Flowers of Evil | Page 2

Horror and Love from its urn??Or the Nightmare with masterful bearing hath led?Thee to drown in the depths of some magic Minturne?
I wish, as the health-giving fragrance I cull,?That thy breast with strong thoughts could for ever be full, And that rhymthmic'ly flowing thy Christian blood
Could resemble the olden-time metrical-flood,?Where each in his turn reigned the father of Rhymes?Phoebus and Pan, lord of Harvest-times.
The Venal Muse
Oh Muse of my heart so fond of palaces old,?Wilt have when New- Year speeds its wintry blast,?Amid those tedious nights, with snow o'ercast,?A log to warm thy feet, benumbed with cold?
Wilt thou thy marbled shoulders then revive?With nightly rays that through thy shutters peep??And void thy purse and void thy palace reap?A golden hoard within some azure hive?
Thou must, to earn thy daily bread, each night,?Suspend the censer like an acolyte,?Te-Deums sing, with sanctimonious ease,
Or as a famished mountebank, with jokes obscene?Essay to lull the vulgar rabble's spleen;?Thy laughter soaked in tears which no one sees.
The Evil Monk
The cloisters old, expounded on their walls?With paintings, the Beatic Verity,?The which ado'rning their religious halls,?Enriched the frigidness of their Austerity.
In days when Christian seeds bloomed o'er the land,?Full many a noble monk unknown to-day,?Upon the field of tombs would take his stand,?Exalting Death in rude and simple way.
My soul is a tomb where bad monk that I be?I dwell and search its depths from all eternity,?And nought bedecks the walls of the odious spot.
Oh sluggard monk! when shall I glean aright?From the living spectacle of my bitter lot,?To mold my handy work and mine eyes' Delight?
The Enemy
My childhood was nought but a ravaging storm,?Enlivened at times by a brilliant sun;?The rain and the winds wrought such havoc and harm?That of buds on my plot there remains hardly one.
Behold now the Fall of ideas I have reached,?And the shovel and rake one must therefore resume,?In collecting the turf, inundated and breached,?Where the waters dug trenches as deep as a tomb.
And yet these new blossoms, for which I craved,?Will they find in this earth like a shore that is laved?The mystical fuel which vigour imparts?
Oh misery! Time devours our lives,?And the enemy black, which consumeth our hearts?On the blood of our bodies, increases and thrives!
Man and the Sea
Free man! the sea is to thee ever dear!?The sea is thy mirror, thou regardest thy soul?In its mighteous waves that unendingly roll,?And thy spirit is yet not a chasm less drear.
Thou delight'st to plunge deep in thine image down;?Thou tak'st it with eyes and with arms in embrace,?And at times thine own inward voice would'st efface?With the sound of its savage ungovernable moan.
You are both of you, sombre, secretive and deep :?Oh mortal, thy depths are foraye unexplored,?Oh sea no one knoweth thy dazzling hoard,?You both are so jealous your secrets to keep!
And endless ages have wandered by,?Yet still without pity or mercy you fight,?So mighty in plunder and death your delight :?Oh wrestlers! so constant in enmity!
Beauty
I arn lovely, O mortals, like a dream of stone,?And my bosom, where each one gets bruised in turn,?To inspire the love of a poet is prone,?Like matter eternally silent and stern.
As an unfathomed sphinx, enthroned by the Nile,?My heart a swan's whiteness with granite combines,?And I hate every movement, displacing the lines,?And never I weep and never I smile.
The poets in front of mine attitudes fine?(Which the proudest of monuments seem to implant),?To studies profound all their moments assign,
For I have all these docile swains to enchant?Two mirrors, which Beauty in all things ignite :?Mine eyes, my large eyes, of eternal Light!
The Ideal
It could ne'er be those beauties of ivory vignettes;?The varied display of a worthless age,?Nor puppet-like figures with castoncts,?That ever an heart like mine could engage.
I leave to Gavarni, that poet of chlorosis,?His hospital-beauties in troups that whirl,?For I cannot discover amid his pale roses?A flower to resemble my scarlet ideal.
Since, what for this fathomless heart I require?Is Lady Macbeth you! in crime so dire;?An AEschylus dream transposed from the South
Or thee, oh great "Night" of Michael-Angelo born,?Who so calmly thy limbs in strange posture hath drawn,?Whose allurements are framed for a Titan's mouth.
The Giantess
I should have loved erewhile when Heaven conceived?Each day, some child abnormal and obscene,?Beside a maiden giantess to have lived,?Like a luxurious cat at the feet of a queen;
To see her body flowering with her soul,?And grow, unchained, in awe-inspiring art,?Within the mists across her eyes that stole?To divine the fires entombed within her heart.
And oft to scramble o'er her mighty limbs,?And climb the slopes of her enormous knees,?Or in summer when the scorching sunlight streams
Across the country, to recline at ease,?And slumber in the shadow of her breast?Like an hamlet 'neath the mountain-crest.
Hymn to Beauty
O Beauty! dost thou generate from Heaven or from Hell??Within thy glance, so diabolic and divine,?Confusedly both wickedness and goodness dwell,?And