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Passionate lovers and austere scholars
Both love, in their ripe season,
The powerful and gentle cats, pride of the house,
Who like them are chilly and like them stay home.
Friends of science and of sensual pleasure,
They seek silence and the horror of darkness;
Erebus would have taken them as his funeral steeds,
If they could bend their pride to servitude.
As they dream they take on the noble poses
Of great sphinxes stretched out in the depths of solitudes,
Who seem to fall asleep in an endless dream;
Their fertile loins are full of magic sparks,
And particles of gold, like fine sand,
Vaguely star their mystic pupils.
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-the-cats-charles-baudelaire/