Sed Non Satiata

Singular goddess, brown as night, and wild,
Perfumed of fine tobacco smoke and musk,
Work of some Faust, some wizard of the dusk,
Ebony sorceress, black midnight's child,

Rare wines or opium are less a prize
Than your moist lips where love struts its pavane;
When my lusts move towards you in caravan
My ennuis drink from cisterns of your eyes.

From these black orbits where the soul breathes through,
O heartless demon! pour a drink less hot;
I'm not the Styx, nine times embracing you,

Alas! and my Megaera, I can not,
To break your nerve and bring you to your knees,
In your bed's hell become Persephone!

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

The Poison

Charles Baudelaire, Simple Poetry

The Harmony Of Evening

Charles Baudelaire, Simple Poetry

The Irremediable

Charles Baudelaire, Simple Poetry

The Living Torch

Charles Baudelaire, Simple Poetry

English

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Afternoon Song

Though your eyebrows surprise,
and give you an air of strangeness,
which isnt that of the angels,
witch with seductive eyes,

I adore my frivolous girl,
my terrible passion,
with the devotion
of a priest for his idol!

The forest and the desert
perfume your wild hair:
your head has an air
of the enigma, the secret.

Round your flesh, perfume sweet
swirls like a censers cloud:
you bewitch like the twilights shroud,
nymph of shadows and heat.

Ah! The strongest potions made
cant match your idleness,
and you know the caress
that resurrects the dead.

Your hips are enamoured
of your back and your breasts,
and the cushions are ravished
with your poses, so languid.

Sometimes to appease
y...

Charles Baudelaire

Song Of The Afternoon

Although your wayward brows
Give you a curious air
Angelic not at all,
Witch of the tempting stare,

I love you with a passion
Terrible and odd,
With the obeisance
Of priest to golden god.

The desert and the woods
Embalm your heavy hair;
Your head takes attitudes
Mysterious and rare.

A censer's faint perfume
Prowls along your skin;
You charm as evening charms,
Warm and shadowy Nymph.

Ah! strongest potions stir me
Less than your idleness,
And you can make the dead
Revive with your caress!

Your hips are amorous
Of back and breasts and thighs,
And ravished by your pose
Are cushions where you lie.

Sometimes to appease
A rage that comes in fits,
Serious one, you squander
Bites...

Charles Baudelaire

Femmes Damnées

Like pensive cattle, lying on the sands,
they turn their eyes towards the seas far hills,
and, feet searching each others, touching hands,
know sweet languor and the bitterest thrills.


Some, where the stream babbles, deep in the woods,
their hearts enamoured of long intimacies,
go spelling out the loves of their own girlhoods,
and carving the green bark of young trees.


Others, like Sisters, walk, gravely and slow,
among the rocks, full of apparitions,
where Saint Anthony saw, like lava flows,
the bared crimson breasts of his temptations.


There are those, in the melting candles glimmer,
who in mute hollows of caves still pagan,
call on you to relieve their groaning fever,
O Bacchus, to soothe the remorse of the ancients!
<...

Charles Baudelaire

Condemned Women: Delphine And Hippolyta

Within the dwindling glow of light from languid lamps,
Sunk in the softest cushions soaked with heady scent,
Hippolyta lay dreaming of the thrilling touch
That spread apart the veil of her young innocence.

She searched with troubled eye, afflicted by the storm,
For the once-distant sky of her naivety,
A voyager who turns and looks beyond the wake
To blue horizons which had once been overhead.

The heavy tears that fell from dull and weary eyes,
The broken look, the stupor, the voluptuousness,
Her conquered arms thrown down, surrendered in the field,
All strangely served her still, to show her fragile charm.

Stretched calmly at her feet, joyfully satisfied,
Delphine looked up at her with those compelling eyes
Like a strong animal that oversees her prey,<...

Charles Baudelaire

The Temptation

The Demon, in my chamber high,
This morning came to visit me,
And, thinking he would find some fault,
He whispered: "I would know of thee

Among the many lovely things
That make the magic of her face,
Among the beauties, black and rose,
That make her body's charm and grace,

Which is most fair?" Thou didst reply
To the Abhorred, O soul of mine:
"No single beauty is the best
When she is all one flower divine.

When all things charm me I ignore
Which one alone brings most delight;
She shines before me like the dawn,
And she consoles me like the night.

The harmony is far too great,
That governs all her body fair,
For impotence to analyse
And say which note is sweetest there.

O mystic metamorphosis!
My senses int...

Charles Baudelaire

Allegory

Picture a beauty, shoulders rich and fine,
Letting her long hair trail into her wine.
Talons of love, the poison tooth of sin
Slip and are dulled against her granite skin.
She laughs at Death and flouts Debauchery;
Those fiends who in their heavy pleasantries
Gouge and destroy, still keep a strange regard
For majesty - her body strong and hard.
A goddess, or a sultan's regal wife
A faithful Paynim of voluptuous life
Her eyes call mortal beings to the charms
Of ready breasts, between her open arms.
She feels, she knows - this maid, this barren girl
By our desire fit to move the world
The gift of body's beauty is sublime
And draws forgiveness out of every crime.
She knows no Hell, or any afterlife,
And when her time shall come to face the Night
She'll ...

Charles Baudelaire