
Semper Eadem
'Where does it come from,' you ask, 'this strange sadness,
that climbs, like the sea, over black, bare stone? '
- When our heart has once reaped the harvest,
life is an evil. That's known,
as the simplest of miseries, and nothing mysterious,
and seen by everyone, like your ecstasy.
Stop searching, you, beauty, so curious!
And, though your voice is sweet, sit, silently!
Be quiet, fool! Ever-ravished soul!
Lips of childish laughter! Often, more than the whole
of Life, Death grips us, with subtle ties we have made.
Let me, let my heart, then, be drunk on its lies,
plunge as into a beautiful dream, into your eyes,
and, forever, sleep, in your eyelids' shade.
To the Reader
Stupidity and error, avarice and vice,
possess our spirits, batten on our flesh,
we feed that fond remorse, our guest,
like ragged beggars nourishing their lice.
Our sins are mulish, our repentance vain:
we make certain our confessions pay,
we'll happily retrace the muddied way,
thinking vile tears will wash away the stain.
Satan Trismegistes rocks the bewitched
Mind, endlessly, on evil's pillow, till,
all the precious metal of our will's
vaporised by that knowing alchemist.
The Devil pulls the strings that make us move!
We take delight in such disgusting things:
one step nearer Hell each new day brings
us, void of horror, to the stinking gloom.
We clutch at furtive pleasure as we pass,
like the debauchee whose lips are pressed
to some antique whore's battered breast,
squeezing the rotten orange that we grasp.
Packed, and seething like a million worms,
a host of Demons riot in our brains,
and when we breathe, invisibly, Death drains
into our lungs, stream full of silent groans.
If poison, arson, knives, base desire,
haven't yet embroidered deft designs
on the dull canvas of our pitiful lives
it's only, alas, because our souls lack fire.
Among the jackals, bitches, panthers,
monkeys, scorpions, serpents, vultures,
that screech, howl, grunt, and crawl, ogres,
in the vile menagerie of our errors,
there's one of uglier, nastier, fouler birth!
Without one wild gesture, one savage yell,
it would willingly send this world to hell,
and in one great yawn swallow up the earth:
it's Boredom! - in its eye's an involuntary tear,
dreaming of scaffolds, as it smokes its hookah,
you know it, Reader, that fastidious monster,
hypocrite, Reader, - my brother, - and my peer!
Note: Trismegistes. Baudelaire here fuses the persons of Satan and Hermes Trismegistes (or Trismegistus). The works of Hermes Trismegistes (The Thrice Great), known as the Corpus Hermeticum were believed during the Renaissance to be Egyptian but were later attributed to Hellenistic writers of the second century A. D, writing in the style of Plotinus. The Corpus Hermeticum takes the form of dialogues between Trismegistus, Thoth, and several other Egyptian deities, including Isis. Little in the text is original. Much of the Hermetic world view is grounded in the philosophy of Plato.
Hermetics saw the universe in terms of light and dark, good and evil, spirit and matter. Like their Gnostic contemporaries, practitioners preached mind-body dualism and salvation through the possession of true and divine knowledge.
The Enemy
My youth was only a threatening storm,
pierced here and there by glowing heat:
my garden scarcely let a ripe fruit form,
the thunderous rain's destruction is complete.
Now I've reached the autumn of ideas,
I must needs labour with rake and spade,
to reclaim afresh the inundated meres,
where pits were scooped as deep as graves.
Who knows whether the flowers I dream
will find in soil, washed by the salt-stream,
the mystic manna that will give them vigour?
- O Sadness! Sadness! Time eats at our lives,
the unseen Enemy drinks, that gnaws our
heart, our wasted blood, digs in, and thrives!
Mist and Rain
Late autumns, winters, spring-times steeped in mud,
anaesthetizing seasons! You I praise, and love
for so enveloping my heart and brain
in vaporous shrouds, in sepulchres of rain.
In this vast landscape where chill south winds play,
where long nights hoarsen the shrill weather-vane,
it opens wide its raven's wings, my soul,
freer than in times of mild renewal.
Nothing's sweeter to my heart, full of sorrows,
on which the hoar-frost fell in some past time,
O pallid seasons, queens of our clime,
than the changeless look of your pale shadows,
- except, two by two, to lay our grief to rest
in some moonless night, on a perilous bed.
