Quite a Different Feel from Last Weekend's Book

Little did I realize when I took it out from the library, and then ordered my own copy, that half of Richard Howard's translation of Charles Baudelaire' Fleurs du Mal was written in English and the second part in French. So it took me little or no time this afternoon to finish the 176 pages in my native tongue. I could, I realize, send the book to Hammagrael or to my son of seven languages, both of whom will berate me for not reading it en francais. Oh well.

It is a book that needs to be read out loud, not as a book on tape, but by the reader so that he or she can become immersed in the poetry, the philosophy, the feelings. Here are poems you want to read to your lover in the afterglow; here are poems that you compose in your head after a full bottle of wine with no one around to appreciate your intelligence and wit; and here are poems for poets and writers who despair that their works will not live on, nay never be read at all.

In the first category, although CB is writing to beauty as a personified inspiration concept, he writes of a woman's irresistible allure in Hymn to Beauty:
"Your eyes reflect the sunset and the dawn;
you scatter perfumes like a windy night;
your kisses are a drug, your mouth the urn
dispensing fear to heroes, fervor to boys."

In Sed Non Satiate:
"... And yet
to wine, to opium even, I prefer
the elixir of your lips on which love flaunts
itself; and in the wasteland of desire
your eyes afford the wells to slake my thirst."

Ah, where were such cravings and emotion when the Slackers read lust last year.

In one called Suppose My Name, I hear echoes of my favorite poem, from a poet who wants his beloved to live forever by his quill:
"Suppose my name were favored by the winds,
my voyage prospered, and the future read
all that I wrote, and marveled ...Love, they're yours!
I give you poems to make your memory

echo the way archaic legends do,
so that by some incantatory spell,
haunting the reader like a psaltery,
you will be caught within my cadences;"

Could any woman not go delirious from such adulation!

There is much contemporary influences in CB even with his original lethargy and beautiful despair. Echoes of Poe, Coleridge and Hugo abound in his exploration of the beauty of poverty and low life, the ever-threatening cloud of crime and the lure of the tale of the seafarer. He writes of writing, something I strain to find in novels when I long to hear the author in the voice of the narrator or a lead character. A poet need not hid behind such veils. To quote at length from The Flask (a poem that evokes Proust as a neurologist):

"Some scents can permeate all substances --
even glass seems porous to their power.
Opening an Oriental chest
once the reluctant locks are pried apart.

or an armoire in some abandoned house
acrid with the dust of time itself,
may yield a musty flask that keeps t faith ;
out of it leapsa returning soul - live!

... like a fetid Lazarus rending is shroud,
the corpse of an old passion stirs and wakes,
spectral and rancid, charnel and charming still!

So it will be with me when i lie lost
to living memory, a used-up flask
tossed in a grim armoire, tarnished and cracked ..."

What an inspiration to keep the computer nigh at night, to write down the poetry of midnight, rather than the book reviews of seven o'clock.