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To The Reader|Charles Baudelaire

Folly, depravity, greed, mortal sin
Invade our souls and rack our flesh; we feed
Our gentle guilt, gracious regrets, that breed
Like vermin glutting on foul beggars' skin

Our sins are stubborn; our repentance, faint
We take a handsome price for our confession
Happy once more to wallow in transgression
Thinking vile tears will cleanse us of all taint

On evil's cushion poised, His Majesty
Satan Thrice-Great, lulls our charmed soul, until
He turns to vapor what was once our will
Rich ore, transmuted by his alchemy

He holds the strings that move us, limb by limb
We yield, enthralled, to things repugnant, base
Each day, towards Hell, with slow, unhurried pace
We sink, uncowed, through shadows, stinking, grim

Like some lewd rake with his old worn-out whore
Nibbling her suffering teats, we seize our sly
delight, that, like an orange—withered, dry—
We squeeze and press for juice that is no more

Our brains teem with a race of Fiends, who frolic
thick as a million gut-worms; with each breath
Our lungs drink deep, suck down a stream of Death—
Dim-lit—to low-moaned whimpers melancholic

If poison, fire, blade, rape do not succeed
In sewing on that dull embroidery
Of our pathetic lives their artistry
It's that our soul, alas, shrinks from the deed

And yet, among the beasts and creatures all—
Panther, snake, scorpion, jackal, ape, hound, hawk—
Monsters that crawl, and shriek, and grunt, and squawk
In our vice-filled menagerie's caterwaul

One worse is there, fit to heap scorn upon—
More ugly, rank! Though noiseless, calm and still
yet would he turn the earth to scraps and swill
swallow it whole in one great, gaping yawn

Ennui! That monster frail!—With eye wherein
A chance tear gleams, he dreams of gibbets, while
Smoking his hookah, with a dainty smile. . .
—You know him, reader,—hypocrite,—my twin

Travelling Bohemians|Charles Baudelaire

The prophetic tribe of the ardent eyes

Yesterday they took the road, holding their babies

On their backs, delivering to fierce appetites

The always ready treasure of pendulous breasts

The men stick their feet out, waving their guns

Alongside the caravan where they tremble together

Scanning the sky their eyes are weighted down

In mourning for absent chimeras

At the bottom of his sandy retreat, a cricket

Watched passing, redoubles his song

Cybele, who loves, adds more flower

Makes fountains out of rock and blossoms from desert

Opening up before these travelers in a yawn—

A familiar empire, the inscrutable future

The Carcass|Charles Baudelaire

Remember that object we saw, dear soul

In the sweetness of a summer morn

At a bend of the path a loathsome carrion

On a bed with pebbles strewn

With legs raised like a lustful woman

Burning and sweating poisons

It spread open, nonchalant and scornful

Its belly, ripe with exhalations

The sun shone onto the rotting heap

As if to bring it to the boil

And tender a hundredfold to vast Nature

All that together she had joined

And the sky watched that superb carcass

Like a flower blossom out

The stench was so strong that on the grass

You thought you would pass out

Flies hummed upon the putrid belly

Whence larvae in black battalions spread

And like a heavy liquid flowed

Along the tatters deliquescing

All together it unfurled, and rose like a wave

And bubbling it sprang forth

One might have believed that, with a faint breath filled

The body, multiplying, lived

And this world gave out a strange music

Like of running water and of wind

Or of grain in a winnow

Rhythmically shaken and tossed

Form was erased and all but a vision

A sketch slow to take shape

On a forgotten canvas, which the artist finishes

From memory alone

Behind the rocks a fretting bitch

Looked at us with fierce mien

Anxious to retrieve from the corpse

A morsel that she had dropped

Yet to this rot you shall be like

To this horrid corruption

Star of my eyes, sun of desire

You, my angel and my passion

Yes, such you shall be, you, queen of all graces

After the last sacraments

When you go beneath the grass and waxy flowers

To mold among the skeletons

Then, oh my beauty! You must tell the vermin

As it eats you up with kisses

That I have preserved the form and essence divine

Of my decayed loves

The Albatross|Charles Baudelaire

Often to pass the time on board, the crew

will catch an albatross, one of those big birds

which nonchalantly chaperon a ship

across the bitter fathoms of the sea

Tied to the deck, this sovereign of space

as if embarrassed by its clumsiness

pitiably lets its great white wings

drag at its sides like a pair of unshipped oars

How weak and awkward, even comical

this traveller but lately so adoit -

one deckhand sticks a pipestem in its beak

another mocks the cripple that once flew

The Poet is like this monarch of the clouds

riding the storm above the marksman's range

exiled on the ground, hooted and jeered

he cannot walk because of his great wings

The Enemy|Charles Baudelaire

My youth was nothing but a black storm

Crossed now and then by brilliant suns

The thunder and the rain so ravage the shores

Nothing's left of the fruit my garden held once

I should employ the rake and the plow

Having reached the autumn of ideas

To restore this inundated ground

Where the deep grooves of water form tombs in the lees

And who knows if the new flowers you dreamed

Will find in a soil stripped and cleaned

The mystic nourishment that fortifies

—O Sorrow—O Sorrow—Time consumes Life

And the obscure enemy that gnaws at my heart

Uses the blood that I lose to play my part