Preface:
"France is passing through a period of vulgarity. Paris, a center radiating universal stupidity. Despite Moliere and Beranger, no one would ever have believed that France would take to the road of progress at such a rate. Matters of art, terrae incognatae.
Great men are stupid.
My book may have done some good; I do not regret that. It may have done harm; I do not rejoice that. "
"We are all hanged or hangable. "
"GIANTESS"
when nature once in lustful hot undress
Conceived gargantuan offspring, then would I
Have loved to live near a young giantess,
Like a voluptuous cat at a queen's feet.
To see her body flower with her desire
And freely spread out in its dreadful play,
Guess if her heart concealed some heavy fire
Whose humid smokes would swim upon her eye.
To feel at leisure her stupendous shapes,
Crawl on the cliffs of her enormous knees,
And, when in summer the unhealthy suns
Have stretched her out across the plains, fatigued,
Sleep in the shadows of her breasts at ease
Like a small hamlet at a mountain's base.
"THE DANCING SERPENT"
Dear indolent, I love to see,
In you body bright,
How like shimmering silk the skin
Reflects the light!
On the deep ocean of your hair
Where perfume laves,
Odorous and vagabond sea
Of blue and brown waves,
Like a vessel awakening
When morning winds rise
My dreaming soul begins to sail
Toward remote skies.
Your two eyes that neither sweetness
Nor bitterness hold
Are two chilly gems mingled of
Iron and gold.
When you walk in rhythm, lovely
With abandonment,
You seem th be swayed by a wand,
A dancing serpent.
Your child's head under the burden
Of your indolence
Sways as delicately as a Young elephant's,
And your body bends and straightens
Like a slender ship
That, plunging and rolling, lets the
Yards in water dip.
When, like a stream by thawing of
Glaciers made replete,
The water of your mouth rises
Up to your teeth,
I drink a Bohemian wine,
Powerful and tart,
A liquid sky that sows its stars
Within my heart!
"THE BALCONY"
Mother of memories, mistress of mistresses,
O thou, my pleasure, thou, all my desire,
Thou shalt recall the beauty of caresses,
The charm of evenings by the gentle fire,
Mother of memories, mistress of mistresses!
The eves illumined by the burning coal,
The balcony where veiled rose-vapour clings -
How soft your breast was then, how sweet your soul!
Ah, and we said imperishable things,
Those eves illumined by the burning coal.
Lovely the suns were in those twilights warm,
And space profound, and strong life's pulsing flood;
In bending o'er you, queen of every charm,
I thought I breathed the perfume of your blood.
The suns were beauteous in those twilights warm.
The film of night flowed round and over us,
And my eyes in the dark did your eyes meet;
I drank your breath, ah! sweet and poisonous,
And in my hands fraternal slept your feet-
Night, like a film, flowed round and over us.
I can recall those happy days forgot,
And see, with head bowed on your knees, my past.
Your languid beauties now would move me not
Did not your gentle heart and body cast
The old spell of those happy days forgot.
Can vows and perfumes, kisses infinite,
Be reborn from the gulf we cannot sound;
As rise to heaven suns once again made bright
After being plunged in deep seas and profound?
Ah, vows and perfumes, kisses infinite!
"REVERSIBILITY"
Angel of gaiety, have you tested grief?
Shame and remorse and sobs and weary spite,
And the vague terrors of the fearful night
That crush the heart up like a crumpled leaf?
Angel of gaiety, have you tested grief?
Angel of kindness, have you tested hate?
With hands clenched in the dark, and tears of gall,
When Vengeance beats her hellish battle-call,
And makes herself the captain of our fate,
Angel of kindness, have you tested hate?
Angel of health, did ever you know pain,
Which like an exile trails his tired footfalls
The cold length of the white infirmary walls,
With lips compressed, seeking the sun in vain?
Angel of health, did ever you know pain?
Angel of beauty, do you know wrinkles know?
