Poems and Baudelaire Flowers/Music

by Charles Baudelaire

MUSIC

Oft Music, as it were some moving mighty sea,
Bears me toward my pale
Star: in clear space, or ’neath a vaporous canopy
On-floating, I set sail.


With heaving chest which strains forward, and lungs outblown,
I climb the ridgèd steeps
Of those high-pilèd clouds which ’thwart the night are thrown,
Veiling its starry deeps.


I suffer all the throes, within my quivering form,
Of a great ship in pain,
Now a soft wind, and now the writhings of a storm

Upon the vasty main
Rock me: at other times a death-like calm, the bare
Mirror of my despair.