T. R. Smith, comp. Poetica Erotica: Rare and Curious Amatory Verse. 1921–22.
Baudelaire to His Love
By Joseph T. Shipley (18931988)(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 |