Parisian Dream, Poem by Charles Baudelaire

To Constantin Guys

Of that terrible landscape,
Such as no mortal ever saw,
This morning still the image,
Vague and distant, delights me.

Sleep is full of miracles!
By a strange caprice,
I had banished from those spectacles
The irregular vegetable,

And, painter proud of my genius,
I savored in my painting
The intoxicating monotony
Of metal, marble, and water.

Babel of stairways and arcades,
It was an infinite palace,
Full of basins and cascades
Falling into dull or burnished gold;

And heavy cataracts,
Like curtains of crystal,
Hung suspended, dazzling,
On walls of metal.

No trees, but colonnades
Surrounded the sleeping pools,
Where gigantic naiads,
Like women, gazed at themselves.

Sheets of water spread, blue,
Between rose and green quays,
For millions of leagues,
Toward the confines of the universe;

There were unheard-of stones
And magic waves; there were
Immense mirrors dazzled
By all that they reflected!

Careless and taciturn,
Ganges, in the firmament,
Poured the treasure of their urns
Into diamond gulfs.

Architect of my enchantments,
I made, at my will,
Under a tunnel of gems
Pass a conquered ocean;

And everything, even the color black,
Seemed polished, clear, iridescent;
The liquid set its glory
In the crystallized ray.

No star besides, no vestiges
Of sun, even at the bottom of the sky,
To illuminate these prodigies,
Which shone with a personal fire!

And over these moving marvels
Hovered (terrible novelty!
All for the eye, nothing for the ears!)
An eternity of silence.

On reopening my eyes full of flame
I saw the horror of my hovel,
And felt, returning to my soul,
The sting of cursed cares;

The clock with funereal accents
Brutally struck noon,
And the sky poured darkness
On the sad, numb world.

Charles Baudelaire

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

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