The Flowers of Evil, page 8
with sunset hues reflected in my eyes.
I lived there in voluptuary ease,
amid the heaven and sea, in gorgeousness,
and naked slaves, breathing exotic scent,
waved palm leaves up and down to cool my brow.
They had one purpose only: to augment
the mournful secret that had laid me low.
13 Traveling Gypsies °
The fire-eyed tribe of prophets left last night.
Some had their kids strapped to their backs, while others
fed powerful infant famishment a mother’s
opulence from a loose and dangling tit.
The men now walk with gleaming weaponry
alongside wagons loaded with their kin.
Their eyes, eyes rendered heavy by a wan
regret for lost illusions, scan the sky.
The cricket in his sandy solitude,
seeing them passing, plays a louder tune.
Cybele,° doting, makes the trees more green,
makes rock jet water and the desert bloom
before these travelers for whom, like home,
the coming darkness’s dominion opens wide.
14 Man and the Sea
Free man, you will forever love high seas.
They are your mirror; you can see yourself
tossed in the endless tossing of a gulf.
Your soul is no less bitter an abyss.
You like to dive to the reflection’s core.
Your eyes and arms embrace it, and the cry
of its unmanageable misery
distracts your heart, sometimes, from its own roar.
You both are shadowed and mysterious:
man, none have plumbed your void the whole way through;
O sea, who sees the wealth inside of you?
You two prefer to keep your secrets close.
Yet pitilessly for unnumbered eons
you have attacked each other, so do both
of you delight in homicide and death,
O timeless warriors, O ruthless twins!
15 Don Juan in Hell °
When Don Juan tumbled to the nether flood
and gave Charon the ferryman° his fare,
a man fierce as Antisthenes,° a sad
beggar, laid vengeful hands on either oar,
and women with their robes undone, breasts showing,
convulsed beneath the black sky overhead
and skulked behind him with a long, loud lowing
like cows soon to be slaughtered to some god.
Sganarelle,° laughing, sought what he was owed
while, with a trembling finger, Don Luis°
revealed to all the shore-wandering dead
the son who’d mocked his gray senility.
Beside the traitor who was once her man,
Elvira° shook with grief and, virtuous,
asked for a last smile, one that had the shine
and sweetness of his erstwhile promises.
While, stiff and armed with steel, a man of stone
stood at the helm and cleaved the dusky tide,
Juan, leaning on his sword and looking on
the wake behind them, never deigned to look aside.
16 Punishment for Pride
Some years back when Theology was in full bloom
and flourishing with utmost energy and vim,
a famous doctor of religion,° it is said,
since he had salvaged souls that had been mostly dead
and roused them from the depths of lightless lethargy,
went on to thrust himself toward sacred ecstasy,
seeking by mystic pathways, to himself unknown,
a state pure souls alone were able to attain.
Like someone who had climbed too high and was afraid,
he cried out in the raptures of satanic pride:
“O little Jesus, how I have exalted you!
But if I chose to lay your helpless body low,
I’d mix disdain in with your all-too-sacred state
and leave you merely an outrageous neonate.”
Suddenly his intelligence was cracked in two.
His solar brilliance was concealed in weeds of woe.
Utter disorder rolled into the gifted mind
that once had been a precious temple where, enshrined
beneath illustrious ceilings, he had reigned supreme.
Now speechlessness and night set up their camp in him,
as if he were a vault to which the key was lost.
Henceforth he walked the city like an idle beast
and, when he passed through gardens without fathoming
the things he saw, as blind to winter as to spring,
he was as negligible as a broken tool,
and children jeered at him as if he were a fool.
17 Beauty
Men, like a stone-dream, I am beautiful.
My breasts, which bruise hand after hand, are made
to give the poets an inhibited
love that, like matter, is perennial.
Like an unfathomed sphinx,° I rule the sky
and make my heart of snow as white as swans.
I hate excitement that displaces lines.
