The Sick Muse

Poor Muse, alas, what ails thee, then, to-day?
Thy hollow eyes with midnight visions burn,
Upon thy brow in alternation play,
Folly and Horror, cold and taciturn.

Have the green lemure and the goblin red,
Poured on thee love and terror from their urn?
Or with despotic hand the nightmare dread
Deep plunged thee in some fabulous Minturne?

Would that the breast where so deep thoughts arise,
Breathed forth a healthful perfume with thy sighs;
Would that thy Christian blood ran wave by wave

In rhythmic sounds the antique numbers gave,
When Phoebus shared his alternating reign
With mighty Pan, lord of the ripening grain.

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 Ghost

Charles Baudelaire, Simple Poetry

For A Creole Lady

Charles Baudelaire, Simple Poetry

Sympathetic Horror

Charles Baudelaire, Simple Poetry

A Former Life

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.

The Venal Muse

Muse of my heart, lover of palaces,
When January comes with wind and sleet,
During the snowy eve's long weariness,
Will there be fire to warm thy violet feet?

Wilt thou reanimate thy marble shoulders
In the moon-beams that through the window fly?
Or when thy purse dries up, thy palace moulders,
Reap the far star-gold of the vaulted sky?

For thou, to keep thy body to thy soul,
Must swing a censor, wear a holy stole,
And chaunt Te Deums with unbelief between.

Or, like a starving mountebank, expose
Thy beauty and thy tear-drowned smile to those
Who wait thy jests to drive away thy spleen.

Charles Baudelaire

The Irreparable

Can we suppress the old Remorse
Who bends our heart beneath his stroke,
Who feeds, as worms feed on the corse,
Or as the acorn on the oak?
Can we suppress the old Remorse?

Ah, in what philtre, wine, or spell,
May we drown this our ancient foe,
Destructive glutton, gorging well,
Patient as the ants, and slow?
What wine, what philtre, or what spell?

Tell it, enchantress, if you can,
Tell me, with anguish overcast,
Wounded, as a dying man,
Beneath the swift hoofs hurrying past.
Tell it, enchantress, if you can,

To him the wolf already tears
Who sees the carrion pinions wave,
This broken warrior who despairs
To have a cross above his grave--
This wretch the wolf already tears.

Can one illume a leaden sky,
Or tear ap...

Charles Baudelaire

The Beacons

Ubens, oblivious garden of indolence,
Pillow of cool flesh where no man dreams of love,
Where life flows forth in troubled opulence,
As airs in heaven and seas in ocean move.

Leonard Da Vinci, sombre and fathomless glass,
Where lovely angels with calm lips that smile,
Heavy with mystery, in the shadow pass,
Among the ice and pines that guard some isle.

Rembrandt, sad hospital that a murmuring fills,
Where one tall crucifix hangs on the walls,
Where every tear-drowned prayer some woe distils,
And one cold, wintry ray obliquely falls.

Strong Michelangelo, a vague far place
Where mingle Christs with pagan Hercules;
Thin phantoms of the great through twilight pace,
And tear their shroud with clenched hands void of ease.

The fighter's anger,...

Charles Baudelaire

A Phantom

I. The Blackness

In vaults of fathomless obscurity
Where Destiny has sentenced me for life;
Where cheerful rosy beams may never shine;
Where, living with that sullen hostess, Night,

I am an artist that a mocking God
Condemns, alas! to paint the gloom itself;
Where like a cook with ghoulish appetite
I boil and devour my own heart,

Sometimes there sprawls, and stretches out, and glows
A splendid ghost, of a surpassing charm,
And when this vision growing in my sight

In oriental languor, like a dream,
Is fully formed, I know the phantom's name:
Yes, it is She! though black, yet full oflight.


II. The Perfume

During your lifetime, reader, have you breathed,
Slow-savouring to the point of dizziness,
That grain of in...

Charles Baudelaire

The Little Old Women

for Victor Hugo

I.

In sinuous coils of the old capitals
Where even horror weaves a magic spell,
Gripped by my fatal humours, I observe
Singular beings with appalling charms.

These dislocated wrecks were women once,
Were Eponine or Lais! hunchbacked freaks,
Though broken let us love them! they are souls.
Under cold rags, their shredded petticoats,

They creep, lashed by the merciless north wind,
Quake from the riot of an omnibus,
Clasp by their sides like relics of a saint
Embroidered bags of flowery design;

They toddle, every bit like marionettes,
Or drag themselves like wounded animals,
Or dance against their will, poor little bells
That a remorseless demon rings! Worn out

They are, yet they have eyes piercing like...

Charles Baudelaire

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