Know you the fear of age, the torment vile
Of reading secret horror in the smile
Of eyes your eyes have loved since long ago?
Angel of beauty, do you wrinkles know?
Angel of happiness, and joy, and light,
Old David would have asked for your afresh
From the pure touch of your enchanted flesh;
I but implore your prayers to aid my plight,
Angel of happiness, and joy, and light.
"CONVERSATION"
You are an autumn sky, suffused with rose ...
Yet sadness rises in me like the sea,
And on my somber lip, when it outflows,
Leaves its salt burning slime for memory.
Over my swooning breast your fingers stray;
In vain, alas! My breast is a void pit
Sacked by the tooth and claw of woman. Nay,
Seek not my heart; the beasts have eaten it!
My heart is as a palace plundered
By the wolves, wherein they gorge and rend and kill,
A perfume round thy naked throat is shed...
Beauty, strong scourge of souls, O work thy will!
Scorch with thy fiery eyes which shine like feasts
These shreds of flesh rejected by the beasts!
"THE GLADLY DEAD"
In a soil with snails and rich as grease
I've longed to dig myself a good deep grave,
There to stretch my old bones at ease
And sleep in oblivion, like a shark in a wave.
Wills I detest, and tombstones set in rows;
Before I'd beg a tear of anyone,
I'd rather go alive and let the crows
Bleed the last scrap of this old carrion.
O worms! Black comrades without eye or ear,
Here comes a dead man for you, willing and gay;
Feasting philosophers, sons born of decay,
Come burrow through my ruins, shed not a tear;
But tell me if any torture is left to dread
For this old soulless body, dead as a dead?
"HEAUTONTIMOROUMENOS"
I'll strike you, but without the least
Anger - as butchers poll an ox,
Or Moses, when he strucj the rocks -
That from your eyelid thus released,
The lymph of suffering may brim
To slake my desert of its drought.
So my desire, by hope made stout,
Upon your salty tears may swim,
Like a proud ship, far out from shore.
Within my heart, which they'll confound
With drunken joy, your sobs will sound
Like drums that beat a charge in war.
Am I not a faulty chord
In all this symphony divine,
Thanks to the irony malign
That shakes and cuts me like a sword?
It's in my voice, the raucous jade!
It's in my blood's black venom too!
I am the looking-glass, wherethrough
Megaera sees herself portrayed!
I am the wound, and yet the blade!
The slap, and yet the cheek that takes it!
The limb, and yet the heel that breaks it,
The torturer, and he who's flayed!
One of the sort whom all revile,
A Vampire, my own blood I quaff,
Condemned to an eternal laugh
Because I know not how to smile.
"THE IRREMEDIABLE"
A Dream, a Form, a Creature, late
Fallen from azure realms, and sped
Into some Styx of mud and lead
No eye from heaven can penetrate;
An angel, rash wanderer, who craves
To look upon deformity,
The vast nightmare's gulf to try
As swimmer struggling with the waves,
And battling (anguish fierce and stark!)
Against gigantic whirlpools
That, singing, go like mad fools
Pirouetting in the dark;
One spellbound in sorcery,
Groping vainly as he makes
To flee a place alive with snakes,
Seeking the candle and the key;
A lost and lampless soul descending,
Within a gulf whose foetid scent
Betrays its damp and deep extent,
A railless staircase never ending,
Where clammy monsters guard the way,
Whose great eyes' phosphoric light
Makes even blacker still the night,
And nothing but themselves betray;
A vessel icebound at the pole,
As in a crystal trap secure,
Seeking the fatal aperture
By which it reached that prison goal:
-Perfect emblems, clear and true,
Of irremediable Fate,
They make us think the Devil's hate
Does well whatever he will do!
The dialogue is dark and clear
When a heart becomes its mirror!
Black well of Truth, but none is clearer,
Where that livid star appears,
That ironic and primaeval
Beacon, torch of Satan's grace,
Our sole glory and our solace -
Consciousness in doing Evil!