Lover's Wine
Today Space is fine!
Like a horse mount this wine,
without bridle, spurs, bit,
for a heaven divine!
We, two angels they torture
with merciless fever,
will this mirage pursue
in the day's crystal blue!
Sweetly balanced, fly higher
through the whirlwind's wise air
in our mirrored desire,
my sister, swim there
without rest or respite
to my dream paradise!
The Solitary's Wine
A flirtatious woman's singular gaze
as she slithers towards you, like the white rays
the vibrant moon throws on the trembling sea
where she wishes to bathe her casual beauty,
the last heap of chips in the gambler's grasp,
skinny Adeline's licentious kiss,
a fragment of music's unnerving caress,
resembling a distant human gasp,
none of these equal, O profound bottle,
the powerful balm of your fecund vessel,
kept for the pious poet's thirsting heart:
you pour out youth, and hope, and life,
and the deepest poverty's treasure - pride,
filling us with triumph, and the Gods' divine art!
The Pipe
I am the pipe of an author:
from my complexion you can see,
like an Abyssinian girl's ebony,
that my owner's a heavy smoker.
When he's overcome by pain
I'm like the cottage chimney smoking,
where the evening supper's cooking,
for the ploughman home again.
I entwine his soul, and soothe it,
in the blue and swirling veil,
that floats from my mouth, pale
rings of powerful balm around it,
that charm his heart, and bless
his spirit freed from weariness.
The Game
Old courtesans in washed-out armchairs,
pale, eyebrows blacked, eyes 'tender', 'fatal',
simpering still, and from their skinny ears
loosing their waterfalls of stone and metal:
Round the green baize, faces without lips,
lips without blood, jaws without the rest,
clawed fingers that the hellish fever grips,
fumbling an empty pocket, heaving breast:
below soiled ceilings, rows of pallid lights,
and huge candelabras shed their glimmer,
across the brooding brows of famous poets:
here it's their blood and sweat they squander:
this the dark tableau of nocturnal dream
my clairvoyant eye once watched unfold.
In an angle of that silent lair, I leaned
hard on my elbows, envious, mute, and cold,
yes, envying that crew's tenacious passion,
the graveyard gaiety of those old whores,
all bravely trafficking to my face, this one
her looks, that one his family honour,
heart scared of envying many a character
fervently rushing at the wide abyss,
drunk on their own blood, who'd still prefer
torment to death, and hell to nothingness!
Spleen
I'm like the king of a rain-soaked country,
rich but impotent, young in senility,
who despises his tutors' servile features,
as bored with his dogs as with other creatures.
Nothing enlivens him, hunting or falconry,
or his people dying beside the balcony.
His favourite fool's most grotesque antic
won't calm this brow so cruelly sick:
his fleur-de-lys bed has become a tomb,
his ladies, who give all princes room,
can't invent new dresses so totally wanton
as to raise a smile from this young skeleton.
The alchemist, making him gold, has never
banished from his being the corrupted matter,
or in baths of blood that the Romans gave,
that men of power recall near the grave,
been able to warm that living cadaver,
where instead of blood, runs Lethe's water.
The Voyage
A Maxime du Camp
I
For the child, in love with globe, and stamps,
the universe equals his vast appetite.
Ah! How great the world is in the light of the lamps!
In the eyes of memory, how small and slight!
One morning we set out, minds filled with fire,
travel, following the rhythm of the seas,
hearts swollen with resentment, and bitter desire,
soothing, in the finite waves, our infinities:
Some happy to leave a land of infamies,
some the horrors of childhood, others whose doom,
is to drown in a woman's eyes, their astrologies
the tyrannous Circe's dangerous perfumes.
In order not to become wild beasts, they stun
themselves, with space and light, and skies of fire:
The ice that stings them, and the scorching sun,
slowly erase the marks of their desire.
But the true voyagers are those who leave
only to move: hearts like balloons, as light,
they never swerve from their destinies,
and, without knowing why, say, always: 'Flight! '
Those whose desires take on cloud-likenesses,
who dream of vast sensualities, the same
way a conscript dreams of the guns, shifting vaguenesses,
that the human spirit cannot name.
