Tonight is a Baudelaire night

Today was another one of those wishing there were more understanding sorts of days. It's a Baudelaire and grunge sort of day.

Here's one:

Rubens

Garden of Sloth, Lethe s fountainhead,
pillow of flesh where no dream is of love
but where life seethes and surges endlessly
like wind in heaven, sea within the sea;

Leonardo

A mirror somber in its distances
where charming angles with a mysterious
gentle smile appear beneath the shade
of pines and glaciers which enclose their realm;

Rembrandt

Sorry hospital echoing with sights,
adorned b one enormous crucifix,
where tearful prayers rise from excrement
and a sudden ray of winter sunlight falls;

Michelangelo

No man s land where every Hercules
becomes a Christ, where mighty phantoms rise
bolt upright from their graves and in the gloom
rend their shrouds by reaching out their hands;

Puget

Faun s impudence and a prize-fighter s rage,
jaundiced and weak, your great heart gorged with
that you could find the beauty in their crimes-pride
you, the convicts melancholy emperor;

Watteau

Festivities where many famous hearts
flutter like months as they go up in flame,
the chandeliers in this enchanted glade
cast a madness on the minuet;

Goya

Nightmare crammed with unfathomable things,
which roasting foetuses in a pan,
crones at a mirror served by naked girls
who straighten stockings to entice the Fiend;

Delacroix

Evil angles haunt this lake of blood
darkened b the green shade of the firs,
where under a stricken sky the trumpet-calls
like a fanfare by Weber fade away. . .

These blasphemies these ecstasies these cries,
these groans and curses, tears and Te Deums,
re-echo though a thousand labyrinths-
a holy opium for mortal hearts!
A thousand sentries pass the order on,
a cry repeated by a thousand messengers;
hunters shout it, lost in t he deep woods;
the beacon flares on a thousand citadels!
This, O Lord, is the best evidence
that we can offer our dignity,
this sob that swells from age to age and dies
out on the shore of Your eternity!


--
I see quite a few typos from the site I got it from. Too tired to really look over it right now.

Baudelaire nearly makes me cry when I read him. It's like he sees something wonderful and then he sees a hopelessness that blocks the wonderful. And when I read him I want to bolster those sad thoughts. We don't have to just get by, and suck up to living with suffering. But I know he already knows that it's not so bad. But it's so darned easy to be sucked in to the melancholy that is present in the world.