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My love, do you recall the object which we saw, That fair, sweet, summer morn! At a turn in the path a foul carcass On a gravel strewn bed, Its legs raised in the air, like a lustful woman, Burning and dripping with poisons, Displayed in a shameless, nonchalant way Its belly, swollen with gases.Charles Baudelaire
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Il était tard; ainsi qu'une médaille neuve La pleine lune s'étalait, Et la solennité de la nuit, comme un fleuve Sur Paris dormant ruisselait.Charles Baudelaire
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I walk alone, absorbed in my fantastic play, – Fencing with rhymes, which, parrying nimbly, back away; Tripping on words, as on rough paving in the street, Or bumping into verses I long had dreamed to meet.Charles Baudelaire
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Flesh is willing, but the Soul requires Sisyphean patience for its song, Time, Hippocrates remarked, is shortand Art is long.Charles Baudelaire
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And yetto wine, to opium even, I preferthe elixir of your lips on which love flaunts itself;and in the wasteland of desireyour eyes afford the wells to slake my thirst.Charles Baudelaire
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I love to watch the fine mist of the night come on, The windows and the stars illumined, one by one, The rivers of dark smoke pour upward lazily, And the moon rise and turn them silver. I shall see The springs, the summers, and the autumns slowly pass; And when old Winter puts his blank face to the glass, I shall close all my shutters, pull the curtains tight, And build me stately palaces by candlelight.Charles Baudelaire
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SpleenJe suis comme le roi d'un pays pluvieux, Riche, mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant très vieux, Qui, de ses précepteurs méprisant les courbettes, S'ennuie avec ses chiens comme avec d'autres bêtes. Rien ne peut l'égayer, ni gibier, ni faucon, Ni son peuple mourant en face du balcon. Du bouffon favori la grotesque ballade Ne distrait plus le front de ce cruel malade; Son lit fleurdelisé se transforme en tombeau, Et les dames d'atour, pour qui tout prince est beau, Ne savent plus trouver d'impudique toilette Pour tirer un souris de ce jeune squelette. Le savant qui lui fait de l'or n'a jamais pu De son être extirper l'élément corrompu, Et dans ces bains de sang qui des Romains nous viennent, Et dont sur leurs vieux jours les puissants se souviennent, I I n'a su réchauffer ce cadavre hébété Où coule au lieu de sang l'eau verte du Léthé //I'm like the king of a rain-country, richbut sterile, young but with an old wolf's itch, one who escapes his tutor's monologues, and kills the day in boredom with his dogs;nothing cheers him, darts, tennis, falconry, his people dying by the balcony;the bawdry of the pet hermaphroditeno longer gets him through a single night;his bed of fleur-de-lys becomes a tomb;even the ladies of the court, for whomall kings are beautiful, cannot put onshameful enough dresses for this skeleton;the scholar who makes his gold cannot inventwashes to cleanse the poisoned element;even in baths of blood, Rome's legacy, our tyrants' solace in senility, he cannot warm up his shot corpse, whose foodis syrup-green Lethean ooze, not blood.– Robert Lowell, from Marthiel & Jackson Matthews, eds., The Flowers of Evil (NY: New Directions, 1963).Charles Baudelaire