II
We imitate, oh horror, tops and bowls,
in their leaps and bounds, and even in dreams, dumb
curiosity torments us, and we are rolled,
as if by a cruel Angel that whips the sun!
Strange fate, where the goal never stays the same,
and, belonging nowhere, perhaps it's no matter where
Man, whose hope never tires, as if insane,
rushes on, in search of rest, through the air.
Our soul, a three-master, heads for the isle, of Icarus.
A voice booms, from the bridge 'Skin your eyes! '
A voice, from aloft, eager and maddened, calls to us:
'Love. . . Fame. . . Happiness! Hell, it's a rock! ' it cries.
On every island, that the lookouts sight,
destiny promises its Eldorado:
Imagination conjuring an orgiastic rite,
finds only a barren reef, in the afterglow.
O, the poor lover of chimeric sands!
Clap him in irons, toss him in the sea,
this drunken sailor, inventing New Found Lands,
whose mirage fills the abyss, with fresh misery?
Like an old tramp, trudging through the mire,
dreaming, head up, of dazzling paradise,
his gaze, bewitched, discovering Capua's fire,
wherever a candlelit hovel meets his eyes.
III
Astounding travellers! What histories
we read in your eyes, deeper than the ocean there!
Show us the treasures of your rich memories,
marvellous jewels made of stars and air.
We wish to voyage without steam or sails!
Project on our spirits, stretched out, like the sheets,
lightening the tedium of our prison tales,
your past, the horizon's furthest reach completes.
Tell us, what did you see?
IV
'We saw the sand,
and waves, we also saw the stars:
despite the shocks, disasters, the unplanned,
we were often just as bored as before.
The sunlight's glory on the violet shoals,
the cities' glory as the sunlight wanes,
kindled that restless longing in our souls,
to plunge into the sky's reflected flames.
The richest cities, the greatest scenes, we found
never contained the magnetic lures,
of those that chance fashioned, in the clouds.
Always desire rent us, on distant shores!
Enjoyment adds strength to our desire.
Desire, old tree, for whom, pleasure is the ground,
while your bark thickens, as you grow higher,
your branches long to touch the sky you sound!
Will you grow forever, mighty tree
more alive than cypress? Though, we have brought, with care,
a few specimens, for your album leaves,
brothers, who find beauty, in objects, from out there!
We have saluted gods of ivory,
thrones, jewelled with constellated gleams,
sculpted palaces, whose walls of faery,
to your bankers, would be ruinous dreams.
Clothes that, to your vision, bring drunkenness,
women with painted teeth and breasts,
juggling savants gliding snakes caress. '
V
And then, what then?
VI
'O, Childishness!
Not to forget the main thing, everywhere,
effortlessly, through this world, we've seen,
from top to bottom of the fatal stair,
the tedious spectacle of eternal sin.
Woman, vile slave, full of pride and foolishness,
adoring herself without laughing, loving without disgust:
Man, greedy tyrant, harsh, lewd, merciless,
slave of that slave, a sewer in the dust.
The torturer who plays; the martyr who sobs;
the feast, perfumed and moist, from the bloody drip;
the poison of power, corrupting the despot;
the crowd, in love with the stupefying whip:
Several religions just like our own,
all climbing heaven. Sanctity,
like an invalid, under the eiderdown,
finding in nails, and hair-shirts, ecstasy:
Drunk with its genius, chattering Humanity,
as mad today as ever, or even worse,
crying to God, in furious agony:
" O, my likeness, my master, take my curse!
And, the least stupid, harsh lovers of Delirium,
fleeing the great herd, guarded by Destiny,
taking refuge in the depths of opium!
- That is the news, from the whole world's country. '
VII
Bitter the knowledge we get from travelling!
Today, tomorrow, yesterday, the world shows what we see,
monotonous and mean, our image beckoning,
an oasis of horror, in a desert of ennui!
Shall we go, or stay? Stay, if you can stay:
Go, if you must. One runs, another crouches, to elude
Time, that vigilant, shadow enemy.
Alas! There are runners for whom nothing is any good,
like Apostles, or wandering Jews,
nothing, no vessel or railway car, they assume,
can flee this vile slave driver; others whose
minds can kill him, without leaving their room.
