The Eyes Of Beauty

by Charles Baudelaire

The Eyes Of Beauty 

YOU are a sky of autumn, pale and rose; 

But all the sea of sadness in my blood 

Surges, and ebbing, leaves my lips morose, 

Salt with the memory of the bitter flood. 

In vain your hand glides my faint bosom o'er, 

That which you seek, beloved, is desecrate 

By woman's tooth and talon; ah, no more 

Seek in me for a heart which those dogs ate. 

It is a ruin where the jackals rest, 

And rend and tear and glut themselves and slay- 

A perfume swims about your naked breast! 

Beauty, hard scourge of spirits, have your way! 

With flame-like eyes that at bright feasts have flared 

Burn up these tatters that the beasts have spared! 

The Flask 

Perfumes there are which through all things can pass

And make all matter porous, even glass;

Old coffers from the Orient brought, whose locks

Grind sullenly when opening the box,

Or, in an empty house, some ancient chest, 

Where time and dust and gloom were long compressed, 

May yield a flask where memory survives, 

And a soul flashes into future lives.

A thousand thoughts, funereal larvae, laid 

Shuddering softly under palls of shade, 

May suddenly their soaring wings unfold, 

Stained azure, glazed with rose, or filmed with gold.

Intoxicating memory now flies 

Into the dusk, and makes us close our eyes: 

Vertigo draws the spirit which it grips 

Towards some dark miasma of eclipse:

Beside an ancient pit he makes her fall, 

Where Lazarus, sweet-scented, tears his pall 

And wakes the spectral corpse of some now-cold, 

Rancid, sepulchral love he knew of old.

So when I'm lost to human memory, thrown

In some old gloomy chest to fie alone,

A poor decrepit flask, cracked, abject, crusty

With dirt, opaque and sticky, damp and dusty,

I'll be your pall and shroud, beloved pest! 

The witness of your venom, and its test, 

Dear poison, angel-brewed with deadly art — 

Life, death, and dear corrosion of my heart.

— Translated by Roy Campbell

The Venal Muse

Lover of palaces, Muse of my heart, O sweet,

When hailstones fly from January's frosty sling,

On snowy nights amid black ennui, who shall bring

A cheery log to thaw your violet chill feet?

Shall you warm your wan mottled shoulder with the wing

Of bleak nocturnal beams that soar from the dank street?

Knowing you have no coin in purse nor bread to eat,

Shall you rake gold from blue arched skies for harvesting?

To earn your daily bread as the dense nights grow denser,

Shall you play acolyte and blithely swing your censer,

Chanting faithless Te Deums; or a moment after,

A famished mountebank, sell the charmed mysteries

Of laughter bathed in tears that no man ever sees

To rouse the rabble herd to fits of obscene laughter?

— Translated by Jacques LeClercq