I know no laughter and I never cry.
Before the grandiose poses that my body
strikes with a fierce and monumental air,
poets will waste their days in serious study,
because I have, to keep my lovers close,
pure mirrors in which all is lovelier:
my eyes, eyes with eternal limpidness.
18 The Ideal
The various charms of trivial portrayals
in worn vignettes,° works of passé design—
the feet in brogues, the fingers clacking zills—
never will fascinate a heart like mine.
Let Paul Gavarni, artist of chlorosis,°
keep all his prattling invalids, his pale
paragons, since among such bloodless roses
I never find my rubicund ideal.
What does my heart, my Hell-deep heart, demand?
It’s you, Lady Macbeth,° a killing mind,
a storm-born dream of Aeschylus,° or you,
great Night, offspring of Michelangelo,°
who calmly twist, in an eccentric pose,
flanks fashioned to be fed to Titans’ maws!°
19 The Giantess
Back when prolific Nature birthed large-size
progeny daily, it would have been fun
to live beside some girlish giantess
like a luxurious cat beside a queen
and watch her body blossom with her soul
as she enjoyed her frightful exercise
and fathom if she felt a loving zeal
from the vague moisture swimming in her eyes,
to wander her colossal form at ease
and mount the slopes of her enormous knees,
and, in the summer, when the harsh sun laid
her out, lethargic, over her estate,
to sleep casually in a vast breast’s shade
like a quaint village at a mountain’s foot.
20 The Mask
An Allegorical Statue in the Style of the Renaissance
For Ernest Christophe, Sculptor°
Let us admire this Tuscan masterpiece:
Two sisters, Elegance and Strength, present
a cascade of the body, rippling thews.
This woman, this astounding monument,
winningly slim, yet with a buxom shape,
was made to couch on a refulgent throne
and charm the spare time of a prince or pope.
O look at the refined, voluptuous grin
where Self-conceit parades its ecstasies;
that sly, mocking and apathetic stare.
Those dainty features, wholly veiled in gauze,
proclaim to us with a triumphant air:
“Love crowns my head, and Pleasure asks for me!”
Look closely at this noble work: what charm
is flowing out of her gentility.
Come walk the whole way round her lovely form.
O blasphemy of art! O fatal trick!
This woman, this celestial lure toward joy,
is at the top a double-headed freak!
—But no, it’s just a mask, a visual ploy,
that face lit up by an exquisite grin,
and, look, the features on the actual face,
crushed miserably underneath a screen,
seem to seek shelter in deceptiveness.
Poor gorgeous thing! The river of your tears
voluminously wets my worried soul.
Your slyness thrills me, and I slake my fierce
thirst in your eyes’ tormented waterfall.
—Why is she weeping, she, pure pulchritude,
who forces mankind to obey her laws?
What secret evil chews her sinewy side?
She weeps, you fool, because she’s lived, because
she still is living. But what makes her grieve
the most, what really brings her to her knees,
is that tomorrow she must be alive
still, and the next day, and the next—like us.
21 Hymn to Beauty
O Beauty, do you come from Paradise
or Hell? Your gaze, infernal and divine,
brims over with benevolence and vice,
and that’s why people liken you to wine.
Your eyes are full of sunrise and sunset;
you strew fragrances like a stormy night.
Your mouth is like a flask; your kiss, a draught,
makes heroes weak and children resolute.
Are you here from the stars? From the abyss?
The dog of Fate attends your daily stroll.
You sow at random jubilance and woes.
You rule all things but aren’t responsible.
You mock the corpses that you trample on.
You wear Abomination as jewelry,
and Homicide, your favorite precious stone,
jigs on your belly in an amorous way.
Candle, the dazed moth seeking out your glow
ignites and utters: “Blessed be my doom!”
Panting above his love, the handsome beau
looks like a sick man hugging his own tomb.
Beauty, you simple, vile monstrosity,
I cannot care about your origin,
provided that your gaze, smile, feet show me
a sweet infinity I have never known.