When, at last he places his foot on our spine, a
hope still stirs, and we can shout: 'Forward! '
Just as when we left for China,
the wind in our hair and our eyes fixed to starboard,
sailing over the Shadowy sea,
with a young traveller's joyous mind.
Do you hear those voices, sadly, seductively,
chanting: 'Over here, if you would find,
the perfumed Lotus! It's here we press
miraculous fruits on which your hopes depend:
Come and be drunk, on the strange sweetness,
of the afternoons, that never end. '
Behind a familiar tongue we see the spectre:
Our Pylades stretches his arms towards our face.
'To renew your heart, swim towards your Electra! '
she calls, whose knees we once embraced.
VIII
O Death, old captain, it is time! Weigh anchor.
This land wearies us, O Death! Take flight!
If the sky and sea are dark as ink's black rancour,
our hearts, as you must know, are filled with light!
Pour out your poison, and dissolve our fears!
Its fire so burns our minds, we yearn, it's true,
to plunge to the Void's depths, Heaven or Hell, who cares?
Into the Unknown's depths, to find the new.
Notes: Circe was the sea-nymph of Aeaea, who bewitched the followers of Ulysses, and delayed him on her island (See Homer, Odyssey X). Icarus fell into the Icarian Sea, and gave his name to the Sea and the island of Icaria in the Aegean, after his waxen wings had melted when he flew too near the sun. The wings had been made for the two of them by his father Daedalus, who buried him on the island (See Ovid, Metamorphoses VIII 195). Eldorado was the mythical golden man of Inca Peru, hunted for by the Spaniards, synonymous with an unattainable treasure. Capua was the royal capital of ancient Campania, at the time of the Wars in Latium, described in Virgil's Aeneid. The Lotus was the mythical drug of the Lotus Eaters, whom Ulysses visited (See Homer, Odyssey IX), their land a synonym for the world of languor outside time. Pylades was the friend of Orestes, who helped Orestes in his journey to avenge Agamemnon and return to his sister Electra (See Aeschylus, The Oresteian Trilogy: The Choephori).
The Seven Old Men
A Victor Hugo
Ant-like city, city full of dreams,
where the passer-by, at dawn, meets the spectre!
Mysteries everywhere are the sap that streams
through the narrow veins of this great ogre.
One morning, when, on the dreary street,
the buildings all seemed heightened, cold
a swollen river's banks carved out to greet,
(their stage-set mirroring an actor's soul),
the dirty yellow fog that flooded space,
arguing with my already weary soul,
steeling my nerves like a hero, I paced
suburbs shaken by the carts' drum-roll.
Suddenly, an old man in rags, their yellow
mirroring the colour of the rain-filled sky,
whose looks alone prompted alms to flow,
except for the evil glittering of his eye,
appeared. You'd have thought his eyeballs
steeped in gall: his gaze intensified the cold,
and his long beard, as rigid as a sword,
was jutting out like Judas's of old.
He was not bent but broken, his spine
made a sharp right angle with his legs,
so that the stick, perfecting his line,
gave him the awkward shape and step
of three-legged usurer, or sick quadruped.
Wading through snow and mud he went
as if, under his feet, he crushed the dead,
hostile to the world, not just indifferent.
Then his double: beard, eyes, rags, stick, back,
no trait distinguished his centenarian twin:
they marched in step, two ghosts of the Baroque,
sprung from one hell, towards some unknown end.
Was I the butt of some infamous game,
some evil chance, aimed at humiliation?
Since minute by minute, I counted seven,
of that sinister old man's multiplication!
Whoever smiles at my anxiety,
and balks at shivering, the un-fraternal,
consider then, despite their senility,
those seven vile monsters looked eternal!
Could I have lived to see an eighth: yet one
more ironic, fatal, inexorable replication,
loathsome Phoenix, his own father and son?
- I turned my back on that hell-bent procession.
Exasperated, a drunk that sees things doubled,
I stumbled home, slammed the door, terrified,
sick, depressed, mind feverish and troubled,
wounded by mystery, the absurd, outside!
In vain my reason tried to take command,
its efforts useless in the tempest's roar,
my soul, a mastless barge, danced, and danced,
over some monstrous sea without a shore!
