To Her Who Is Too Gay

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

Your head, your gesture, your air
Are beautiful as a beautiful landscape;
Laughter plays on your face
Like a fresh wind in a clear sky.

The sorrowful passerby whom you brush against
Is dazzled by the health
That springs like a brightness
From your arms and your shoulders.

The resounding colors
With which you strew your dresses
Cast into the minds of poets
The image of a ballet of flowers.

These mad dresses are the emblem
Of your motley mind;
Mad woman of whom I am mad,
I hate you as much as I love you!
Sometimes in a beautiful garden
Where I dragged my atony,
I felt, like an irony,
The sun tearing my breast;

And spring and greenery
So humiliated my heart,
That I punished on a flower
The insolence of Nature.

Thus I would like, one night,
When the hour of voluptuousness sounds,
Toward the treasures of your person,
Like a coward, to crawl without a sound,

To chastise your joyful flesh,
To bruise your forgiven breast,
And to make on your astonished flank
A wound broad and deep,

And, vertiginous sweetness!
Through these new lips,
More dazzling and more beautiful,
To infuse my venom into you, my sister!

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-to-her-who-is-too-gay-charles-baudelaire/