Angel or Siren?° Satan? God? Who cares,
so long as you, O queen with eyes of satin,
O scent, light, rhythm, make the universe
less loathsome and the lapse of time less leaden?
21x The Jewels
My love was nude but, since she knew my heart,
had kept her jewels on—that was all she wore.
This rich array displayed the conquering art
slave girls might use in kingdoms of the Moor.
This gleaming world of precious stones and gold,
when it performs its pert and mocking dance,
drives me out of my mind. Yes, I go wild
over the back-and-forth of lights and tones.
She lay alluringly, prepared for love,
and from a couch looked down on my desire
which, like a sweet and oceanic wave,
rose for her, as the tide climbs up the shore.
She watched me with a vanquished tiger’s eyes
and posed and posed in an indifferent way.
Candidness, mixed in her with artifice,
endeared her metamorphoses to me.
First it was arms and shoulders, back and thighs,
laved as with oil and rippling like a swan,
that moved before my calm and probing eyes.
Then belly and breasts, grape clusters on my vine,°
advanced and urged me more than demons could
to smash the peacefulness my soul had reached,
to smash to bits the crystal colonnade
in which it had been all-too-calmly couched.
Her waist so thickened into either hip
that I observed what seemed a new design—
A buxom girl below, a boy on top.
What great artiste had daubed her outside brown?
Because the sun was fixed on going out,
we two were seeing by the hearth alone,
and, every time it sighed a sigh of light,
it flickered crimson on that amber skin.
22 Exotic Perfume
When, on a warm fall evening, I breathe in,
eyes shut, the perfume of your balmy breast,
I see a very happy stretch of coast
lit by the fires of an unsubtle sun:
a lazy island on which Nature grows
peculiar trees and fruits that taste like bliss,
sinewy males whose limbs are vigorous,
and females flashing candor from their eyes.
Led by your fragrance to this charming place,
I see a wharf with ships and rigging still
worn out from riding on the ocean swell;
meanwhile the scent of verdant tamarind,
swelling my nostrils, riding on the breeze,
mixes with sailors’ chanteys in my mind.
23 Her Hair
O tumble to the collarbone, O fleece,
O locks, O fragrance full of “I don’t care,”
what ecstasy! To stuff a gloomy place
with all I know is rife within this mass,
I’ll shake it like a kerchief in the air.
Africa: torrid; Asia: languorous—
whole worlds half-dead and very far away
live in your depths, redolent wilderness.
While other spirits sail on melodies,
mine, O my darling, swims in your bouquet.
I’ll go to where both resinous man and tree
lose consciousness beneath a tropic blast.
Strong, swelling tresses, carry me away!
O onyx sea, O dazzling reverie,
made up of sail and pennant, oar and mast:
a sounding harbor where my soul can swill
colossal waves of sounds and scents and hues,
where vessels on the silk and golden swell
open their arms wide to the sky to cull
the heat there making an eternal daze.
I’ll dunk my lust-besotted head in this
dark sea where what I want is kept in prison.
My subtle soul that rolls in its caress
will rediscover you, ripe languidness,
O endless rest, ambrosial intermission.
Indigo tresses, you, O shadow tent,
lend me an ever-azure, open sky.
I’ll gladly sink into the mingled scent
the little wisps along your neck ferment—
cocoa oil, musk and tar in harmony.
A long time! Always! In your mess of hair
my hand will scatter every precious stone
so that you not be deaf to my desire.
Paradise of my dreams—that’s what you are,
my gourd for drinking memory’s best wine.
24 I love you as I love nocturnal skies . . .
I love you as I love nocturnal skies,
O grandiose reserve, O tear-filled vase.°
Attractive one, midnight accessory,
I love you more the more you run from me,
the more mockingly you expand the breach
between the big blue and my farthest reach.
I rush you, climb you, outrage you as if
I were a choir of worms, and you, a stiff.
