Charles-Pierre
Baudelaire
1821 - 1867 |
The Erotica Of...
Afternoon Song
Hymn To Beauty
Even When
She Walks
The Jewels
I Prize The Memory
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Much
of Baudeliare’s poetry is wrapped in erotic imagery, which was the cause
for much of the controversy surrounding his work. Six of the pieces in
“"Fleurs du Mal" were banned by French censors in 1857,
calling the work obscenity. Even his erotica often had a dark flavor. Here
are several such pieces.
"Afternoon
Song"
Though your wicked eyebrows call
Your nature into question
(Unangelic's their suggestion,
Witch whose eyes enthrall)>
I adore you still -
O foolish terrible emotion -
Kneeling in devotion
As a priest to his idol will.
Your undone braids conceal
Desert, forest scents:
In your exotic countenance
Lie secrets unrevealed.
Over your flesh perfume drifts
Like incense 'round a censor:
Tantalizing dispenser
Of evening's ardent gifts.
No Philtres could compete
With your potent idleness:
You've mastered the caress
That raises dead me to their feet.
Your hips themselves are romanced
By your back and by your breasts:
By your languid dalliance.
Now and then, your appetite's
Uncontrolled, unassuaged:
Mysteriously enraged,
You kiss me and you bite.
Dark one, I am torn
By your savage ways,
Then, soft as the moon, your gaze
Sees my tortured heart reborn.
Beneath your satin shoe,
Beneath your charming silken foot.
My greatest joy I put
My genius and destiny, too.
You bring my spirit back,
Bringer of the light.
Exploding color in the night
Of my Siberia so black.
--Translated by Randall Koral and Ruth
Marshall
Taken from the Book
"Lust",
Complied by : Miller & Miller
Published by Chronicle Books
ISBN o-8118-0691-X (hc)
"Hymn
To Beauty"
Do you come from on high or out of the
abyss,
O Beauty? Godless yet divine, your gaze
indifferently showers favor and shame,
and yet some have likened you to wine.
Your eyes reflect the sunset and the dawn;
your scatter perfumes like a windy night;
your kisses are a drug, your mouth the urn
dispensing fear to heroes, fervor to boys.
Whether spawned by hell or sprung from the
stars,
Fate like a spaniel follows at your heel;
you sow haphazard fortune and despair,
ruling all things, responsible for none.
You walk on corpses, Beauty, undismayed,
and Horror coruscates among your gems;
Murder, one of your dearest trinkets, throbs
on your shameless belly: make it dance!
Dazzled, the dayfly flutters round your
wick,
crackles, flares, and cries: I bless this
torch!
The pining lover for his lady swoons
like a dying man adoring his own tomb.
Who cares if you come from paradise or hell,
appalling Beauty, artless and monstrous
scourge,
if only your eyes, your smile or your foot
reveal
the Infinite I love and have never known?
Come from Satan, come from God - who cares,
Angel or siren, rhythm, fragrance, light,
provided you transform - O my one queen!
This hideous universe, this heavy hour?
"Even
When She Walks..."
Even when she walks she seems to dance!
Her garments writhe and glisten like long
snakes
obedient to the rhythm of the wands
by which a fakir wakens them to grace.
Like both the desert and the desert sky
insensible to human suffering,
and like the ocean's endless labyrinth
she shows her body with indifference.
Precious minerals are her polished eyes,
and in her strange symbolic nature
angel and sphinx unite,
where diamonds, gold, and steel dissolve
into one light,
shining forever, useless as a star,
the sterile woman's icy majesty.
"The
Jewels"
The beloved was naked, and knowing my heart,
had retained only her vibrant jewels,
whose pageantry gave to her a rich and
conquering air
such as belonged, on langorous days, to
Moorish concubines.
This world radiant of metal and rock
ravishes me, and when its bright
and mocking noise leaps in dance, I madly
love
those things in which sound is mixed with
light.
She lay thus, abandoned to love,
and from the height of the couch, smiled
carelessly at my ardor that rose, deep and
fragrant as the sea,
mounting toward her as toward a pale cliff.
Eyeing me like a tamed tiger,
she posed with a vague and dreamy air,
and candor, being joined to shamelessness,
gave fresh charm to all her metamorphoses.
Polished with oil, undulant like a swan,
arm and leg, thigh and loins
passed before my serene and clairvoyant
eyes;
while her belly and breasts, fruits of my
vine,
Hovered, more seductive than Fallen Angels,
to trouble the repose in which my soul lay,
and to lure it from the crystal rock where,
calm and solitary, it had been enthroned.
I thought I saw the hips of Antiope
joined by a new design to a boyish torso,
so that her figure thrust forth its pelvis--
how superb the rouge on this brown and tawny
complexion!
--The lamp had resigned itself to dying.
The hearth alone illuminated the room,
and each time it heaved forth a flaming
sigh,
flooded her amber skin with blood!
(from "Fleurs du Mal" one of 6
poems banned by French censors in 1857)
"I
Prize The Memory..."
I prize the memory of the naked ages
when Apollo relished gilding marble limbs
whose agile-fleshed originals achieved
with neither ecstasy, fraud nor fear
and was nursed by companionable sky,
enjoying the health of a sublime machine.
Cybele than, abundant in her yield,
did not regard her sons as burdensome,
but, tender-hearted she-wolf, graciously
suckled the universe as her brown dugs.
Lithe and powerful, a man deserved
his pride in beauties who called him their
king-
flawless fruit engendered without shame,
whose ripened flash asked only to be tried!
Today the poet eager to recall
such human splendor, when visiting the sites
where men and women show their nakedness
must feel a cold revulsion in his soul
at the display of flesh he contemplates.
How these deformities cry out for clothes!
-wretched bodies, regular grotesques,
runty, paunchy, flabby, scrawny, lame,
brats whom Utility, a pitiless god,
has swaddled in his brazen diapers!
Look at the women - pale as tallow, gnawed
and nourished by debauch - the girls who
bear
the burden of their mothers' vice or wear
the hideous stigmas of fecundity!
True, in our corruption we possess
beauties unrevealed to ancient times:
countenances cankered by the heart
and, so to speak, the charm of listlessness;
but subtle thought they are, such artifacts
of a belated muse will never keep
our sickly race from offering to youth
its truest homage; youth we worship still,
its frank expression, its untroubled brow,
its eyes as bright as water; sacred youth
that shares - unconscious as a singing bird,
a flower, or the blue sky's radiance -
its song, its scent, its irresistible
warmth!
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