Spleen
Charles Baudelaire 1821 (Paris) – 1867 (Paris)
I'm like the king of a rain-country, rich
but sterile, young but with an old wolf's itch,
one who escapes Fénelon's apologues,
and kills the day in boredom with his dogs;
nothing cheers him, darts, tennis, falconry,
his people dying by the balcony;
the bawdry of the pet hermaphrodite
no longer gets him through a single night;
his bed of fleur-de-lys becomes a tomb;
even the ladies of the court, for whom
all kings are beautiful, cannot put on
shameful enough dresses for this skeleton;
the scholar who makes his gold cannot invent
washes to cleanse the poisoned element;
even in baths of blood, Rome's legacy,
our tyrants' solace in senility,
we cannot warm up his shot corpse, whose food
is syrup-green Lethean ooze, not blood.
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 39 sec read
- 51 Views
Quick analysis:
Scheme | AABBCCDDEEFGHIBCJK |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 738 |
Words | 128 |
Stanzas | 1 |
Stanza Lengths | 18 |
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"Spleen" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 19 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/5003/spleen>.
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