L’ Étranger

-Qui aimes-tu le mieux, homme énigmatique, dis? ton père,
ta mère, ta s«ur ou ton frère?

—Je n’ai ni père, ni mère, ni s«ur, ni frère.
—Tes amis?
—Vous vous servez là d’une parole dont le sens m’est resté
jusqu’à ce jour inconnu.
—Ta patrie?
—J’ignore sous quelle latitude elle est située.
—La beauté?
—Je l’aimerais volontiers, déesse et immortelle.
—L’or?
—Je le hais comme vous haïssez Dieu.
—Eh! qu’aimes-tu donc, extraordinaire étranger?
—J’aime les nuages… les nuages qui passent… là-bas… là-bas…
les merveilleux nuages!

poem by Charles Baudelaire
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De Profundis Clamavi

Have pity, You alone whom I adore
From down this black pit where my heart is sped,
A sombre universe ringed round with lead
Where fear and curses the long night explore.

Six months a cold sun hovers overhead;
The other six is night upon this land.
No beast; no stream; no wood; no leaves expand.
The desert Pole is not a waste so dead.

Now in the whole world there's no horror quite
so cold and cruel as this glacial sun,
So like old Chaos as this boundless night;

I envy the least animals that run,
Which can find respite in brute slumber drowned,
So slowly is the skein of time unwound.

poem by Charles Baudelaire
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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!

poem by Charles Baudelaire
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The Fountain of Blood

A fountain's pulsing sobs--like this my blood
Measures its flowing, so it sometimes seems.
I hear a gentle murmur as it streams;
Where the wound lies I've never understood.

Like water meadows, boulevards are flooded.
Cobblestones, crisscrossed by scarlet rills,
Are islands; creatures come and drink their fill.
Nothing in nature now remains unblooded.

I used to hope that wine could bring me ease,
Could lull asleep my deeply gnawing mind.
I was a fool: the senses clear with wine.

I looked to Love to cure my old disease.
Love led me to a thicket of IVs
Where bristling needles thirsted for each vein.

poem by Charles Baudelaire
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Correspondences

Nature is a temple whose living colonnades
Breathe forth a mystic speech in fitful sighs;
Man wanders among symbols in those glades
Where all things watch him with familiar eyes.

Like dwindling echoes gathered far away
Into a deep and thronging unison
Huge as the night or as the light of day,
All scents and sounds and colors meet as one.

Perfumes there are as sweet as the oboe's sound,
Green as the prairies, fresh as a child's caress,
- And there are others, rich, corrupt, profound

And of an infinite pervasiveness,
Like myrrh, or musk, or amber, the excite
The ecstasies of sense, the soul's delight.

poem by Charles Baudelaire
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On Tasso In Prison (Eugène 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!

poem by Charles Baudelaire
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The Void

Pascal had his Void that went with him day and night.
- Alas! It’s all Abyss, - action, longing, dream,
the Word! And I feel Panic’s storm-wind stream
through my hair, and make it stand upright.
Above, below, around, the desert, the deep,
the silence, the fearful compelling spaces...
With his knowing hand, in my dark, God traces
a multi-formed nightmare without release.
I fear sleep as one fears a deep hole,
full of vague terror. Where to, who knows?
I see only infinity at every window,
and my spirit haunted by vertigo’s stress
envies the stillness of Nothingness.
- Ah! Never to escape from Being and Number!

poem by Charles Baudelaire
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Calm

Have patience, O my sorrow, and be still.
You asked for night: it falls: it is here.
A shadowy atmosphere enshrouds the hill,
to some men bringing peace, to others care.
While the vile human multitude
goes to earn remorse, in servile pleasure’s play,
under the lash of joy, the torturer, who
is pitiless, Sadness, come, far away:
Give me your hand. See, where the lost years
lean from the balcony in their outdated gear,
where regret, smiling, surges from the watery deeps.
Underneath some archway, the dying light
sleeps, and, like a long shroud trailing from the East,
listen, dear one, listen to the soft onset of night.

poem by Charles Baudelaire
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The Lid

Whatever place he goes, on land or sea,
under a sky on fire, or a polar sun,
servant of Jesus, follower of Cytherea,
shadowy beggar, or Croesus the glittering one,
city-dweller or rustic, traveller or sedentary,
whether his tiny brain works fast or slow,
everywhere man knows the terror of mystery,
and with a trembling eye looks high or low.
Above, the Sky! That burial vault that stifles,
a ceiling lit for a comic opera, blind walls,
where each actor treads a blood-drenched stage:
Freethinkers’ fear, the hermit sets his hope on:
the Sky! The black lid of the giant cauldron,
under which we vast, invisible Beings rage.

poem by Charles Baudelaire
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The Living Torch

Those lit eyes go before me, in full view,
(Some cunning angel magnetised their light) -
Heavenly twins, yet my own brothers too,
Shaking their diamond blaze into my sight.

My steps from every trap or sin to save,
In the strait road of Beauty they conduct me,
They are my servants, and I am their slave,
Obedient in whatever they instruct me.

Delightful eyes, you burn with mystic rays
Like candles in broad day; red suns may blaze,
But cannot quench their still, fantastic light.

Those candles burn for death, but you for waking :
You sing the dawn that in my soul is breaking,
Stars which no sun could ever put to flight!

poem by Charles Baudelaire
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