Blizzards and BLTs

best served with pepper jack cheese and half an apple (or a scarf, depending).

Today: an angry lake, Oscar Wilde, and Charles Baudelaire.

A bit of poetry from each:


*****

*****

*****

*****

*****

*****

and the final couplets of Wilde's 62. [Greek]

Yet I am not sorry that I loved you—ah! what else had I a boy to do,—
For the hungry teeth of time devour, and the silent-footed years pursue.

Rudderless, we drift athwart a tempest, and when once the storm of youth is past,
Without lyre, without lute or chorus, Death a silent pilot comes at last.

And within the grave there is no pleasure, for the blind-worm battens on the root,
And Desire shudders into ashes, and the tree of Passion bears no fruit.

Ah! what else had I to do but love you, God’s own mother was less dear to me,
And less dear the Cytheræan rising like an argent lily from the sea.

I have made my choice, have lived my poems, and, though youth is gone in wasted days,
I have found the lover’s crown of myrtle better than the poet’s crown of bays.

*****
and William Aggeler's translation of Baudelaire's "The Broken Bell"---or as Aggeler titles it:

The Flawed Bell

It is bitter and sweet on winter nights
To listen by the fire that smokes and palpitates,
To distant souvenirs that rise up slowly
At the sound of the chimes that sing in the fog.

Happy is the bell which in spite of age
Is vigilant and healthy, and with lusty throat
Faithfully sounds its religious call,
Like an old soldier watching from his tent!

I, my soul is flawed, and when, a prey to ennui,
She wishes to fill the cold night air with her songs,
It often happens that her weakened voice

Resembles the death rattle of a wounded man,
Forgotten beneath a heap of dead, by a lake of blood,
Who dies without moving, striving desperately.

*****
Perhaps I should qualify all of this with some clever exegesis, but I can only say that I'm enjoying the reading, which is new territory for me. Like grocery shopping for one, like eating off a schedule of breakfast in the morning, lunch at midday, and dinner in the evening, like drinking wine in the afternoon and exercising to Sarah Jarosz at night. Indeed: "come down off the cross / we could use the wood" (from "Come On Up to the House" -- thx, Luke, for the introduction; truly, it was sudden love).

*****