The Swan, Poem by Charles Baudelaire

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

To Victor Hugo.

Andromache, I think of you! This little river,
Poor and sad mirror where once shone
The immense majesty of your widow’s sorrows,
This lying Simois that grows with your tears,

Has suddenly fertilized my fertile memory,
As I was crossing the new Carrousel.
The old Paris is no more (the shape of a city
Changes faster, alas! than a mortal’s heart);

I see only in my mind all that camp of shacks,
Those heaps of rough-hewn capitals and shafts,
The weeds, the big blocks greened by the water in puddles,
And, glittering in the windowpanes, the confused bric-a-brac.

There once spread out a menagerie;
There I saw, one morning, at the hour when beneath the cold
And clear skies work awakens, when the refuse cart
Drives a dark hurricane through the silent air,

A swan that had escaped from its cage,
And, with its webbed feet scraping the dry pavement,
Dragged its white plumage over the rough ground.
Near a waterless stream the creature, opening its beak,

Nervously bathed its wings in the dust,
And said, its heart full of its beautiful native lake:
“Water, when will you rain? when will you thunder, lightning?”
I see this wretch, strange and fatal myth,

Toward the sky sometimes, like Ovid’s man,
Toward the sky ironic and cruelly blue,
On its convulsive neck stretching its eager head,
As if it were addressing reproaches to God!

Paris changes! but nothing in my melancholy
Has moved! new palaces, scaffolding, blocks,
Old suburbs, everything becomes allegory for me,
And my dear memories are heavier than rocks.

So before this Louvre an image oppresses me:
I think of my great swan, with its mad gestures,
Like the exiled, ridiculous and sublime,
And gnawed by a desire without truce! and then of you,

Andromache, fallen from the arms of a great husband,
Vile cattle, under the hand of the superb Pyrrhus,
Bent in ecstasy beside an empty tomb;
Widow of Hector, alas! and wife of Helenus!

I think of the negress, emaciated and consumptive,
Tramping in the mud, and seeking, with haggard eye,
The absent coconut palms of superb Africa
Behind the immense wall of fog;

Of whoever has lost what is never found
Again, never! of those who drink their fill of tears
And suckle sorrow like a good she-wolf!
Of the skinny orphans withering like flowers!

Thus in the forest where my spirit exiles itself
An old Memory sounds with the full blast of the horn!
I think of the sailors forgotten on an island,
Of captives, of the vanquished!… of many others still!

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-swan-charles-baudelaire/