Charles Baudelaire Quote
SpleenJe suis comme le roi d'un pays pluvieux,Riche, mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant très vieux,Qui, de ses précepteurs méprisant les courbettes,S'ennuie avec ses chiens comme avec d'autres bêtes.Rien ne peut l'égayer, ni gibier, ni faucon,Ni son peuple mourant en face du balcon.Du bouffon favori la grotesque balladeNe distrait plus le front de ce cruel malade;Son lit fleurdelisé se transforme en tombeau,Et les dames d'atour, pour qui tout prince est beau,Ne savent plus trouver d'impudique toilettePour tirer un souris de ce jeune squelette.Le savant qui lui fait de l'or n'a jamais puDe son être extirper l'élément corrompu,Et dans ces bains de sang qui des Romains nous viennent,Et dont sur leurs vieux jours les puissants se souviennent,II n'a su réchauffer ce cadavre hébétéOù coule au lieu de sang l'eau verte du Léthé //I'm like the king of a rain-country, richbut sterile, young but with an old wolf's itch,one who escapes his tutor's monologues,and kills the day in boredom with his dogs;nothing cheers him, darts, tennis, falconry,his people dying by the balcony;the bawdry of the pet hermaphroditeno longer gets him through a single night;his bed of fleur-de-lys becomes a tomb;even the ladies of the court, for whomall kings are beautiful, cannot put onshameful enough dresses for this skeleton;the scholar who makes his gold cannot inventwashes to cleanse the poisoned element;even in baths of blood, Rome's legacy,our tyrants' solace in senility,he cannot warm up his shot corpse, whose foodis syrup-green Lethean ooze, not blood.— Robert Lowell, from Marthiel & Jackson Matthews, eds., The Flowers of Evil (NY: New Directions, 1963)
SpleenJe suis comme le roi d'un pays pluvieux,Riche, mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant très vieux,Qui, de ses précepteurs méprisant les courbettes,S'ennuie avec ses chiens comme avec d'autres bêtes.Rien ne peut l'égayer, ni gibier, ni faucon,Ni son peuple mourant en face du balcon.Du bouffon favori la grotesque balladeNe distrait plus le front de ce cruel malade;Son lit fleurdelisé se transforme en tombeau,Et les dames d'atour, pour qui tout prince est beau,Ne savent plus trouver d'impudique toilettePour tirer un souris de ce jeune squelette.Le savant qui lui fait de l'or n'a jamais puDe son être extirper l'élément corrompu,Et dans ces bains de sang qui des Romains nous viennent,Et dont sur leurs vieux jours les puissants se souviennent,II n'a su réchauffer ce cadavre hébétéOù coule au lieu de sang l'eau verte du Léthé //I'm like the king of a rain-country, richbut sterile, young but with an old wolf's itch,one who escapes his tutor's monologues,and kills the day in boredom with his dogs;nothing cheers him, darts, tennis, falconry,his people dying by the balcony;the bawdry of the pet hermaphroditeno longer gets him through a single night;his bed of fleur-de-lys becomes a tomb;even the ladies of the court, for whomall kings are beautiful, cannot put onshameful enough dresses for this skeleton;the scholar who makes his gold cannot inventwashes to cleanse the poisoned element;even in baths of blood, Rome's legacy,our tyrants' solace in senility,he cannot warm up his shot corpse, whose foodis syrup-green Lethean ooze, not blood.— Robert Lowell, from Marthiel & Jackson Matthews, eds., The Flowers of Evil (NY: New Directions, 1963)
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About Charles Baudelaire
His most famous work, a book of lyric poetry titled Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), expresses the changing nature of beauty in the rapidly industrialising Paris caused by Haussmann's renovation of Paris during the mid-19th century. Baudelaire's original style of prose-poetry influenced a generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé. He coined the term modernity (modernité) to designate the fleeting experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility of artistic expression to capture that experience. Marshall Berman has credited Baudelaire as being the first Modernist.