Baudelaire

I picked up a book called 'Flowers of Evil' by Baudelaire, a renowned french poet. This is the English translation by the Peter Pauper Press. I was always curious about poetry, but this book blew me away! Brilliant poetry, and great hold on metaphors. I really liked the translator's meter and rhyme patterns...

Here is the poem...

To the Reader
Folly and error, sin and avarice,
Labor our minds and bodies in their course,
Blithely we nourish pleasurable remorse
As beggars feed their parasitic lice.

Our sins are stubborn, our repentance faint,
We sell our weak confessions at high price,
Returning gaily to the bogs of vice,
Thinking base tears can cleanse our every taint.

Pillowed on evil, Satan Trismegist
Ceaselessly cradles our enchanted mind,
The flawless metal of our will we find
Volatilized by this rare alchemist.

The Devil holds the puppet threads; and swayed
By noisome things and their repugnant spell,
Daily we take one further step toward Hell,
Suffering no horror in the olid shade.

As an impoverished rake will kiss and bite
The bruised blue nipples of an ancient whore,
We steal clandestine pleasures by the score,
Which, like dried orange rinds, we pressure tight.

Serried, aswarm, like million maggots, so
Demons carouse in us with fetid breath,
And, when we breathe, the unseen stream of death
Flows down our lungs with muffled wads of woe.

If poison, knife, rape, arson, have not dared
Yet stamp the pleasing pattern of their gyves
On the dull canvas of our sorry lives,
It is because our torpid souls are scared.

But side by side with our monstrosities
— Jackals and bitch hounds, scorpions, vultures, apes,
Panthers and serpents whose repulsive shapes
Pollute our vice's dank menageries,

There is one viler and more wicked spawn,
Which never makes great gestures or loud cries
Yet would turn earth to wastes of sumps and sties
And swallow all creation in a yawn:

Ennui! Moist-eyed perforce, worse than all other,
Dreaming of stakes, he smokes his hookah pipe.
Reader, you know this fiend, refined and ripe,
Reader, O hypocrite — my like! — my brother!

I really thought it was a great description of myself, actually. Most of the time, I act revolted by evil... I scorn all those who commit such... But am I not the chief of evildoers myself?

(Ennui means boredom)