Implacable, cruel creature, I adore
your chill—it makes you even lovelier.
25 Adulterated woman, you would screw the whole . . .
Adulterated woman, you would screw the whole
world in an alley. Boredom makes you mean of soul.
Merely to work your teeth, as if you’re at some sport,
you spend the whole day gnawing on a lover’s heart.
Lit up like a boutique’s front windows or like trees
adorned with lanterns for outdoor festivities,
your eyes use borrowed power in a haughty way,
utterly mindless of your beauty’s monarchy.
O blind and deaf machine, fecund in cruelties,
drinker of all creation’s blood, wholesome device,
why are you not embarrassed? Why have you not seen,
in every mirror that you pass, your charm’s decline?
Has the immensity of every wicked plot
you brilliantly conceive not filled your heart with fright,
when Nature, mighty in her secretive designs,
uses you for her own ends, O you queen of sins,
foul beast, to knead out men of ingenuity?
O muddy grandeur! O sublime ignominy!
26 Sed non satiata °
Bizarre and shadowy divinity,
musky mélange of perfume and Havana,
work of an obeah, Faust° of the savannah,
child of the night, witch cut from ebony,
love dancing on your lips is more to me
than opium and Malbec, Cabernet.
Whenever my desires parade your way,
your eyes, like cisterns, slake my great ennui.
Yes, large and dark, they pour your spirit out.
—O ruthless demon, serve a drink less hot.
I am no river Styx° to wrap you round
nine times, nor can I, so that I could wound
your will and lay you low, dire debauchee,
on your infernal mattress play Persephone.°
27 When she, a billow of bejeweled clothing . . .
When she, a billow of bejeweled clothing,
enters, it seems that she is dancing like
an endless snake some charmer has got writhing
rhythmically up and down a shaken stick.
She understands our misery as well
as a dark morning does, or desert air.
Like long networks of breakers in the swell,
she moves about without the slightest care.
Fine stones have gone into her polished eyes,
and in that strange symbolic nature where
I lived there in voluptuary ease,
amid the heaven and sea, in gorgeousness,
and naked slaves, breathing exotic scent,
waved palm leaves up and down to cool my brow.
They had one purpose only: to augment
the mournful secret that had laid me low.
13 Traveling Gypsies °
The fire-eyed tribe of prophets left last night.
Some had their kids strapped to their backs, while others
fed powerful infant famishment a mother’s
opulence from a loose and dangling tit.
The men now walk with gleaming weaponry
alongside wagons loaded with their kin.
Their eyes, eyes rendered heavy by a wan
regret for lost illusions, scan the sky.
The cricket in his sandy solitude,
seeing them passing, plays a louder tune.
Cybele,° doting, makes the trees more green,
makes rock jet water and the desert bloom
before these travelers for whom, like home,
the coming darkness’s dominion opens wide.
14 Man and the Sea
Free man, you will forever love high seas.
They are your mirror; you can see yourself
tossed in the endless tossing of a gulf.
Your soul is no less bitter an abyss.
You like to dive to the reflection’s core.
Your eyes and arms embrace it, and the cry
of its unmanageable misery
distracts your heart, sometimes, from its own roar.
You both are shadowed and mysterious:
man, none have plumbed your void the whole way through;
O sea, who sees the wealth inside of you?
You two prefer to keep your secrets close.
Yet pitilessly for unnumbered eons
you have attacked each other, so do both
of you delight in homicide and death,
O timeless warriors, O ruthless twins!
15 Don Juan in Hell °
When Don Juan tumbled to the nether flood
and gave Charon the ferryman° his fare,
a man fierce as Antisthenes,° a sad
beggar, laid vengeful hands on either oar,
and women with their robes undone, breasts showing,
convulsed beneath the black sky overhead
and skulked behind him with a long, loud lowing
like cows soon to be slaughtered to some god.