The Digging Skeleton
I
In the anatomical plates
displayed on the dusty quays
where many a dry book sleeps
mummified, as in ancient days,
drawings to which the gravity
and skill of some past artist,
despite the gloomy subject
have communicated beauty,
you'll see, and it renders those
gruesome mysteries more complete,
flayed men, and skeletons posed,
farm-hands, digging the soil at their feet.
II
Peasants, dour and resigned,
convicts pressed from the grave,
what's the strange harvest, say,
for which you hack the ground,
bending your backbones there,
flexing each fleshless sinew,
what farmer's barn must you
labour to fill with such care?
Do you seek to show - by that pure,
and terrible, emblem of too hard
a fate! - that even in the bone-yard
the promised sleep's far from sure:
that even the Void's a traitor:
that even Death tells us lies,
that in some land new to our eyes,
we must, perhaps, alas, forever,
and ever, and ever, eternally,
wield there the heavy spade,
scrape the dull earth, its blade
beneath our naked, bleeding feet?
Far Away from Here
This is the sanctuary
where the prettified young lady,
calm, and always ready,
fans her breasts, aglow,
elbow on the pillow,
hears the fountain's flow:
it's the room of Dorothea.
- The breeze and water distantly
sing their song, mingled here
with sobs to soothe the spoiled child's fear.
From tip to toe, most thoroughly,
her delicate surfaces appear,
oiled with sweet perfumery.
- the flowers nearby swoon gracefully.
The Swan
I
Andromache, I think of you! That false Simois
that narrow stream, meagre and sad, flowing there
where the immense majesty of your widowed grief,
shone out, growing from your tears,
stirred my fertile memory, suddenly,
as I was crossing the new Carrousel.
The old Paris is gone (the shape of a city
changes faster than the human heart can tell)
I can only see those frail booths in the mind's eye,
those piles of rough-cut pillars, and capitals,
the weeds, the massive greening blocks, that used to lie
water-stained: the bric-a-brac piled in shop windows.
There, there used to be a menagerie:
One dawn, at the hour when labour wakes, there,
under the cold, clear sky, or, when the road-menders set free
a dull hammering, into the silent air,
I saw a swan, that had escaped its cage,
striking the dry stones with webbed feet;
trailing, on hard earth, its white plumage;
in the waterless gutter, opening its beak;
bathing its wings frantically, in the dust,
and crying, its heart full of its native streams:
'Lightning, when will you strike? Rain when will you gust? '
Unfortunate, strange, fatal symbol, it seems
I see you, still: sometimes, like Ovid's true
man transformed, his head, on a convulsive neck, strained
towards the sky's cruel and ironic blue,
addressing the gods with his complaint.
II
Paris changes! But nothing, in my melancholy,
moves. New hotels, scaffolding, stone blocks,
old suburbs, everything, becomes allegory,
to me: my memories are heavier than rocks.
So, in front of the Louvre, an image oppresses me.
I think of my great swan, with its mad movements,
ridiculous, sublime, as exiles seem,
gnawed by endless longing! And then,
of you, Andromache, fallen from the embrace
of the great hero, vile chattel in the hands of proud Pyrrhus,
in front of an open tomb, in grief's ecstatic grace,
Hector's widow, alas, and wife of Helenus!
I think of the negress, consumptive, starved,
dragging through the mire, and searching, eyes fixed,
for the absent palm-trees of Africa, carved
behind the immense walls of mist:
Of those who have lost what they cannot recover,
ever! Ever! Those who drink tears like ours,
and suck on sorrow's breasts, their wolf-mother!
Of the skinny orphans, withering like flowers!
So in the forest of my heart's exile,
an old memory sounds its clear encore!
I think of sailors forgotten on some isle,
prisoners, the defeated! . . . . and of many more!
