THE VENAL MUSE
by: Charles Baudelaire
- USE
of my heart, lover of palaces,
- When January comes with wind and sleet,
- During the snowy eve's long weariness,
- Will there be fire to warm thy violet feet?
-
- Wilt thou reanimate thy marble shoulders
- In the moon-beams that through the window fly?
- Or when thy purse dries up, thy palace moulders,
- Reap the far star-gold of the vaulted sky?
-
- For thou, to keep thy body to thy soul,
- Must swing a censor, wear a holy stole,
- And chaunt Te Deums with unbelief between.
-
- Or, like a starving mountebank, expose
- Thy beauty and thy tear-drowned smile to those
- Who wait thy jests to drive away thy spleen.
'The Venal Muse' is reprinted from
The Poems and Prose Poems of Charles Baudelaire. Ed. James
Huneker. New York: Brentano's, 1919. |
MORE POEMS BY CHARLES BAUDELAIRE |
|