Sganarelle,° laughing, sought what he was owed
while, with a trembling finger, Don Luis°
revealed to all the shore-wandering dead
the son who’d mocked his gray senility.
Beside the traitor who was once her man,
Elvira° shook with grief and, virtuous,
asked for a last smile, one that had the shine
and sweetness of his erstwhile promises.
While, stiff and armed with steel, a man of stone
stood at the helm and cleaved the dusky tide,
Juan, leaning on his sword and looking on
the wake behind them, never deigned to look aside.
16 Punishment for Pride
Some years back when Theology was in full bloom
and flourishing with utmost energy and vim,
a famous doctor of religion,° it is said,
since he had salvaged souls that had been mostly dead
and roused them from the depths of lightless lethargy,
went on to thrust himself toward sacred ecstasy,
seeking by mystic pathways, to himself unknown,
a state pure souls alone were able to attain.
Like someone who had climbed too high and was afraid,
he cried out in the raptures of satanic pride:
“O little Jesus, how I have exalted you!
But if I chose to lay your helpless body low,
I’d mix disdain in with your all-too-sacred state
and leave you merely an outrageous neonate.”
Suddenly his intelligence was cracked in two.
His solar brilliance was concealed in weeds of woe.
Utter disorder rolled into the gifted mind
that once had been a precious temple where, enshrined
beneath illustrious ceilings, he had reigned supreme.
Now speechlessness and night set up their camp in him,
as if he were a vault to which the key was lost.
Henceforth he walked the city like an idle beast
and, when he passed through gardens without fathoming
the things he saw, as blind to winter as to spring,
he was as negligible as a broken tool,
and children jeered at him as if he were a fool.
17 Beauty
Men, like a stone-dream, I am beautiful.
My breasts, which bruise hand after hand, are made
to give the poets an inhibited
love that, like matter, is perennial.
Like an unfathomed sphinx,° I rule the sky
and make my heart of snow as white as swans.
I hate excitement that displaces lines.
I know no laughter and I never cry.
Before the grandiose poses that my body
strikes with a fierce and monumental air,
poets will waste their days in serious study,
because I have, to keep my lovers close,
pure mirrors in which all is lovelier:
my eyes, eyes with eternal limpidness.
18 The Ideal
The various charms of trivial portrayals
in worn vignettes,° works of passé design—
the feet in brogues, the fingers clacking zills—
never will fascinate a heart like mine.
Let Paul Gavarni, artist of chlorosis,°
keep all his prattling invalids, his pale
paragons, since among such bloodless roses
I never find my rubicund ideal.
What does my heart, my Hell-deep heart, demand?
It’s you, Lady Macbeth,° a killing mind,
a storm-born dream of Aeschylus,° or you,
great Night, offspring of Michelangelo,°
who calmly twist, in an eccentric pose,
flanks fashioned to be fed to Titans’ maws!°
19 The Giantess
Back when prolific Nature birthed large-size
progeny daily, it would have been fun
to live beside some girlish giantess
like a luxurious cat beside a queen
and watch her body blossom with her soul
as she enjoyed her frightful exercise
and fathom if she felt a loving zeal
from the vague moisture swimming in her eyes,
to wander her colossal form at ease
and mount the slopes of her enormous knees,
and, in the summer, when the harsh sun laid
her out, lethargic, over her estate,
to sleep casually in a vast breast’s shade
like a quaint village at a mountain’s foot.
20 The Mask
An Allegorical Statue in the Style of the Renaissance
For Ernest Christophe, Sculptor°
Let us admire this Tuscan masterpiece:
Two sisters, Elegance and Strength, present
a cascade of the body, rippling thews.
This woman, this astounding monument,
winningly slim, yet with a buxom shape,
was made to couch on a refulgent throne
and charm the spare time of a prince or pope.
O look at the refined, voluptuous grin
where Self-conceit parades its ecstasies;
that sly, mocking and apathetic stare.