Note. Andromache was Hector's wife who mourned his death in the Trojan War. The Simois and the Scamander (Xanthus) were the two rivers of the Trojan Plain. Pyrrhus is Neoptolemus, son of Achilles. Andromache fell to him as a spoil after the fall of Troy. Helenus was a son of Priam and brother of Hector. Baudelaire follows Virgil, The Aeneid III 289, where Aeneas reaches Epirus and Chaonia, and finds Helenus and Andromache. Helenus has succeeded to the throne of Pyrrhus and married Andromache. Aeneas finds Andromache sacrificing to Hector's ashes in a wood near the city (Buthrotum) by a river named after the Simois. This is Baudelaire's 'false Simois'. Andromache explains that Pyrrhus has left her for Hermione, and passed her on to Helenus, who has been accepted as a Greek prince. Helenus has built a second 'little' Troy in Chaonia. Andromache is a symbol of fallen exile. The Carrousel is a bridge over the Seine in Paris, recent at the time of the poem. The Ovid reference is (arguably) to Cycnus, son of Sthenelus, changed to a swan, grieving for Phaethon (See Metamorphoses II 367 and also Virgil, Aeneid X 187). The Louvre Palace is now a Museum and Art Gallery, on the right bank of the Seine, in Paris.
Parisian Dream
A Constantine Guys
I
The vague and distant image
of this landscape, so terrifying,
on which no mortal's gazed
thrilled me again this morning.
Sleep is full of miracles!
By a singular caprice
from that unfolding spectacle
I'd banned all shapeless leaf,
a painter proud of my artistry
I savoured in my picture
the enchanting monotony
of metal, marble, water.
Babel of stairs and arcades,
it was an infinite palace
full of pools and cascades,
falling gold, burnt, or lustreless:
and heavy cataracts there
like curtains of crystal,
dazzling, hung in air
from walls of metal.
Not trees, but colonnades
circled the sleeping pools
where colossal naiads gazed
at themselves, as women do.
Between banks of rose and green,
the blue water stretched,
for millions of leagues
to the universe's edge:
there were un-heard of stones,
and magic waves: there were,
dazzled by everything shown,
enormous quivering mirrors!
Impassive and taciturn,
Ganges, in the firmament,
poured treasures from the urn
into abysses of diamond.
Architect of this spell,
I made a tame ocean swell
entirely at my will,
through a jewelled tunnel:
and all, seemed glossy, clear
iridescent: even the shades
of black, liquid glory there
in light's crystallised rays.
Not a single star, no trace
of a sun even, low in the sky,
to illuminate this wondrous place
that shone with intrinsic fire!
And over these shifting wonders
hovered (oh dreadful novelty!
All for the eye, none for the ear! )
the silence of eternity.
II
Opening eyes filled with flame
I saw the horrors of my hovel,
and felt the barbs of shameful
care, re-entering my soul:
brutally with gloomy blows
the clock struck mid-day,
and the sky poured shadows
on a world, benumbed and grey.
The Inquisitive Man's Dream
A Nadar
Do you know, as I do, delicious sadness
and make others say of you: 'Strange man! '
- I was dying. In my soul, singular illness,
desire and horror were mingled as one:
anguish and living hope, no factious bile.
The more the fatal sand ran out, the more
acute, delicious my torment: my heart entire
was tearing itself away from the world I saw.
I was like a child eager for the spectacle,
hating the curtain as one hates an obstacle. . .
at last the truth was chillingly revealed:
I'd died without surprise, dreadful morning
enveloped me. - Was this all there was to see?
The curtain had risen, and I was still waiting.
Obsession
Great forests you frighten me, like vast cathedrals:
You roar like an organ, and in our condemned souls,
aisles of eternal mourning, where past death-rattles
sound, the echo of your De Profundis rolls.
I hate you, Ocean! My mind, in your tumultuous main,
sees itself: I hear the vast laughter of your seas,
the bitter laughter of defeated men,
filled with the sound of sobs and blasphemies.
How you would please me without your stars, O Night!
I know the language that their light employs!
Since I search for darkness, nakedness, the Void!
But the shadows themselves seem, to my sight
canvases, where thousands of lost beings, alive,
and with a familiar gaze, leap from my eyes.
Sympathetic Horror
'From that sky livid, bizarre
as your tortured destiny,
what thoughts fill your empty heart,
Freethinker, answer me. '
- Insatiable and avid
for vague and obscure skies,
I'll not groan like Ovid,
banned from Rome and paradise.
Skies, shores split and seamed,
my pride's mirrored in you:
your clouds in mourning, too,
are the hearses of my dreams,
Hell's reflected in your light,
where my heart takes delight.
The Alchemy of Sadness
One man lights you with his ardour
one decks you in mourning, Nature!
What says to the first: 'A Sepulchre!
