Spleen: I am like the king of a rainy land

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

I am like the king of a rainy land,
Wealthy, but powerless, young and yet very old,
Who, despising the bowings of his tutors,
Is bored with his dogs as with other beasts.
Nothing can cheer him, neither game nor falcon,
Nor his people dying before the balcony.
Of the favorite jester the grotesque ballad
No longer distracts the brow of this cruel invalid;
His bed adorned with fleurs-de-lis turns into a tomb,
And the ladies-in-waiting, for whom every prince is handsome,
No longer know how to find an indecent toilette
To draw a smile from this young skeleton.
The scholar who makes gold for him has never been able
To root out from his being the corrupted element,
And in those blood baths that come to us from the Romans,
And which in their old days the mighty remember,
He could not warm this dazed corpse
Where the green water of Lethe flows instead of blood.

Charles Baudelaire

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