T. R. Smith, comp. Poetica Erotica: Rare and Curious Amatory Verse. 1921–22.
Baudelaire to His Love
By Joseph T. Shipley (1893–1988)(1922) LUXURIOUS languid tiger-lily, swaying | |
| Unconcerned, my lips are burned with the kiss | |
| You waft me, my head turned, and I swoon with bliss. | |
| Out of the anguish of your arms I’m praying | |
| That life shall end with this. | 5 |
| You are my memory of Egyptian suns | |
| When I adored the phallic pyramids | |
| And found you couched beside the Sphinx, that bids | |
| Beware. Frantic and vain my dream that once | |
| Love seeped through drowsy lids. | 10 |
| Where no gods be, man makes his god, and you | |
| Are god or devil fashioned for my woe; | |
| From you my pangs and parlous pleasures flow; | |
| Would I had strength to be blasphemous, untrue, | |
| Would I could bid you go! | 15 |
| But all a hemisphere whirls in the tress | |
| You shake at me; imprisoned there I dwell. | |
| Its secret dreads I do not dare to tell; | |
| It is my paradise—ah! who will bless | |
| Me with the gift of hell! | 20 |
| And you have loved before—if the flaming passion | |
| That roars through you to what it shall consume, | |
| Be love—and I would wring an awful doom | |
| On those who held you first, and I would fashion | |
| Their straight abysmal tomb. | 25 |
| There I would bid you wander, calling, calling | |
| The ghosts of those with whom your frenzy played | |
| Discarding (Were you ever an untried maid?) | |
| I would engulf you there. Run blindly, falling!— | |
| But that I am afraid. | 30 |
| And fear is new to me; I fear and wonder; | |
| I prick my flesh with fear to feel it squirm. | |
| I grasp you, quivering; I hold you firm; | |
| And when the ground I trample heaves with thunder | |
| I hail my end, the worm. | 35 |
| And once, you said the brat was mine. Ill-fated! | |
| Whelped of a dastard and a dusky whore. | |
| Through what dives shall it crawl? upon what floor | |
| Lick up perversion? Are new sins created | |
| That it may cry for more? | 40 |
| I loved my mother once; the thought lurks ever | |
| Somewhere, redeeming; I am not wholly gone. | |
| What if my life be but the cross laid on? | |
| But he will find no respite, surcease never; | |
| All suns and sins are wan. | 45 |
| There was a time when mad suns out of me | |
| Lighted and whirled a universe untold, | |
| Whose realms were henna-spiced, whose maidens bold; | |
| I have burned eons; there is naught to see; | |
| I whirl in endless cold. | 50 |
| If out of time and space you have conceived | |
| A garden of luxuriant delight | |
| Where I am rooted in you, and my plight | |
| Flowers in your laughter, still you are bereaved | |
| By the noxious breath of night. | 55 |
| Out of your menace spring exotic blooms, | |
| Gnarled morbid growths and leering venomed vines, | |
| And you the unholy temptress that entwines | |
| Where flickering maudlin sunlights blotch our glooms | |
| And my soul pants and pines. | 60 |
| And in that garden I have set a shrine | |
| Where I am poet, warrior, and priest, | |
| Know, kill, create; my senses are increased | |
| Beyond love’s evil; passion’s bread and wine | |
| Is my ecstatic feast. | 65 |
| I watch the incense pouring through that skull, | |
| And those are chimneys now that once were eyes, | |
| And all is fetid I could ever prize, | |
| And a transcendent glory now is dull | |
| And even evil dies. | 70 |
| We can forget time but by using it; | |
| And pleasure sizzles drearily; the clod— | |
| Knowing creation is the fall of God— | |
| Stumbles through blindness to the heart of wit, | |
| And my numbed senses nod. | 75 |
| Voluptuousness is circling cruelty | |
| Burning like heat and cold; I must live fast, | |
| Tasting each joy lest that joy be the last: | |
| A gust from the wing of imbecility | |
| Has warningly swept past. | 80 |
| I wake anew to pangs of eager lust; | |
| I am enhungered for forgotten food; | |
| The world is straitlaced; I am frankly lewd: | |
| In universal horror and disgust | |
| I shall find solitude. | 85 |