My Earlier Life

I've been home a long time among the vast porticos,
Which the mariner sun has tinged with a million fires,
Whose grandest pillars, upright, majestic and cold
Render them the same, this evening, as caves with basalt spires.

The swells' overwhelming accords of rich music,
Heaving images of heaven to the skies,
Mingle in a way solemn and mystic
With the colors of the horizon reflected by my eyes.

It was here I was true to the voluptuous calm,
The milieu of azure, the waves, the splendors,
And the nude slaves, all impregnated with odors,

Who refreshed my brow with waving palms
My only care to bring to meaning from anguish
The sad secret in which I languish.

Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire was a renowned French poet, essayist, and art critic born on April 9, 1821, in Paris, France. Best known for his collection of poems Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), Baudelaire profoundly influenced the Symbolist and Modernist movements. He led a controversial life, marked by financial difficulties, substance abuse, and relationships with various women. Despite a relatively short life, dying at the age of 46 on August 31, 1867, his work has had a lasting impact on both French and international literature. Baudelaire's writing is characterized by its exploration of beauty, decadence, and the human condition.

Charles Baudelaire

Every Man His Chimera

Charles Baudelaire, Simple Poetry

The Ransom

Charles Baudelaire, Simple Poetry

The Owls

Charles Baudelaire, Simple Poetry

The Fountain Of Blood

Charles Baudelaire, Simple Poetry

English

Suggested Poems

Explore a curated selection of verses that share themes, styles, and emotional resonance with the poem you've just read.

A Former Life

Long since, I lived beneath vast porticoes,
By many ocean-sunsets tinged and fired,
Where mighty pillars, in majestic rows,
Seemed like basaltic caves when day expired.

The rolling surge that mirrored all the skies
Mingled its music, turbulent and rich,
Solemn and mystic, with the colours which
The setting sun reflected in my eyes.

And there I lived amid voluptuous calms,
In splendours of blue sky and wandering wave,
Tended by many a naked, perfumed slave,

Who fanned my languid brow with waving palms.
They were my slaves - the only care they had
To know what secret grief had made me sad.

Charles Baudelaire

Invitation To The Voyage

My sister, my child
Imagine how sweet
To live there as lovers do!
To kiss as we choose
To love and to die
In that land resembling you!
The misty suns
Of shifting skies
To my spirit are as dear
As the evasions
Of your eyes
That shine behind their tears.

There, all is order and leisure,
Luxury, beauty, and pleasure.

The tables would glow
With the lustre of years
To ornament our room.
The rarest of blooms
Would mingle their scents
With amber's vague perfume.
The ceilings, rich
The mirrors, deep
The splendour of the East
All whisper there
To the silent soul
Her sweet familiar speech.

There, all is order and leisure,
Luxury, beauty, and pleasure.

And these canals
Bear ships at ...

Charles Baudelaire

Already!

A hundred times already the sun had leaped, radiant or saddened, from the immense cup of the sea whose rim could scarcely be seen; a hundred times it had again sunk, glittering or morose, into its mighty bath of twilight. For many days we had contemplated the other side of the firmament, and deciphered the celestial alphabet of the antipodes. And each of the passengers sighed and complained. One had said that the approach of land only exasperated their sufferings. "When, then," they said, "shall we cease to sleep a sleep broken by the surge, troubled by a wind that snores louder than we? When shall we be able to eat at an unmoving table?"
There were those who thought of their own firesides, who regretted their sullen, faithless wives, and their noisy progeny. All so doted upon the image of the absent land, that I believe they would h...

Charles Baudelaire

Exotic Perfume

When with closed eyes in autumn's eves of gold
I breathe the burning odours of your breast,
Before my eyes the hills of happy rest
Bathed in the sun's monotonous fires, unfold.

Islands of Lethe where exotic boughs
Bend with their burden of strange fruit bowed down,
Where men are upright, maids have never grown
Unkind, but bear a light upon their brows.

Led by that perfume to these lands of ease,
I see a port where many ships have flown
With sails outwearied of the wandering seas;

While the faint odours from green tamarisks blown,
Float to my soul and in my senses throng,
And mingle vaguely with the sailor's song.

Charles Baudelaire

Letter to Sainte-Beuve

On the old oak benches, more shiny and polished
than links of a chain that were, each day, burnished
rubbed by our human flesh, we, still un-bearded,
trailed our ennui, hunched, round-shouldered,
under the four-square heaven of solitude,
where a child drinks studys tart ten-year brew.
It was in those days, outstanding and memorable,
when the teachers, forced to loosen our classical
fetters, yet all still hostile to your rhyming,
succumbed to the pressure of our mad duelling,
and allowed a triumphant, mutinous, pupil
to make Triboulet howl in Latin, at will.
Which of us in those days of pale adolescence
didnt share the weary torpor of confinement,
eyes lost in the dreary blue of a summer sky
or the snowfalls whiteness, we were dazzled by,
ears pricked, eager...

Charles Baudelaire

Landscape

In order to write my chaste verses Ill lie
like an astrologer near to the sky
and, by the bell-towers, listen in dream
to their solemn hymns on the air-stream.
Hands on chin, from my attics height
Ill see the workshops of song and light,
the gutters, the belfries those masts of the city,
the vast skies that yield dreams of eternity

It is sweet to see stars being born in the blue,
through the mists, the lamps at the windows, too,
the rivers of smoke climbing the firmament,
and the moon pouring out her pale enchantment.
Ill see the springs, summers, autumns glow,
and when winter brings the monotonous snow
Ill close all my doors and shutters tight
and build palaces of faery in the night.
Then Ill dream of blue-wet horizons,
weeping fountains of ...

Charles Baudelaire