Obsession, Poem by Charles Baudelaire

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

Great woods, you frighten me like cathedrals;
You howl like the organ; and in our cursed hearts,
Chambers of eternal mourning where old death rattles vibrate,
Echoes of your De profundis respond.

I hate you, Ocean! your leaps and your tumults,
My spirit finds them in itself; that bitter laugh
Of defeated man, full of sobs and insults,
I hear it in the enormous laugh of the sea.

How you would please me, O night! without those stars
Whose light speaks a familiar language!
For I seek the void, and the black and the bare!

But the shadows are themselves canvases
Where live, springing from my eye by thousands,
Departed beings with familiar gazes.

Charles Baudelaire

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

Text published on Poésies 123: https://www.poesies123.com/en/poem-obsession-charles-baudelaire/