Spleen

Pluvius, this whole city on his nerves,
Spills from his urn great waves of chilling rain
On graveyards' pallid inmates, and he pours
Mortality in gloomy district streets.

My restless cat goes scratching on the tiles
To make a litter for his scabby hide.
Some poet's phantom roams the gutter-spouts,
Moaning and whimpering like a freezing soul.

A great bell wails-within, the smoking log
Pipes in falsetto to a wheezing clock,
And meanwhile, in a reeking deck of cards


Some dropsied crone's foreboding legacy
The dandy Jack of Hearts and Queen of Spades
Trade sinister accounts of wasted love.

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 Spiritual Dawn

Charles Baudelaire, Simple Poetry

Congenial Horror

Charles Baudelaire, Simple Poetry

The Possessed

Charles Baudelaire, Simple Poetry

The Elevation

Charles Baudelaire, Simple Poetry

English

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

Spleen

I'm like some king in whose corrupted veins
Flows agèd blood; who rules a land of rains;
Who, young in years, is old in all distress;
Who flees good counsel to find weariness
Among his dogs and playthings, who is stirred
Neither by hunting-hound nor hunting-bird;
Whose weary face emotion moves no more
E'en when his people die before his door.
His favourite Jester's most fantastic wile
Upon that sick, cruel face can raise no smile;
The courtly dames, to whom all kings are good,
Can lighten this young skeleton's dull mood
No more with shameless toilets. In his gloom
Even his lilied bed becomes a tomb.
The sage who takes his gold essays in vain
To purge away the old corrupted strain,
His baths of blood, that in the days of old
The Romans used when their hot ...

Charles Baudelaire

Spleen

When low and heavy sky weighs like a lid
Upon the spirit moaning in ennui,
And when, spanning the circle of the world,
It pours a black day sadder than our nights;

When earth is changed into a sweaty cell,
In which Hope, captured, like a frantic bat,
Batters the walls with her enfeebled wing,
Striking her head against the rotting beams;

When steady rain trailing its giant train
Descends on us like heavy prison bars,
And when a silent multitude of spiders
Spins its disgusting threads deep in our brains,

Bells all at once jump out with all their force,
And hurl about a mad cacophony
As if they were those lost and homeless souls
Who send a dogged whining to the skies.

And long corteges minus drum or tone
Deploy morosely through my bei...

Charles Baudelaire

Spleen I

Pluviôse, irrité contre la ville entière,
De son urne à grands flots verse un froid ténébreux
Aux pâles habitants du voisin cimetière
Et la mortalité sur les faubourgs brumeux.

Mon chat sur le carreau cherchant une litière
Agite sans repos son corps maigre et galeux;
Lâme dun vieux poète erre dans la gouttière
Avec la triste voix dun fantôme frileux.

Le bourdon se lamente, et la bûche enfumée
Accompagne en fausset la pendule enrhumée,
Cependant quen un jeu plein de sales parfums,

Héritage fatal dune vieille hydropique,
Le beau valet de cur et la dame de pique
Causent sinistrement de leurs amours défunts.

Charles Baudelaire

Spleen

I might as well be king of rainy lands
Wealthy and young, but impotent and old,
Who scorns the troupe of tutors at his feet
And dallies with his dogs and other beasts.
Nothing can cheer him - game or falconry
Not even subjects dying at his door.
The comic jingles of the court buffoon
Do not amuse this twisted invalid.
His regal bed is nothing but a tomb,
And courtesans, who dote on any prince,
No longer have the antics or the clothes
To get a smile from this young rack of bones.
The alchemist who made him gold cannot
Attend his soul and extirpate the flaw;
Nor in those baths of blood the Romans claimed
Would bring an old man's body youthful force,
Can scholar's knowledge bring to life a corpse
With Lethe's putrid water in its veins.

Charles Baudelaire

Spleen

More memories than if I'd lived a thousand years!

A giant chest of drawers, stuffed to the full
With balance sheets, love letters, lawsuits, verse
Romances, locks of hair rolled in receipts,
Hides fewer secrets than my sullen skull.
It is a pyramid, a giant vault
Holding more corpses than a common grave.
I am a graveyard hated by the moon
Where like remorse the long worms crawl, and turn
Attention to the dearest of my dead.
I am a dusty boudoir where are heaped
Yesterday's fashions, and where withered roses,
Pale pastels, and faded old Bouchers,
Alone, breathe perfume from an opened flask.

Nothing is longer than the limping days
When under heavy snowflakes of the years,
Ennui, the fruit of dulling lassitude,
Takes on the size of immortality.

Charles Baudelaire

Spleen - (Twelve Translations From Charles Baudelaire)

    When the low heavy sky weighs like a lid
        Upon the spirit aching for the light
    And all the wide horizon's line is hid
        By a black day sadder than any night;

    When the changed earth is but a dungeon dank
        Where batlike Hope goes blindly fluttering
    And, striking wall and roof and mouldered plank,
        Bruises his tender head and timid wing;

    When like grim prison-bars stretch down the thin,
        Straight, rigid pillars of the endless rain,
    And the dumb throngs of infamous spiders spin
        Their meshes in the caverns of the brain;,

    Suddenly, bells leap forth into the air,
        Hurling a hideous uproar to the sky
    As 'twere a band of homeless spirits who fare
        Through the strange he...

John Collings Squire, Sir