BENEDICTION Poem by CHARLES BAUDELAIRE book FLOWERS OF EVIL

 

Charles Baudelaire
Benediction

( In French: Bénédiction )

 

Poem from book:

Baudelaire – The flowers of evil

 

French literature – poetry

Full text translated into English

 

Benediction is composed of nineteen quatrains written in regular Alexandrine, or twelve-syllable, lines with an alternating abab rhyme scheme. Charles Baudelaire’s choice of this traditional verse form contrasts with his innovative use of imagery that was to inspire a new symbolic form of expression in French poetry.

While the poem uses the third person, the poet it describes clearly represents Baudelaire himself. The autobiographical elements, however, are generalized enough for the poet to represent at the same time the romantic archetype of the poet as an inspired figure misunderstood by society.

Below the text of the poem by Charles Baudelaire: “Benediction” translated into English.

By clicking here you can read the poem by Charles Baudelaire: “Bénédiction” (Benediction) in the original French language.

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Charles Baudelaire All the poems > here

 

Charles Baudelaire

Benediction

 

French poetry

Full text translated into English

 

When, by an edict of the powers supreme,

The Poet in this bored world comes to be,

His daunted mother, eager to blaspheme,

Rages to God, who looks down piteously:

 

-‘Rather than have this mockery to nurse

Why not a nest of snakes for me to bear!

And may that night of fleeting lust be cursed,

When I conceived my penance, unaware!

 

Since from all women you chose me to shame,

To be disgusting to my grieving spouse,

And since I can’t just drop into the flames

Like an old love-note, this misshapen mouse,

 

l turn your hate that overburdens me

Toward the damned agent of your spiteful doom,

And I will twist this miserable tree

So its infected buds will never bloom!’

 

She swallows thus her hatred’s foaming spit

And, never grasping the divine design,

She makes herself within Gehenna’s pit

The pyre suited to a mother’s crimes.

 

Still, with an angel guarding secretly,

The misfit child grows drunk on sunny air;

In all he drinks or eats in ecstasy

He finds sweet nectar and ambrosia there.

 

Free as a bird, he plays with clouds and wind,

Sings of the Passion with enraptured joy;

Tending his pilgrimage, his Guardian

Must weep to see the gladness of the boy.

 

Those he would love watch him with jaundiced eye,

Or, growing bold with his tranquillity,

Look for a certain way to make him cry,

Testing on him their own ferocity.

 

In bread and wine intended for his mouth

They muddle filthy spit with dirt and ash;

Hypocrites, all that he touches they throw out,

And blame their feet for walking in his path.

 

His woman cries to all the countryside:

‘Since he has found me worthy to adore

I’ll let the heathen idols be my guide

And gild myself, as they have done before;

 

I’ll sate myself with incense, myrrh, and nard,

With genuflections, meats and wines galore,

To prove I can in that admiring heart

Laughingly claim the homage due the Lord!

 

I’ll set on him my frail, determined hand

When I am bored with this blasphemous farce;

My fingemails, like harpies’ talons, can

Claw out a bloody pathway to his heart.

 

I’ll dig the bright red heart out of his breast,

A pitiful and trembling baby bird;

To satisfy the dog I like the best

I’ll toss it to him, with a scornful word!’

 

Toward Heaven, where he sees a throne of gold,

The Poet lifts his arms in piety,

And brilliant flashes from his lucid soul

Block from his sight the people’s cruelty:

 

– ‘Be praised, my God, who gives us suffering

As remedy for our impurities,

And as the best and purest nurturing

To fit the strong for holy ecstasies!

 

I know in Heaven there’s a place for me

Kept for the poet in celestial zones,

And that I’ll feast throughout eternity

With Virtues, Powers, Dominations, Thrones.

 

Man’s sorrow is a nobleness, I trust,

Untouchable by either earth or he;

I know to weave my mystic crown I must

Tax a the times, the universe as we.

 

But treasure lost from old Palmyra’s wealth,

The unknown metals, pearls out of the sea,

Can’t equal, though you mounted them yourself,

This diadem of dazzling clarity,

 

Since it is perfect luminosity,

Drawn from the holy hearth of primal rays,

Of which men’s eyes, for a their majesty,

Are only mournful mirrors, dark and crazed!’

..

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Charles Baudelaire – Poem Benediction

In original French: Bénédiction

From book: The flowers of evil

French poetry

Full Text translated into English

 

C. Baudelaire Bénédiction original text in French > here

 

 

Charles Baudelaire All poems > here

 

 

Charles Baudelaire

Charles Pierre Baudelaire (April 9, 1821 – August 31, 1867) was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe.

His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the 19th century. Baudelaire’s highly original style of prose-poetry influenced a whole generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé among many others.

He is credited with coining the term “modernity” (modernité) to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and art’s responsibility to capture that experience. (wikipedia)

 

Baudelaire Works

 

Salon de 1845, 1845

Salon de 1846, 1846

La Fanfarlo, 1847

Les Fleurs du mal, 1857

Les paradis artificiels, 1860

Réflexions sur Quelques-uns de mes Contemporains, 1861

Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne, 1863

Curiosités Esthétiques, 1868

L’art romantique, 1868

Le Spleen de Paris, 1869

Oeuvres Posthumes et Correspondance Générale, 1887–1907

Fusées, 1897

Mon Coeur Mis à Nu, 1897

Oeuvres Complètes, 1922–53 (19 vols.)

Mirror of Art, 1955

The Essence of Laughter, 1956

Curiosités Esthétiques, 1962

The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, 1964

Baudelaire as a Literary Critic, 1964

Arts in Paris 1845–1862, 1965

Selected Writings on Art and Artist, 1972

Selected Letters of Charles Baudelaire, 1986

Twenty Prose Poems, 1988

Critique d’art; Critique musicale, 1992

(Wikipedia)

 

 

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