Charles-Pierre Baudelaire's 1821 - 1867

A Collection Of Writing Get Drunk Carrion To The Reader Spleen Cats Overcast

"Get Drunk!"

One should always be drunk. That's all that matters;
that's our one imperative need. So as not to feel Time's
horrible burden one which breaks your shoulders and bows

you down, you must get drunk without cease.

But with what?
With wine, poetry, or virtue
as you choose.
But get drunk.

And if, at some time, on steps of a palace,
in the green grass of a ditch,
in the bleak solitude of your room,
you are waking and the drunkenness has already abated,
ask the wind, the wave, the stars, the clock,
all that which flees,
all that which groans,
all that which rolls,
all that which sings,
all that which speaks,
ask them, what time it is;
and the wind, the wave, the stars, the birds, and the clock,
they will all reply:

"It is time to get drunk!

So that you may not be the martyred slaves of Time,
get drunk, get drunk,
and never pause for rest!
With wine, poetry, or virtue,
as you choose!"

"Carrion"

Remember, my soul, the thing we saw that lovely summer day?
On a pile of stones where the path turned off, the hideous carrion-
legs in the air, like a whore - displayed, indifferent to the last,
a belly slick with lethal sweat and swollen with foul gas.

The sun lit up that rottenness as though to roast it through,
restoring to Nature a hundredfold what she had here made one.
And heaven watched the splendid corpse like a flower open wide-
you nearly fainted dead away at the perfume it gave off.

Flies kept humming over the guts from which a gleaming clot
of maggots poured to finish off what scraps of flesh remained.
The tide of trembling vermin sank, then bubbled up afresh
as if the carcass, drawing breath, by their lives lived again
and made a curious music there - like running water, or wind,
or the rattle of chaff the winnower loosens in his fan.

Shapeless - nothing was left but a dream the artist had sketched in,
forgotten, and only later on finished from memory.
Behind the rocks an anxious bitch eyed us reproachfully,
waiting for the chance to resume her interrupted feast.

- Yet you will come to this offence, this horrible decay,
you, the light of my life, the sun and the moon and the stars of my love!
Yes, you will come to this, my queen, after the sacraments,
when you rot underground among the bones already there.

But as their kisses eat you up, my Beauty, tell the worms
I've kept the sacred essence, saved the form of my rotted loves!

"To The Reader"

Stupidity, delusion, selfishness and lust
torment our bodies and possess our minds,
and we sustain our affable remorse
the way a beggar nourishes his lice
Our sins are stubborn, our contrition lame;
we want our scruples to be worth our while-
how cheerfully we crawl back to the mire:
with few cheap tears washing our stains away!
Satan Trismegistus subtly rocks
our ravished spirits on his wicked bed
until the precious metal of our will
is leached out by this cunning alchemist:
the Devil's hand directs our every move-
the things we loathed become the things we love:
day by day we drop though stinking shades
quite undeterred on our descent to Hell!
Like a poor profligate who sucks and bites
the withered breasts of some well-seasoned troll,
we snatch in passing at clandestine joys
and squeeze the oldest orange harder yet.
Wriggling in our brains like a million worms,
a demon demos holds its revels there,
and when we breathe, the Lethe in our lungs
trickles sighing on its secret course.
If rape and arson, poison and the knife
have not yet stitched their ludicrous designs
onto the banal buckram of our fates,
it is because our souls lack enterprise!
But here among the scorpions and the hounds,
the jackals, apes and vultures, snakes and wolves,
monsters that howl and growl and squeal and crawl,
in all the squalid zoo of vices,
one is even uglier and fouler than the rest,
although the least flamboyant of the lot;
this beast would gladly undermine the earth.

"Spleen"

I am like the king of a rainy country
Rich, and yet powerless, young and yet most old
Who, distrustful of the bows his tutors make
Sits bored among his dogs as with his other beasts
Nothing can lift his spirits, neither hawk nor game
The dying subjects gathered to his balcony.
The grotesque ballad of his best-loved fool
No more distracts him in this sickness cruel.
His lilied bed is changed into a tomb;
The ladies of his court all lords might love
And yet they can no longer find shameless attire
To draw a smile from their young, wasted sire.
The alchemist who made him gold could not
Purge from his soul this corrupt element
And in a blood bath, as in ancient Rome,
Remembered by the mighty in their latter days
Knew not to warm this dazzled corpse
Where flows not blood but Lethe's waters green.

"Cats"

Fevered lovers and austere thinkers
Love equally, in their ripe season
Cats powerful and gentle, pride of the house
Like them they feel the cold, like them are sedentary

Friends of science and sensuality
They seek the silence and the horror of the shadows
Erebus had taken them for its funeral coursers
Could they to servitude incline their pride.

Dreaming, they take on noble postures
Great sphinxes stretched out in the depths of emptiness
Seeming to fall asleep into an endless dream.

Their fertile loins are full of magic sparks
And nuggets of gold like fine sand
Vaguely bestir their mystic pupils.

"Overcast"

Are they blue, gray or green? Mysterious eyes
(as if in fact you were looking through a mist)
in alternation tender, dreamy, grim
to match the shiftless pallor of the sky.

That's what you're like- these warm white afternoons
which make the ravished heart dissolve in tears,
the nerves, inexplicably overwrought,
outrage the dozen mind.

Not always, though-sometimes
you're like the horizon when the sun
ignites our cloudy autumn-how you glow!
A sodden countryside in sudden rout,
turned incandescent by a changing wind.

Dangerous woman-demoralizing days!
Will I adore your killing frost as much,
and in that implacable winter, when it comes,
discover pleasures sharper than iron and ice?