Charles Baudelaire. 5 poems to celebrate your birthday

Charles Baudelaire, poet, novelist, art critic and one of the great bastions of French culture, I was born on a day like today in Paris in 1821. He was considered the father of modern poetry and his reference work is The flowers of Evil, published in 1857. Today I select 5 poems to read in your memory.

5 poems

The prayer of a pagan

Don't let your flames die;
Warm my deaf heart,
Voluptuousness, cruel torment!
Diva! supplicem exaudî!

Goddess in the air diffused,
Flame from our underground,
Listen to a wasted soul
That raises its iron song to you,

Voluptuousness, be my queen!
Take Mermaid Mask
Made of meat and brocade,

Or pour me your deep dreams
In the formless and mystical liquor,
Voluptuousness, elastic phantom!

The destruction

Beside me without respite the Demon is agitated;
Around my fleet like an impalpable air;
I swallow it and feel my lungs burn
Of a desire filling them guilty and infinite.

Take, sometimes, because you know of my love for Art,
Of the most seductive woman appearances,
and resorting to specious pretexts of adultery
My lips get used to depraved filters.

Far from the gaze of God, he takes me like this
Panting and undone by fatigue, to the center
From the deep and lonely plains of Boredom,

And throws before my eyes, full of confusion,
Stained garments and wounds ajar,
And the bloody apparatus that lives in Destruction!

I still haven't forgotten ...

I have not yet forgotten, close to the city,
Our white mansion, small quieter,
The Stucco Pomona and Ancient Aphrodite
Veiling his modesty behind a sparse foliage,
And the sun, in the twilight, sparkling and superb
That, behind the glass where its rays were broken,
It seemed, great pupil in the curious sky,
To contemplate our long and lonely dinners,
Shedding her beautiful elongated reflections
On the twill blind and on the frugal tablecloth.

Allegory

She is a beautiful and splendid woman,
That in the wine drag leaves his hair.
The claws of love, the poisons of the den,
They slip without penetrating your granite skin.
He jokes about death and debauchery:
The monsters, whose heartbreaking and rough hand,
He has always respected, in his fatal games,
The rude majesty of that arrogant body.
Walk like a goddess, pose like a sultana;
A Mohammedan faith deposits in enjoyment
and with open arms that the breasts stand out,
With his gaze he invites the mortal race.
Believe or, better yet, know, this barren virgin,
Necessary, however, in the march of the world,
That physical beauty is a sublime gift
Who knows how to obtain clemency from all ignominy.
As much as Hell, Purgatory ignores,
And when the time comes to go into the Night,
He will look straight at the face of Death,
Like a newborn - without hatred or regret.

The metamorphosis of the vampire

The woman, meanwhile, from her strawberry mouth
Writhing like a serpent among embers
And kneading her breasts on the hard corset,
It said these words impregnated with musk:
«My lips are wet and I know science
To lose consciousness at the bottom of a bed,
I dry all the tears on my triumphal breasts.
And I make the old laugh with childish laughter.
For those who contemplate me awake and naked
I replace the sun, the moon, the sky and the stars.
I am, my dear wise man, so learned in delights,
When I smother a man in my dreaded arms
Or when to the bites I abandon my bust,
Shy and debauched and fragile and robust,
That in those covers that give up emotion,
Impotent the angels were lost by me. »

When he had sucked the marrow from my bones
and very languidly I turned to her
In order to kiss him back, I only saw
Overflowing with pus, a sticky wineskin.
I closed both eyes with icy terror
and when I wanted to open them to that clarity,
By my side, instead of the strong mannequin
That seemed to have made a supply of my blood,
Pieces of skeleton collided in confusion
Of which the weather vane squeaks rose
Or as a poster, at the end of an iron rod,
That sways the wind on winter nights.