Cats
They are alike, prim scholar and perfervid lover:
When comes the season of decay, they both decide
Upon sweet, husky cats to be the household pride;
Cats choose, like them, to sit, and like them, shudder.
Like partisans of carnal dalliance and science,
They search for silence and the shadowings of dread;
Hell well might harness them as horses for the dead,
If it could bend their native proudness in compliance.
In reverie they emulate the noble mood
Of giant sphinxes stretched in depths of solitude
Who seem to slumber in a never-ending dream;
Within their fertile loins a sparkling magic lies;
Finer than any sand are dusts of gold that gleam,
Vague starpoints, in the mystic iris of their eyes.
The Cat
Come, my fine cat, against my loving heart;
Sheathe your sharp claws, and settle.
And let my eyes into your pupils dart
Where agate sparks with metal.
Now while my fingertips caress at leisure
Your head and wiry curves,
And that my hand’s elated with the pleasure
Of your electric nerves,
I think about my woman — how her glances
Like yours, dear beast, deep-down
And cold, can cut and wound one as with lances;
Then, too, she has that vagrant
And subtle air of danger that makes fragrant
Her body, lithe and brown.
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) is one of the most important poets in French literature (he also made a name for himself as a literary and art critic). While his early poems displayed the influence of Romanticism, he eventually developed a counter-Romantic style, exhibited in Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil), a book of poems which express a candid, often shocking, realism that later generations, especially the Modernist poets, would also adopt. In fact, Baudelaire is credited with coining the term “modernity” as a way of describing through verse the ephemera of life in contemporary urban settings, a task which he charged all poets to take up through their work.
Cats
They are alike, prim scholar and perfervid lover:
When comes the season of decay, they both decide
Upon sweet, husky cats to be the household pride;
Cats choose, like them, to sit, and like them, shudder.
Like partisans of carnal dalliance and science,
They search for silence and the shadowings of dread;
Hell well might harness them as horses for the dead,
If it could bend their native proudness in compliance.
In reverie they emulate the noble mood
Of giant sphinxes stretched in depths of solitude
Who seem to slumber in a never-ending dream;
Within their fertile loins a sparkling magic lies;
Finer than any sand are dusts of gold that gleam,
Vague starpoints, in the mystic iris of their eyes.
The Cat
Come, my fine cat, against my loving heart;
Sheathe your sharp claws, and settle.
And let my eyes into your pupils dart
Where agate sparks with metal.
Now while my fingertips caress at leisure
Your head and wiry curves,
And that my hand’s elated with the pleasure
Of your electric nerves,
I think about my woman — how her glances
Like yours, dear beast, deep-down
And cold, can cut and wound one as with lances;
Then, too, she has that vagrant
And subtle air of danger that makes fragrant
Her body, lithe and brown.
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) is one of the most important poets in French literature (he also made a name for himself as a literary and art critic). While his early poems displayed the influence of Romanticism, he eventually developed a counter-Romantic style, exhibited in Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil), a book of poems which express a candid, often shocking, realism that later generations, especially the Modernist poets, would also adopt. In fact, Baudelaire is credited with coining the term “modernity” as a way of describing through verse the ephemera of life in contemporary urban settings, a task which he charged all poets to take up through their work.
Comments