"THE CLOCK"
The Clock, calm evil god, that makes us shiver,
With threatening finger warns us each apart: -
"Remember! Soon the vibrant woes will quiver,
Like arrows in a target, in your heart.
To the horizon Pleasure will take flight
As flits a vaporous sylphide to the wings.
Each instant gnaws a crumb of the delight
That for his season every mortal brings.
Three thousand times and more, each hour, the second
Whispers 'Remember!' Like an insect shrill
The present chirps, 'With Nevermore I'm reckoned.
I've pumped your lifeblood with my loathsome bill.'
Remember! Souviens-toi! Esto Memor!
My brazen windpipe speaks in every tongue.
Each moment, foolish mortal, is like ore
From which the precious metal must be wrung.
Remember. Time the gamester (it's the law)
Wins always, without cheating. Daylight wanes.
Night deepens. The abyss with gulfy maw
Thirsts on unsated, while the hourglass drains.
Sooner or later, now, the tie must be
When Hazard, Virtue (your still-virgin mate),
Repentance (your last refuge), or all three -
Will tell you, 'Die, old Coward. It's too late!'"
"A LANDSCAPE"
I would, when I compose my solemn verse,
Sleep near the heaven as do astrologers,
Near the high bells, and with a dreaming mind
Hear their calm hymns blown upon the wind.
Out of my tower, with chin upon my hands,
I'll watch the singing, babbling human bands;
And see clock-towers like spars against the sky,
And heavens that bring thoughts of eternity;
And softly, through the mist, will watch the birth
Of stars in heaven and lamplight on the earth;
The threads of smoke that rise above the town;
The moon that pours her ale enchantment down.
Seasons will pass till Autumn fades the rose;
And when comes Winter with his weary snows,
I'll shut the doors and window-casements tight,
And build my faery palace in the night.
Then I will dream of blue horizons deep,
Of gardens where the marble fountains weep,
Of kisses, and of ever-singing birds --
A sinless Idyll built of innocent words.
And Trouble, knocking at my window-pane
And at my closet door, shall knock in vain;
I will not heed him with his stealthy tread,
Nor from my reverie uplift my head;
For I will plunge deep in the pleasure still
Of summoning the spring-time with my will,
Drawing the sun out of my heart, and there
With burning thoughts making a summer air.
"THE LITTLE OLD WOMEN"
In sinuous folds of cities old and grim,
Where all things, even horror, turn to grace,
I follow, in obedience to my whim,
Strange, feeble, charming creatures round the place.
These crooked freaks were women in their pride,
Fair Eponine of Lais! Humped and bent,
Love them! Because they still have souls inside.
Under their draughty skirts in tatters rent.
They crawl: a vicious wind their carrion rides;
From the deep roar of traffic see them cover,
Pressing like precious relics to their sides
Some satchels stitched with mottoes or a flower.
They trot like marionettes along the level,
Or drag themselves like wounded deer, poor crones!
Or dance, against their will, as if the devil
Were swinging in the belfry of their bones.
Cracked though they are, their eyes are sharp as drills
And shine, like pools of water in the night, -
they eyes of little girls whom wonder thrills
To laugh at all that sparkles and is bright.
The coffins of old women very often
Are near as small as those of children are.
Wise Death, who makes a symbol of a coffin
Displays a taste both charming and bizarre.
And when I track some feeble phantom fleeing
Through Paris's immense ant-swarming Babel,
I always think that such a fragile being
Is moving softly to another cradle.
Unless, sometimes, in geometric mood,
To see the strange deformities they offer,
I muse how often he who saws the wood
Must change the shape and outline of the coffer.
Those eyes are wells a million teardrops feed,
Crucibles spangled by cooling ore,
Invincible in charm to all that breed
Whom stern Misfortune suckled with her lore.