Those dainty features, wholly veiled in gauze,
proclaim to us with a triumphant air:
“Love crowns my head, and Pleasure asks for me!”
Look closely at this noble work: what charm
is flowing out of her gentility.
Come walk the whole way round her lovely form.
O blasphemy of art! O fatal trick!
This woman, this celestial lure toward joy,
is at the top a double-headed freak!
—But no, it’s just a mask, a visual ploy,
that face lit up by an exquisite grin,
and, look, the features on the actual face,
crushed miserably underneath a screen,
seem to seek shelter in deceptiveness.
Poor gorgeous thing! The river of your tears
voluminously wets my worried soul.
Your slyness thrills me, and I slake my fierce
thirst in your eyes’ tormented waterfall.
—Why is she weeping, she, pure pulchritude,
who forces mankind to obey her laws?
What secret evil chews her sinewy side?
She weeps, you fool, because she’s lived, because
she still is living. But what makes her grieve
the most, what really brings her to her knees,
is that tomorrow she must be alive
still, and the next day, and the next—like us.
21 Hymn to Beauty
O Beauty, do you come from Paradise
or Hell? Your gaze, infernal and divine,
brims over with benevolence and vice,
and that’s why people liken you to wine.
Your eyes are full of sunrise and sunset;
you strew fragrances like a stormy night.
Your mouth is like a flask; your kiss, a draught,
makes heroes weak and children resolute.
Are you here from the stars? From the abyss?
The dog of Fate attends your daily stroll.
You sow at random jubilance and woes.
You rule all things but aren’t responsible.
You mock the corpses that you trample on.
You wear Abomination as jewelry,
and Homicide, your favorite precious stone,
jigs on your belly in an amorous way.
Candle, the dazed moth seeking out your glow
ignites and utters: “Blessed be my doom!”
Panting above his love, the handsome beau
looks like a sick man hugging his own tomb.
Beauty, you simple, vile monstrosity,
I cannot care about your origin,
provided that your gaze, smile, feet show me
a sweet infinity I have never known.
Angel or Siren?° Satan? God? Who cares,
so long as you, O queen with eyes of satin,
O scent, light, rhythm, make the universe
less loathsome and the lapse of time less leaden?
21x The Jewels
My love was nude but, since she knew my heart,
had kept her jewels on—that was all she wore.
This rich array displayed the conquering art
slave girls might use in kingdoms of the Moor.
This gleaming world of precious stones and gold,
when it performs its pert and mocking dance,
drives me out of my mind. Yes, I go wild
over the back-and-forth of lights and tones.
She lay alluringly, prepared for love,
and from a couch looked down on my desire
which, like a sweet and oceanic wave,
rose for her, as the tide climbs up the shore.
She watched me with a vanquished tiger’s eyes
and posed and posed in an indifferent way.
Candidness, mixed in her with artifice,
endeared her metamorphoses to me.
First it was arms and shoulders, back and thighs,
laved as with oil and rippling like a swan,
that moved before my calm and probing eyes.
Then belly and breasts, grape clusters on my vine,°
advanced and urged me more than demons could
to smash the peacefulness my soul had reached,
to smash to bits the crystal colonnade
in which it had been all-too-calmly couched.
Her waist so thickened into either hip
that I observed what seemed a new design—
A buxom girl below, a boy on top.
What great artiste had daubed her outside brown?
Because the sun was fixed on going out,
we two were seeing by the hearth alone,
and, every time it sighed a sigh of light,
it flickered crimson on that amber skin.
22 Exotic Perfume
When, on a warm fall evening, I breathe in,
eyes shut, the perfume of your balmy breast,
I see a very happy stretch of coast
lit by the fires of an unsubtle sun:
a lazy island on which Nature grows
peculiar trees and fruits that taste like bliss,
sinewy males whose limbs are vigorous,
and females flashing candor from their eyes.
