Correspondences

Nature is a temple in which living pillars

Sometimes give voice to confused words;
Man passes there through forests of symbols
Which look at him with understanding eyes.

Like prolonged echoes mingling in the distance

In a deep and tenebrous unity,
Vast as the dark of night and as the light of day,
Perfumes, sounds, and colors correspond.

There are perfumes as cool as the flesh of children,

Sweet as oboes, green as meadows
— And others are corrupt, and rich, triumphant,

With power to expand into infinity,

Like amber and incense, musk, benzoin,
That sing the ecstasy of the soul and senses.

The Albatross
Often to pass the time on board, the crew
will catch an albatross, one of those big birds
which nonchalantly chaperon a ship
across the bitter fathoms of the sea.

Tied to the deck, this sovereign of space,

as if embarrassed by its clumsiness,
pitiably lets its great white wings
drag at its sides like a pair of unshipped oars.

How weak and awkward, even comical

this traveller but lately so adoit -
one deckhand sticks a pipestem in its beak,
another mocks the cripple that once flew!

The Poet is like this monarch of the clouds

riding the storm above the marksman's range;
exiled on the ground, hooted and jeered,
he cannot walk because of his great wings.
Beauty
Conceive me as a dream of stone:
my breast, where mortals come to grief,
is made to prompt all poets' love,
mute and noble as matter itself.

With snow for flesh, with ice for heart,

I sit on high, an unguessed sphinx
begrudging acts that alter forms;
I never laugh, I never weep.

In studious awe the poets brood

before my monumental pose
aped from the proudest pedestal,
and to bind these docile lovers fast
I freeze the world in a perfect mirror:
The timeless light of my wide eyes

Spleen
I am like the king of a rainy country
Rich, and yet powerless, young and yet most old
Who, distrustful of the bows his tutors make
Sits bored among his dogs as with his other beasts
Nothing can lift his spirits, neither hawk nor game
The dying subjects gathered to his balcony.
The grotesque ballad of his best-loved fool
No more distracts him in this sickness cruel.
His lilied bed is changed into a tomb;
The ladies of his court all lords might love
And yet they can no longer find shameless attire
To draw a smile from their young, wasted sire.
The alchemist who made him gold could not
Purge from his soul this corrupt element
And in a blood bath, as in ancient Rome,
Remembered by the mighty in their latter days
Knew not to warm this dazzled corpse
Where flows not blood but Lethe's waters green.

Hymn To Beauty

O Beauty! do you visit from the sky

Or the abyss? infernal and divine,
Your gaze bestows both kindnesses and crimes,
So it is said you act on us like wine.

Your eye contains the evening and the dawn;

You pour out odours like an evening storm;
Your kiss is potion from an ancient jar,
That can make heroes cold and children warm.

Are you of heaven or the nether world?

Charmed Destiny, your pet, attends your walk;
You scatter joys and sorrows at your whim,
And govern all, and answer no man's call.

Beauty, you walk on corpses, mocking them;

Horror is charming as your other gems,
And Murder is a trinket dancing there
Lovingly on your naked belly's skin.

You are a candle where the mayfly dies

In flames, blessing this fire's deadly bloom.
The panting lover bending to his love
Looks like a dying man who strokes his tomb.

What difference, then, from heaven or from hell,

O Beauty, monstrous in simplicity?
If eye, smile, step can open me the way
To find unknown, sublime infinity?

Angel or siren, spirit, I don't care,

As long as velvet eyes and perfumed head
And glimmering motions, o my queen, can make
The world less dreadful, and the time less dead.

The Ideal
NOT all the beauties in old prints vignetted,
Those worthless products of an outworn age,
With slippered feet and fingers castanetted,
The thirst of hearts like my heart can assuage.

To Gavarni, the poet of chloroses,

I leave his troupe of beauties sick and wan;
I cannot find among those pale, pale roses
The red ideal mine eyes would gaze upon.

Lady Macbeth, the lovely star of crime,

The Greek poet's dream born in a northern clime—
Ah, she could quench my dark heart's deep desiring;

Or Michelangelo's dark daughter Night,

In a strange posture dreamily admiring
Your beauty fashioned for a giant's delight!