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Charles Baudelaire: Charles Baudelaire Poems

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YOU'D TAKE THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE TO BED WITH YOU

Charles Baudelaire

You'd take the entire universe to bed with you,
I think, just out of boredom, you lecherous, idle shrew!
You need, to keep your teeth sound, exercise your jaws,
Daily, for dinner, some new heart between your paws!
Your eyes, all lighted up like shops, like public fairs,
How insolent they are! — as if their power were theirs
Indeed! — this borrowed power, this Beauty, you direct
And use, whose law, however, you do not suspect.
Unwholesome instrument for health, O deaf machine
And blind, fecund in tortures! — how is it you have not seen,
You drinker of the world's blood, your mirrored loveliness
Blench and recoil? how is it you feel no shame? confess:
Has never, then, this evil's very magnitude
Caused you to stagger? — you, who think yourself so shrewd
In evil? — seeing how Nature, patient and abstruse —
O Woman, Queen of Sins, Vile Animal, — has made use
Of you, to mould a genius? — employed you all this time?
O muddy grandeur! — ignominy ironic and sublime!