“You are sitting and smoking; you believe that you are sitting in your pipe, and that your pipe is smoking you; you are exhaling yourself in bluish clouds. You feel just fine in this position, and only one thing gives you worry or concern: how will you ever be able to get out of your pipe?”
-Charles Baudelaire: Les Paradis Artificiels
The Ghost
Like angels that have monster eyes,
Over your bedside I shall rise,
Gliding towards you silently
Across night’s black immensity.
O darksome beauty, you shall swoon
At kisses colder than the moon
And fondlings like a snake’s who coils
Sinuous round the grave he soils.
When livid morning breaks apace,
You shall find but an empty place,
Cold until night, and bleak, and drear:
As others do by tenderness,
So would I rule your youthfulness
By harsh immensities of fear.
-Charles Baudelaire
Witch Burning
In the marketplace they are piling the dry sticks.
A thicket of shadows is a poor coat. I inhabit
The wax image of myself, a doll’s body.
Sickness begins here: I am the dartboard for witches.
Only the devil can eat the devil out.
In the month of red leaves I climb to a bed of fire.
It is easy to blame the dark: the mouth of a door,
The cellar’s belly. They’ve blown my sparkler out.
A black-sharded lady keeps me in parrot cage.
What large eyes the dead have!
I am intimate with a hairy spirit.
Smoke wheels from the beak of this empty jar.
If I am a little one, I can do no harm.
If I don’t move about, I’ll knock nothing over. So I said,
Sitting under a potlid, tiny and inert as a rice grain.
They are turning the burners up, ring after ring.
We are full of starch, my small white fellows. We grow.
It hurts at first. The red tongues will teach the truth.
Mother of beetles, only unclench your hand:
I’ll fly through the candle’s mouth like a singeless moth.
Give me back my shape. I am ready to construe the days
I coupled with dust in the shadow of a stone.
My ankles brighten. Brightness ascends my thighs.
I am lost, I am lost, in the robes of all this light.
-Sylvia Plath
Je t’adore à l’égal de la voûte nocturne,
Ô vase de tristesse, ô grande taciturne,
Et t’aime d’autant plus, belle, que tu me fuis,
Et que tu me parais, ornement de mes nuits,
Plus ironiquement accumuler les lieues
Qui séparent mes bras des immensités bleues.
Je m’avance à l’attaque, et je grimpe aux assauts,
Comme après un cadavre un choeur de vermisseaux,
Et je chéris, ô bête implacable et cruelle!
Jusqu’à cette froideur par où tu m’es plus belle!
More Than Night’s Vault, It’s You That I Adore
More than night’s vault, it’s you that I adore,
Vessel of sorrow, silent one, the more
Because you flee from me, and seem to place,
Ornament of my nights! more leagues of space
Ironically between me and you
Than part me from these vastitudes of blue.
I charge, attack, and mount to the assault
As worms attack a corpse within a vault.
And cherish even the coldness that you boast,
By which, harsh beast, you subjugate me most.
— Roy Campbell, Poems of Baudelaire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952)
The Witch of Atlas
I.
BEFORE those cruel Twins, whom at one birth
Incestuous Change bore to her father Time, 50
Error and Truth, had hunted from the Earth
All those bright natures which adorned its prime,
And left us nothing to believe in, worth
The pains of putting into learnèd rhyme,
A lady-witch there lived on Atlas’ mountain
Within a cavern, by a secret fountain.
II.
Her mother was one of the Atlantides:
The all-beholding Sun had ne’er beholden
In his wide voyage o’er continents and seas
So fair a creature, as she lay enfolden 60
In the warm shadow of her loveliness; –
He kissed her with his beams, and made all golden
The chamber of gray rock in which she lay –
She, in that dream of joy, dissolved away.
III.
‘Tis said, she first was changed into a vapour,
And then into a cloud, such clouds as flit,
Like splendour-wingèd moths about a taper,
Round the red west when the sun dies in it:
And then into a meteor, such as caper
On hill-tops when the moon is in a fit: 70
Then, into one of those mysterious stars
Which hide themselves between the Earth and Mars.
IV.
Ten times the Mother of the Months had bent
Her bow beside the folding-star, and bidden
With that bright sign the billows to indent
The sea-deserted sand — like children chidden,
At her command they ever came and went –
Since in that cave a dewy splendour hidden
Took shape and motion: with the living form
Of this embodied Power, the cave grew warm. 80
V.
A lovely lady garmented in light
From her own beauty — deep her eyes, as are
Two openings of unfathomable night
Seen through a Temple’s cloven roof — her hair
Dark — the dim brain whirls dizzy with delight,
Picturing her form; her soft smiles shone afar,
And her low voice was heard like love, and drew
All living things towards this wonder new.
Read more…
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden lived, whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love, and be loved by me.
I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love,
I and my Annabel Lee,—
With a love that the wingèd seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.
And this was the reason that long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsmen came,
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre,
In this kingdom by the sea.
The angels, not so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me.
Yes! that was the reason (as all men know)
In this kingdom by the sea,
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.
But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we,
Of many far wiser than we;
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.
[343]For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee,
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.
And so, all the night-tide I lie down by the side
Of my darling, my darling, my life, and my bride,
In her sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.
“Perhaps the old monks were right when they tried to root love out; perhaps the poets are right when they try to water it. It is a blood-red flower, with the color of sin; but there is always the scent of a god about it.” -Olive Schreiner (South African Writer, 1855-1920)
“Any healthy man can go without food for two days, but not without poetry.” -Baudelaire
I have learned is that words can make you bleed. They can also break your heart, make you cry or make you feel as if you’ve been kissed by an angel with broken wings. Words can also unlock your imagination, ignite your senses and break down walls.
I can’t get by without poetry and I do love my quite dead poets. As busy as I get with the Oompa Loompas running rampant and with work and art, I still make it a point to read poetry every day.
Unfortunately for me – the classics were nevuh, evuh introduced to me in school. (Except for Poe, who I also adore!) Baudelaire, Dickinson and Shelley were my first obsessions and I will probably study them for the rest of my life. Then came Byron and Keats followed by Plath, Sexton, Lorca and Neruda. I’m also wild for Wilde. Rarely, if ever do I read anything but poetry or 19th century literature!
Except of course, unless Leslie sends me some fabulous trashy vampire novel….heh!
Obsession #10: collecting the oldest copies of these poet’s works that I can find, no matter what the condition. (that don’t cost a fortune!) Mainly the 18th & 19th century poets, even if I have a copy of it already!
WP Cumulus Flash tag cloud by Roy Tanck requires Flash Player 9 or better.
