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Charles Baudelaire's Poems Text

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414 views11 pages

Charles Baudelaire's Poems Text

Uploaded by

Shifatullah Oyon
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Charles Baudelaire: Selected Poem's Text

The Albatross

Often the idle mariners at sea


Catch albatrosses, vast birds of the deep.
Companions which follow lazily

Across the bitter gulfs the gliding ship.

They're scarcely set on deck, these heavenly kings


Before, clumsy, abashed, and full of shame,
They piteously let their great white wings

Beside them drag, oar-like, and halt and lame.

See this winged traveller, so awkward, weak!


He was so fine: how droll and ugly now!
One sailor sticks a cutty in his beak,
Another limps to mock the bird that flew!

The Poet's like the monarch of the clouds


Who haunts the tempest, scorns the bows and slings;
Exiled on earth amid the shouting crowds,
He cannot walk, for he has giant's wing.
Correspondences

Nature's a temple where the pilasters


Speak sometimes in their mystic languages;

Man reaches it through symbols dense as trees,


That watch him with a gaze familiar.

As far-off echoes from a distance sound


In unity profound and recondite,

Boundless as night itself and as the light,


Sounds, fragrances and colours correspond.

Some perfumes are, like children, innocent,


As sweet as oboes, green as meadow sward,
-And others, complex, rich and jubilant,

The vastness of infinity afford,


Like musk and amber, incense, bergamot,
Which sing the senses' and the soul's delight.
The Ghost

Like an angle wild of eye,


I shall return to where you lie

And towards you, noiseless, glide


With the shades of eventide.

I shall give you, dusky one,


Kisses icy as the moon,

Embraces that a snake would give


As it crawled around a grave.

When the sombre morning comes


You will find your lover gone,
My place cold till the night draws near.

As others reign through tenderness


Over your life and youthfulness,
I want, myself, to reign through fear.
You would be all creation's concubine...

You would be all creation's concubine,


Woman impure! Boredom makes you malign.

To keep your teeth sharp for this monstrous chase,


Each day with hearts you feed your ivories,
Your eyes are lit up bright like fairground stalls
And lanterns gay at public festivals;
They insolently use a borrowed power,

And never understand their beauty's law.

Unfeeling, blind machine, of malice full!


Imbiber of the world's blood, useful tool
How are you not ashamed, how could you fail
To see in every glass your charms grow pale?

The greatness of this harm at which you are skilled


Has never, then made you draw back, appalled,
When nature, great in its concealed designs,
Makes use of you, o woman, queen of sins
-Of you, vile beast, - to form a genius?

Greatness unclean! Dishonour marvellous!


To a creole woman

In aromatic lands loved by the sun,


Beneath empurpled canopies of trees,

And palm-trees which an indolence rain down,


I knew a creole's haunting mysteries.

Her skin is pale and warm; enchantress brown,


She holds her head with nobly mannered ease,

She walks tall, slender like an amazon,


Her smile serene, assurance in her gaze.

If you Madame, went to the very scene,


Of glory, by the green Loire or the Seine,
To ornament some manor ancient,

Shadowed by these retreats of shadows full,


You'd sow a thousand sonnets in men's souls:
Made by your eyes, like slaves, obedient.
The Cat

Come, lovely cat, my heart is amorous;


Draw in your claws for me,

And let me gaze into your splendid eyes,


Flecked with calcedony.

When, gently, leisurely, my hands caress


Your head, your tensile back,

And grow intoxicated with the bliss,


The Aphrodisiac,

I see my mistress in my mind. Her glance,


Like yours, endearing beast,
Cold, searching, cuts and shivers like a lance,

Aromas sweet invest-


A subtle air, a perilous perfume-
Her body cinnamon.
Spleen 1

When, like a lid, the low and heavy sky

Weighs on the spirit burdened with long care,


And when, as far as mortal eye can see,
It sheds a darkness sadder than nights are;

When earth is changed into a prison cell,

Where, in the damp and dark, with timid wing


Hope, like a bat, goes beating at the wall,
Striking its head on ceilings mouldering;

When rain spreads out its never-ending trails


And imitates the bars of prisons vast,

And spiders, silent and detestable,


Crowd in, our minds with webs to overcast,

Some bells burst out in fury, suddenly,


And hurl a roar most terrible to heaven,

Like spirits lost for all eternity


Who start, most obstinately, to complain.
And, without drums or music, funerals
File past, in slow procession, in my soul;
Hope weeps, defeated; pain, tyrannical,

Atrocious, plants its black flag on my skull.


Spleen 2

I have more memories than a thousand years.


A chest-of-drawers cluttered with registers,

With poems, letters, songs, certificates,


With heavy locks of hair wrapped in receipts,
Hides fewer secrets than my mind forlorn.
It is a pyramid, a vast store-room
Which holds more dead than any sepulchres.

-I am a graveyard which the moon abhors,


Where, like regrets, the long worms ever crawl
And on my best loved hold their carnival.
I am a boudoir full of faded flowers,
Littered by fashions of other hours,

Where plaintive pastels, pale Bouchers alone


Breathe scent from bottles opened in days gone.

Nothing is so long as the halting hours,

When, burdened by the snowfall of the years,


Boredom, the fruit of dismal apathy,
Takes the proportions of eternity.
-Henceforth, O living world, you are no more
Than some old granite block hemmed in by fear,
Deep in Sahara misty sleeping on;
An old sphinx to a careless world unknown,

Forgotten on the map, whose dudgeon


Melts only in the warmth of setting suns!
Joyful Death

In fertile earth, heavy and full of snails,


I want to dig myself a hollow grave,

And leisurely, stretch out my mortal coil


And sleep, a shark forgotten in the waves.

I hate all testaments and funerals


Rather than beg the world a tear to give,

I'd ask the crows to bleed my carcass foul


At all extremities while I still live.

O worms! Dark neighbours without eyes or ears,


Behold a free and joyful corpse appear;
Calm revellers, the offspring of decay,

Show no remorse, and on my ruin feed,


You may still give it some new agony:
This soulless corpse, old, dead among the dead!

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