II
vestal whom old Frascati could enamour:
Thalia's nun, whose name was only known
To her dead prompter: madcap full of glamour
Whom Tivoli once sheltered as its own -
They all elate me. But of there a few,
Of sorrow having made a honeyed leaven,
Say to Devotion, "Lend me wings a new,
O powerful Hippogriff, and fly to heaven."
One for her fatherland a martyr: one
By her own husband wronged beyond belief:
And one a pierced Madonna through her son -
They all could make a river with their grief.
III
Yes, I have followed them, time and again!
One, I recall, when sunset, like a heart,
Bled through the sky from wounds of ruddy stain,
Pensively sat upon a seat apart,
To listen to the music, rich in metal,
That's played by bands of soldiers in the parks
On golden, soul-reviving eves, to fettle,
From meek civilian hearts, heroic sparks.
This one was straight and stiff, in carriage regal,
She breathed the warrior-music through her teeth,
Opened her eye like that of an old eagle,
And bared a forehead moulded for a wreath.
IV
Thus then, you journey, uncomplaining, stoic
Across the strife of modern cities flung,
Sad mothers, courtesans, or saints heroic,
Whose names of old were heard on every tongue,
You once were grace, and you were glory once.
None know you now. Derisory advances
Some drunkard makes you, mixed with worse affronts.
And on your heels a child-tormentor prances.
Ashamed of living, shrivelled shades, who creep
Timidly sidling by the walls, bent double;
Nobody greets you, ripe for endless sleep,
Strange destinies, and shards of human rubble!
But I who watch you tenderly: and measure
With anxious eye, your weak unsteady gait
As would a father- get a secret pleasure
On your account, as on your steps I wait.
I see your passionate and virgin crazes;
Sombre or bright, I see your vanished prime;
My soul, resplendent with your virtue, blazes,
And revels in your vices and your crimes.
Poor wrecks! My family! Kindred in mind, you
Receive from me each day my last addresses.
Eighty-year Eves, will yet tomorrow find you
On whom the claw of God so fiercely presses?
COMEST THE CHARMING EVENING
Comes the charming evening, the criminal's friend,
Comes conspirator-like on soft wolf tread.
Like a large alcove the sky slowly closes,
And man approaches his bestial metamorphosis.
To arms that have laboured, evening is kind enough,
Easing the strain of sinews that have borne their rough
Share of the burden; it is evening that relents
To those whom and angry obsession daily haunts.
The solitary student now raises a burdened head
And the back that bent daylong sinks into its bed.
Meanwhile darkness dawns, filled with demon familiars
Who rouse, reluctant as business-men, to their affairs,
Their ponderous fight rattling the shutters and blinds.
Against the lamplight, whose shivering is the wind's,
Prostitution spreads its light and life in the streets:
Like an anthill opening its issues it penetrates
Mysteriously everywhere by its own occult route;
Like an enemy mining the foundations of a fort,
Or a worm in an apple, eating what all should eat,
It circulates securely in the city's clogged heart.
The heat and hiss of kitchens can be felt here and there,
The panting of heavy bands, the theaters' clamour.
Cheap hotels, the haunts of dubious solaces,
Are filling with tarts, and crookes, their sleep accomplices,
And thieves, who have never heard of restraint or remorse,
Return now to their work as a matter of course,
Forcing safes behind carefully re-locked doors,
To get a few days' living and put clothes on their whores.
Collect yourself, my soul, this is a serious moment,
Pay no further attention to the noise and movement.
This is the hour when the pains of the sick sharpen,
Night touches them like a torture, pushes them to the open
Trapdoor over the gulf that is all too common.
Their groans overflow the hospital. More than one
Will not come back to taste the soup's familiar flavour
In the evening, with some friendly soul, by his own fire.
Indeed, many a one has never even known
The hearth's warm charm. Pity such one.
THE VOYAGE
For children crazed with maps and prints and stamps-
The universe can sate their appetite.
How vast the world is by the light of lamps,
But in the eyes of memory how slight.