Led by your fragrance to this charming place,
I see a wharf with ships and rigging still
worn out from riding on the ocean swell;
meanwhile the scent of verdant tamarind,
swelling my nostrils, riding on the breeze,
mixes with sailors’ chanteys in my mind.
23 Her Hair
O tumble to the collarbone, O fleece,
O locks, O fragrance full of “I don’t care,”
what ecstasy! To stuff a gloomy place
with all I know is rife within this mass,
I’ll shake it like a kerchief in the air.
Africa: torrid; Asia: languorous—
whole worlds half-dead and very far away
live in your depths, redolent wilderness.
While other spirits sail on melodies,
mine, O my darling, swims in your bouquet.
I’ll go to where both resinous man and tree
lose consciousness beneath a tropic blast.
Strong, swelling tresses, carry me away!
O onyx sea, O dazzling reverie,
made up of sail and pennant, oar and mast:
a sounding harbor where my soul can swill
colossal waves of sounds and scents and hues,
where vessels on the silk and golden swell
open their arms wide to the sky to cull
the heat there making an eternal daze.
I’ll dunk my lust-besotted head in this
dark sea where what I want is kept in prison.
My subtle soul that rolls in its caress
will rediscover you, ripe languidness,
O endless rest, ambrosial intermission.
Indigo tresses, you, O shadow tent,
lend me an ever-azure, open sky.
I’ll gladly sink into the mingled scent
the little wisps along your neck ferment—
cocoa oil, musk and tar in harmony.
A long time! Always! In your mess of hair
my hand will scatter every precious stone
so that you not be deaf to my desire.
Paradise of my dreams—that’s what you are,
my gourd for drinking memory’s best wine.
24 I love you as I love nocturnal skies . . .
I love you as I love nocturnal skies,
O grandiose reserve, O tear-filled vase.°
Attractive one, midnight accessory,
I love you more the more you run from me,
the more mockingly you expand the breach
between the big blue and my farthest reach.
I rush you, climb you, outrage you as if
I were a choir of worms, and you, a stiff.
Implacable, cruel creature, I adore
your chill—it makes you even lovelier.
25 Adulterated woman, you would screw the whole . . .
Adulterated woman, you would screw the whole
world in an alley. Boredom makes you mean of soul.
Merely to work your teeth, as if you’re at some sport,
you spend the whole day gnawing on a lover’s heart.
Lit up like a boutique’s front windows or like trees
adorned with lanterns for outdoor festivities,
your eyes use borrowed power in a haughty way,
utterly mindless of your beauty’s monarchy.
O blind and deaf machine, fecund in cruelties,
drinker of all creation’s blood, wholesome device,
why are you not embarrassed? Why have you not seen,
in every mirror that you pass, your charm’s decline?
Has the immensity of every wicked plot
you brilliantly conceive not filled your heart with fright,
when Nature, mighty in her secretive designs,
uses you for her own ends, O you queen of sins,
foul beast, to knead out men of ingenuity?
O muddy grandeur! O sublime ignominy!
26 Sed non satiata °
Bizarre and shadowy divinity,
musky mélange of perfume and Havana,
work of an obeah, Faust° of the savannah,
child of the night, witch cut from ebony,
love dancing on your lips is more to me
than opium and Malbec, Cabernet.
Whenever my desires parade your way,
your eyes, like cisterns, slake my great ennui.
Yes, large and dark, they pour your spirit out.
—O ruthless demon, serve a drink less hot.
I am no river Styx° to wrap you round
nine times, nor can I, so that I could wound
your will and lay you low, dire debauchee,
on your infernal mattress play Persephone.°
27 When she, a billow of bejeweled clothing . . .
When she, a billow of bejeweled clothing,
enters, it seems that she is dancing like
an endless snake some charmer has got writhing
rhythmically up and down a shaken stick.
She understands our misery as well
as a dark morning does, or desert air.
Like long networks of breakers in the swell,
she moves about without the slightest care.
Fine stones have gone into her polished eyes,
and in that strange symbolic nature where
