The Two Good Sisters

Debauch and Death are a fine, healthy pair
Of girls, whose love is prodigal and free.
Their virgin wombs, beneath the rags they wear,
Are barren, though they labour constantly.

To the arch poet, foe of families,
Hell's favourite, a cut-rate whore at court,
Brothels and tombs show in dark galleries
A bed never frequented by remorse.

And coffin, alcove, rich in blasphemy,
As two good sisters would, offer as treats
Terrible pleasures, horrifying sweets.

Debauch, when will your clutches bury me? a rival
Death, will you be coming now
To graft black cypress to her myrtle bough?

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 Ideal

Charles Baudelaire, Simple Poetry

The Soul Of Wine

Charles Baudelaire, Simple Poetry

A Fantastical Engraving

Charles Baudelaire, Simple Poetry

English

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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

Like pensive cattle lying on the sands
They gaze upon the endless seas, until
Feet grope for feet, and hands close over hands,
In languid sweetness or with quivering chill.

Some, with full hearts from long and private talk
In deep groves, where the brooks will chide and tease,
Spell out the love of fretful girlishness,
Carving the fresh green wood of tender trees.

Others, like sisters, walk with stately pace
Where apparitions live in craggy piles,
Where rose like lava for St Anthony
The naked, purple breasts of his great trial.

Some there may be, by sinking resin glow,
Deep in a cave where ancient pagans met,
Who call to help for fevers in a rage,
o Bacchus, silencer of all regret!

And others, with a taste for monkish cloaks,
Who, ...

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

The Dance Of Death

Carrying bouquet, and handkerchief, and gloves,
Proud of her height as when she lived, she moves
With all the careless and high-stepping grace,
And the extravagant courtesan's thin face.

Was slimmer waist e'er in a ball-room wooed?
Her floating robe, in royal amplitude,
Falls in deep folds around a dry foot, shod
With a bright flower-like shoe that gems the sod.

The swarms that hum about her collar-bones
As the lascivious streams caress the stones,
Conceal from every scornful jest that flies,
Her gloomy beauty; and her fathomless eyes

Are made of shade and void; with flowery sprays
Her skull is wreathed artistically, and sways,
Feeble and weak, on her frail vertebrae.
O charm of nothing decked in folly! they

Who laugh and name you a Car...

Charles Baudelaire

Duellum

Two warriors have grappled, and their arms
Have flecked the air with blood and flashing steel.
These frolics, this mad clanking, these alarms
Proceed from childish love's frantic appeal.

The swords are broken! like our youthful life
My dear! But tooth and nail, avid and sharp,
Soon fill the place of rapier and knife.
0 bitter heat of love, o cankered hearts!

In a ravine haunted by catlike forms
These two have tumbled, struggling to the end;
Shreds of their skin will bloom on arid thorns.

This pit is Hell, its denizens our friends!
Amazon, let us roll there guiltlessly
In spiteful fervour, for eternity!

Charles Baudelaire

The Game

Old courtesans in washed-out armchairs,
pale, eyebrows blacked, eyes tender, fatal,
simpering still, and from their skinny ears
loosing their waterfalls of stone and metal:


Round the green baize, faces without lips,
lips without blood, jaws without the rest,
clawed fingers that the hellish fever grips,
fumbling an empty pocket, heaving breast:


below soiled ceilings, rows of pallid lights,
and huge candelabras shed their glimmer,
across the brooding brows of famous poets:
here its their blood and sweat they squander:


this the dark tableau of nocturnal dream
my clairvoyant eye once watched unfold.
In an angle of that silent lair, I leaned
hard on my elbows, envious, mute, and cold,


yes, envying that crews ten...

Charles Baudelaire