THE DANCE OF DEATH
by: Charles Baudelaire
- ARRYING
bouquet, and handkerchief, and gloves,
- Proud of her height as when she lived, she moves
- With all the careless and high-stepping grace,
- And the extravagant courtesan's thin face.
-
- Was slimmer waist e'er in a ball-room wooed?
- Her floating robe, in royal amplitude,
- Falls in deep folds around a dry foot, shod
- With a bright flower-like shoe that gems the sod.
-
- The swarms that hum about her collar-bones
- As the lascivious streams caress the stones,
- Conceal from every scornful jest that flies,
- Her gloomy beauty; and her fathomless eyes
-
- Are made of shade and void; with flowery sprays
- Her skull is wreathed artistically, and sways,
- Feeble and weak, on her frail vertebrae.
- O charm of nothing decked in folly! they
-
- Who laugh and name you a Caricature,
- They see not, they whom flesh and blood allure,
- The nameless grace of every bleached, bare bone,
- That is most dear to me, tall skeleton!
-
- Come you to trouble with your potent sneer
- The feast of Life! or are you driven here,
- To Pleasure's Sabbath, by dead lusts that stir
- And goad your moving corpse on with a spur?
-
- Or do you hope, when sing the violins,
- And the pale candle-flame lights up our sins,
- To drive some mocking nightmare far apart,
- And cool the flame hell lighted in your heart?
-
- Fathomless well of fault and foolishness!
- Eternal alembic of antique distress!
- Still o'er the curved, white trellis of your sides
- The sateless, wandering serpent curls and glides.
-
- And truth to tell, I fear lest you should find,
- Among us here, no lover to your mind;
- Which of these hearts beat for the smile you gave?
- The charms of horror please none but the brave.
-
- Your eyes' black gulf, where awful broodings stir,
- Brings giddiness; the prudent reveller
- Sees, while a horror grips him from beneath,
- The eternal smile of thirty-two white teeth.
-
- For he who has not folded in his arms
- A skeleton, nor fed on graveyard charms,
- Recks not of furbelow, or paint, or scent,
- When Horror comes the way that Beauty went.
-
- O irresistible, with fleshless face,
- Say to these dancers in their dazzled race:
- "Proud lovers with the paint above your bones,
- Ye shall taste death, musk scented skeletons!
-
- Withered Antinoüs, dandies with plump faces,
- Ye varnished cadavers, and grey Lovelaces,
- Ye go to lands unknown and void of breath,
- Drawn by the rumour of the Dance of Death.
-
- From Seine's cold quays to Ganges' burning stream,
- The mortal troupes dance onward in a dream;
- They do not see, within the opened sky,
- The Angel's sinister trumpet raised on high.
-
- In every clime and under every sun,
- Death laughs at ye, mad mortals, as ye run;
- And oft perfumes herself with myrrh, like ye
- And mingles with your madness, irony!"
'The Dance of Death' is reprinted
from The Poems and Prose Poems of Charles Baudelaire.
Ed. James Huneker. New York: Brentano's, 1919. |
MORE POEMS BY CHARLES BAUDELAIRE |
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