One morning we set sail, with brains on fire,
And hearts swelled up with rancorous emotion,
Balancing, to the rhythm of its lyre,
Our infinite upon the finite ocean.
Some wish to leave their venal native skies,
Some flee their birthplace, others change their ways,
Astrologers who've drowned in Beauty's eyes,
Tyrannic Circe with the scent that slays.
Not ot be changed to beasts, they have their fling
with space, and splendour, and the burning sky,
The suns that bronze them and the frosts that sting
Efface the mark of kisses by and by.
But the true travellers are those who go
Only to get away: hearts like balloons
Unballasted, with their own fate aglow,
Who know not why they fly with the monsoons:
Those whose desires are in the shape of clouds,
Who dream, as raw recruits of shot and shell,
Of mighty raptures in strange, transient crowds
Of which no human soul the name can tell.
II
Horror! We imitate the top and bowl
In swerve and bias. Through our sleep our sleep it runs.
It's Curiosity that makes us roll,
As the fierce Angel whips the whirling suns.
Singular game! Where the goal changes places;
The winning-post is nowhere, yet all round;
Where Man tires not of the mad hope her races
Thinking, some day, that respite will be found.
Our soul's like a three-master, where one hears
A voice that from the bridge would warn all hands.
Another from the foretop madly cheers
"Love, joy, and glory" ... Hell! we're on the sands!
The watchman think each isle that heaves in view
An Eldorado, shouting their belief;
Imagination riots in the crew
Who in the morning only find a reef.
The fool that dotes on far, chimeric lands -
Put him in irons, or feed him to the shark!
The drunken sailor's visionary lands
Can only leave the bitter truth more stark.
So some old vagabond, in mud who grovels,
Dreams, nose in air, of Edens sweet to roam;
Wherever smoky wicks illuminate hovels
He sees another Capua or Rome.
III
Amazing travellers, what a noble stories
We read in the deep oceans of your gaze!
Show us your memory's casket, and the glories
Streaming from gems made out of stars and rays!
We, too, would roam without a sail or stream,
And to combat the boredom of your jail,
Would stretch, like canvas on our souls, a dream,
Framed in horizons, of the seas you sail.
What have you seen?
IV
"We have seen stars and waves,
We have seen sands and shores and oceans too,
In spite of shocks and unexpected graves,
we have been bored, at times, the same as you.
The solar glories on the violet ocean
And those of spires that in the sunset rise,
lit, in our hearts, a yearning, fierce emotion
To plunge into those ever-luring skies.
The richest cities and the scenes most proud
In nature, have no magic to enamour
Like those which hazard traces in the cloud
While wistful longing magnifies their glamour.
(enjoyment adds more fuel for desire,
Old tree, to which all pleasure is manure;
As the bark hardens, so the boughs shoot higher,
And nearer to the sun would grow mature.
Tree, will you always flourish, more vivacious
Then cyress? ) None the less, these views are yours:
We took some photographs for your voracious
Album, who only care for distant shores.
We have seen idols elephantine-snouted,
And thrones with living gems bestarred and pearled,
And palaces whose riches would have routed
The dreams of all the bankers in the world.
We have seen wonder-striking robes and dresses,
Women whose nails and teeth the betel stains
And jugglers whom the rearing snake caresses."
V
What then? What then?
VI
"O childish little brains,
Not to forget the greatest wonder there -
We've seen in every country, without searching,
From top to bottom of the fatal stair
Immortal sin ubiquitously lurching:
Woman, a vile slave, proud in her stupidity,
Self-worshipping, without the least disgust:
Man, greedy, lustful, ruthless in cupidity,
Slave to a slave, and sewer to her lust:
The torturer's delight, the martyr's sobs,
The feasts where blood perfumes the giddy rout:
Power sapping its own tyrants: servile mobs
In amorous obeisance to the knout:
Some similar religions to our own,
All climbing skywards: Sanctity who treasures,
As in his downy couch some dainty drone,
In horsehair, nails, and whips, his dearest pleasures.
