Flowers of Evil | Page 2

colours to each other respond.
And scents there are, like infant's flesh as chaste,
As sweet as oboes,
and as meadows fair,
And others, proud, corrupted, rich and vast,
Which have the expansion of infinity,
Like amber, musk and
frankincense and myrrh,
That sing the soul's and senses' ecstasy.
The Sick Muse
Alas my poor Muse what aileth thee now?
Thine eyes are bedimmed
with the visions of Night,
And silent and cold I perceive on thy brow


In their turns Despair and Madness alight.
A succubus green, or a hobgoblin red,
Has it poured o'er thee 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