The Punishment of Pride

Poem by Charles Baudelaire Collection The Flowers of EvilThemes ReligionPeriod 19th century

In those marvelous times when Theology
Flourished with the most sap and energy,
They tell how one day a doctor of the greatest,
— After having forced indifferent hearts;
Having stirred them in their black depths;
After having crossed toward celestial glories
Strange paths unknown to himself,
Where perhaps only the pure Spirits had come, —
Like a man mounted too high, seized with panic,
Cried out, carried away by a satanic pride:
“Jesus, little Jesus! I have pushed you very high!
But, if I had wanted to attack you at the flaw
Of the armor, your shame would equal your glory,
And you would be nothing more than a ridiculous fetus!”

Immediately his reason left him.
The splendor of that sun veiled itself in crepe;
All chaos rolled into that intelligence,
Once a living temple, full of order and opulence,
Beneath whose ceilings so much pomp had shone.
Silence and night settled within him,
As in a vault whose key is lost.
From then on he was like the beasts of the street,
And, when he went along seeing nothing, across
The fields, without distinguishing summers from winters,
Filthy, useless and ugly as a worn-out thing,
He was the joy and the laughingstock of children.

Charles Baudelaire

Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.

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