The best poems by Charles Baudelaire to share on WhatsApp

Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a French poet, essayist, art critic and translator. He is considered one of the greatest exponents of symbolism and the first “cursed poet”a concept taken up by the writer Paul Verlaine to describe those who live a bohemian life full of excess.

He lived almost all his life in Paris, the city where he enrolled in the Faculty of Law and began the bohemian life. During that time he met the prostitute Sarah “Louchette”, who contracted the disease syphilisfor which he would die in 1867.

Baudelaire’s influences were Edgar Allan Poe, Théophile Gautier AND Joseph de Maistre. In 1856, the poet sold a series of poems to the publisher Poulet-Malassis under the title The Flowers of Evilwhich was published a year later and brought scandals, censorship and complaints for “offending public morality and good customs”.

Despite the fine and the court’s attempt to suppress the work, it was republished in 1861 with 35 unpublished texts.

The best poems of the writer Charles Baudelaire

1) Posthumous remorse

“When you have fallen asleep, my dark beauty, at the bottom of a tomb made of black marble, and when your only bedroom and abode is a damp pantheon and a hollow tomb; when the stone, sinking your frightened breast and the your torso relaxed by a delicious indifference, and your torso relaxed by a delicious indifference, and may your feet travel your eventful career, the grave, confidant of my infinite dream (for the grave will always understand the poet), in those long nights where sleep is proscribed, he will say to you: “What does it profit you, incomplete courtesan, to have never known what the dead cry?”

—And the worm will gnaw at your skin like remorse.”

2) Allegory

“This is a woman with round hips who lets her hair dip in wine. The claws of love, like granite. She laughs at death and depravity, and despite her strong power of destruction, the two respected each other until now, in truth, of his tall and firm body the haughty majesty.

Walk like a goddess and take care of the sultana, try the Mohammedan faith please. And when she opens her arms, her sovereign breasts claim the gaze of all human beings.

She knows, she knows, O sterile girl! It is necessary, despite the unclean crowd, that the beauty of the body is a sublime gift that ensures the forgiveness of every infamy.

She ignores hell and purgatory, and for this reason, when her time comes, she will look death in the face in such a difficult moment, like a child: without hatred, without remorse.

3) Obsession

“Great forests, you scare me like those cathedrals; you scream like an organ; and in our cursed hearts, halls of eternal mourning where ancient death rattles vibrate, the echoes of your De profundis respond.

I hate you, Ocean! Your leaps and your tumults, my spirit finds them in him; I hear that bitter laugh of the defeated man, full of sobs and insults, in the enormous laughter of the sea.

How I would like you, oh night! Without those stars whose light speaks a known language! Because I look for the void, the black and the naked!

But the darkness itself is a canvas where the disappeared beings with familiar looks live, appearing in thousands from my eyes.”

4) Hymn to beauty

“Do you come from the deep sky or emerge from the abyss, Beauty? Your infernal and divine gaze confusingly reverses benefit and crime, and you can, therefore, be compared to wine.

Contain the sunset and the dawn in your gaze; you spread perfumes like a stormy afternoon; Your kisses are a filter and your mouth an amphora that make the hero lazy and the child brave.

Do you rise from the black abyss or descend from the stars? The enchanted Fate follows your skirts like a dog; You sow joy and misfortune at random, and you rule everything and are responsible for nothing,

You walk on the dead, Bella, whom you mock; Of your jewels, Horror is not the least fascinating, and Death, among your most expensive amulets, dances lovingly on your proud belly.

The dazzled ephemeral marches towards you, candle, crackles, burns and says: Let us bless this torch! The lover, panting, bent over her beauty, has the appearance of a dying man caressing her tomb.

Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty! Huge, horrible, naive monster! What if your look, your smile, your foot opened the door for me towards an infinity that I love and have never known?

From Satan or from God, what does it matter? Angel or Siren, who cares, – velvet-eyed fairy, rhythm, perfume, splendor, oh my only queen! – is the universe less horrible and the moments less burdensome?

5) The abyss

“​Pascal had his abyss that moved with him. -Everything is an abyss, oh, the action, the dreams, the desires, the words, and my hair that rises suddenly sometimes feels the wind of terror.

Below, above, in everything, on the beach, in the depths, in the silence, in the subjugating and horrible space… In my deep nights God expertly traces a great multi-uniform and implacable nightmare.

I am afraid of sleep as of a wide chasm filled with a vague horror, which leads I know not where; I contemplate the infinite in all the windows;

My spirit, always obsessed with vertigo, envies the insensitivity of nothingness. -Ah, continue to get confused between Being and Numbers!”