The Inquisitive Mans Dream

Do you know, as I do, delicious sadness
and make others say of you: Strange man!
I was dying. In my soul, singular illness,
desire and horror were mingled as one:

anguish and living hope, no factious bile.
The more the fatal sand ran out, the more
acute, delicious my torment: my heart entire
was tearing itself away from the world I saw.

I was like a child eager for the spectacle,
hating the curtain as one hates an obstacle
at last the truth was chillingly revealed:

Id died without surprise, dreadful morning
enveloped me. Was this all there was to see?
The curtain had risen, and I was still waiting.

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

Je nai pas oublié, voisine de la ville

Charles Baudelaire, Simple Poetry

A Phantom II: The Perfume

Charles Baudelaire, Simple Poetry

The Enemy

Charles Baudelaire, Simple Poetry

Every Man His Chimera

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.

Dream Of A Curious Man

for F.N.

Do you, as I do, know a zesty grief,
And is it said of you, 'curious man!'
I dreamed of dying; in my spirit's heat
Desire and horror mixed, a strange mischance;

Anguish and ardent hope were tightly knit;
The more the fatal glass was drained of sand
The more I suffered, and I savoured it;
My heart pulled out of the familiar, and

I was a child, eager to see a play,
Hating the curtain standing in the way...
At last the chilling verity came on:

Yes, I was dead, and in the dreadful dawn
Was wrapped. And what! That's all there is to tell?
The screen was raised, and I was waiting still.

Charles Baudelaire

The Voice

I was the height of a folio, my bed just
backed on the bookcases sombre Babel,
everything, Latin ashes, Greek dust
jumbled together: novel, science, fable.


Two voices spoke to me. One, firmly, slyly,
said: The Earths a cake filled with sweetness:
I can give you (and your pleasure will be
endless!) an appetite of comparable vastness.


The other said: Come! Come voyage in dream,
beyond the known, beyond the possible!
And that one sang like the ocean breeze,
phantom, from who knows where, its wail


caressing the ear, and yet still frightening.
You I answered: Yes! Gentle voice! My
wound and what, Id call my fatality, begins
alas, from then. From behind the scenery


of vast existence, in voids without light,

Charles Baudelaire

The Double Chamber

A chamber that is like a reverie; a chamber truly spiritual, where the stagnant atmosphere is lightly touched with rose and blue.
There the soul bathes itself in indolence made odorous with regret and desire. There is some sense of the twilight, of things tinged with blue and rose: a dream of delight during an eclipse. The shape of the furniture is elongated, low, languishing; one would think it endowed with the somnambulistic vitality of plants and minerals.
The tapestries speak an inarticulate language, like the flowers, the skies, the dropping suns.
There are no artistic abominations upon the walls.
Compared with the pure dream, with an impression unanalysed, definite art, positive art, is a blasphemy.
Here all has the sufficing lucidity and the delicious obscurity of music.
An infinitesimal odour of the m...

Charles Baudelaire

The Seven Old Men

Ant-like city, city full of dreams,
where the passer-by, at dawn, meets the spectre!
Mysteries everywhere are the sap that streams
through the narrow veins of this great ogre.


One morning, when, on the dreary street,
the buildings all seemed heightened, cold
a swollen rivers banks carved out to greet,
(their stage-set mirroring an actors soul),


the dirty yellow fog that flooded space,
arguing with my already weary soul,
steeling my nerves like a hero, I paced
suburbs shaken by the carts drum-roll.


Suddenly, an old man in rags, their yellow
mirroring the colour of the rain-filled sky,
whose looks alone prompted alms to flow,
except for the evil glittering of his eye,


appeared. Youd have thought his eyeballs

Charles Baudelaire

Semper Eadem

You said, there grows within you some strange gloom,
A sea rising on rock, why is it so?
When once your heart has brought its harvest home
Life is an evil! (secret all men know),

A simple sorrow, not mysterious,
And, like your joy, it sparkles for us all.
So, lovely one, be not so curious!
And even though your voice is sweet, be still!

Be quiet silly girl! Soul of delight!
Mouth of the childish laugh! More, still, than Life
Death holds us often in the subtlest ways.

So let my heart be lost within a lie,
As in a sweet dream, plunge into your eyes
And sleep a long time in your lashes' shade.

Charles Baudelaire

A Rotting Carcase

My soul, do you remember the object we saw
on what was a fine summers day:
at the paths far corner, a shameful corpse
on the gravel-bed, darkly lay,

legs in the air, like a lecherous woman,
burning and oozing with poisons,
revealing, with nonchalance, cynicism,
the belly ripe with its exhalations.

The sun shone down on that rot and mould,
as if to grill it completely,
and render to Nature a hundredfold
what shed once joined so sweetly:

and the sky gazed at that noble carcass,
like a flower, now blossoming.
The stench was so great, that there, on the grass,
you almost considered fainting.

The flies buzzed away on its putrid belly,
from which black battalions slid,
larvae, that flowed in thickening liquid
the length of t...

Charles Baudelaire

The Inquisitive Mans Dream

Suggested Poems

The Inquisitive Mans Dream