EXOTIC PERFUME

by: Charles Baudelaire

      HEN with closed eyes in autumn's eves of gold
      I breathe the burning odours of your breast,
      Before my eyes the hills of happy rest
      Bathed in the sun's monotonous fires, unfold.
       
      Islands of Lethe where exotic boughs
      Bend with their burden of strange fruit bowed down,
      Where men are upright, maids have never grown
      Unkind, but bear a light upon their brows.
       
      Led by that perfume to these lands of ease,
      I see a port where many ships have flown
      With sails outwearied of the wandering seas;
       
      While the faint odours from green tamarisks blown,
      Float to my soul and in my senses throng,
      And mingle vaguely with the sailor's song.

'Exotic Perfume' is reprinted from The Poems and Prose Poems of Charles Baudelaire. Ed. James Huneker. New York: Brentano's, 1919.

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