Prating Humanity, with genius raving,
As and today as ever from the first,
Cries in fierce agony, its Maker braving,
'O God, my Lord and likeness, be thou cursed!'
But those less dull, the lovers of Dementia,
Fleeing the herd which fate has safe impounded,
In opium seek for limitless adventure.
-That's all the record of the globe we rounded."
VII
It's bitter knowledge that one learns from travel.
The world so small and drab, from day to day,
The horror of our image will unravel,
A pool of dread in deserts of dismay.
Must we depart, or stay? Stay if you can.
Go if you must. One runs: another hides
To baffle Time, that fatal foe to man.
And there are runners, whom no rest betides,
Like the Apostles or the Wandering Jew,
Whom neither ship nor waggon can enable
To cheat the retiary. But not a few
Have killed him without stirring from their cradle.
But when he sets his foot upon our nape
We still can hope and cry "Leave all behind!"
As in old times China we'd escape
With eyes turned seawards, hair that fans the wind,
We'll sail once more upin the sea of Shades
with heart like that of a young sailor beating.
I hear the rich, sad voices of the Trades
Who cry "This Way! all you who would be eating
The second Lotus. Here it is they range
The piles of magic fruit. O hungry friend,
Come here and swoon away into the strange
Trance of an afternoon that has no end."
In the familiar tones we sense the spectre;
Our Pylades stretch arms across the seas.
"To salve your heart, now swim to your Electra,"
She cries, of whom we used to kiss the knees.
VIII
O Death, old Captain, it is time. Weigh anchor!
To sail beyond the doldrums of our days.
Though black as pitch the sea and sky, we hanker
For space; you know our hearts are full of rays.
Pour us your poison to revive our soul!
It cheers the burning quest that we pursue,
Careless if Hell of Heaven be our goal,
Beyond the known world to seek out the New!
THE UNFORESEEN
Harpagon watched his father slowly dying
And musing on his white lips as they shrunk,
Said, "There is lumber in the outhouse lying
It seems: old boards and junk."
Celimene cooed, and said, "How good I am
And, naturally, god made my looks excel."
(Her callous hear, thrice-smoked like salted ham,
And cooked in the fires of Hell!)
A smoky scribbler, to himself a beacon,
Says to the wretch whom he has plunged in shade-
"Where's the Creator you so loved to speak on,
The Saviour you portrayed?"
But best of all I know a certain rogue
Who yawns and weeps, lamenting night and day
(Impotent fathead) in the same old brogue,
"I will be good- one day!"
the clock says in a whisper, "He is ready
The damned one, whom I warned of his disaster.
He's blind, and deaf, and like a wall unsteady,
Where termites mine the plaster."
Then one appeared whom all of them denied
And said with mocking laughter, "To my manager
You've all come; to the Black Mass I provide
Not one of you's a stranger.
You've built me temples in your hearts of sin.
You've kissed my buttocks in your secret mirth.
Know me for Satan by this conquering grin,
As monstrous as the Earth.
D'you think, poor hypocrites surprised red-handed,
That you can trick your lord without a hitch;
And that by guile two prizes can be landed-
heaven, and being rich?
The wages of huntsman is his quarry,
Which pays him for the chill he gets while stalking.
Companions of my revels grim and sorry
I am going to take you walking,
Down through the denseness of the soil and rock,
Down through the dust and ash you leave behind,
Into a palace, built in one solid block,
Of stone that is not kind:
For it is built of Universal Sin
And holds of me all the is proud and glorious."
-Meanwhile an angel, far above the din,
Sends forth a peal victorious
For all whose hearts can say, "I bless thy rod;
And blessed be the griefs that on us fall.
My soul is not a toy, Eternal God,
Thy wisdom's all in all!"
And so deliciously that trumpet blows
On evenings of celestial harvestings,
It makes a rapture in the hearts of those
Whose love and praise it sings.
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