Music
- Music
Music often carries me away like a sea!Toward my pale star,Beneath a ceiling of mist or in a vast sky,I cast anchor;
My chest a bowsprit and lungs billowingLike sails,I scale the back of waves gatheringAs night drops its veil;
I feel all the passions of a strickenVessel vibrating inside me;The fair wind, the tempest and its convulsions
Upon the immense gulf rock me.At other times, becalmed, great mirrorOf my despair! [End Page 113]
Charles Baudelaire (1821-67), a preeminent nineteenth-century French poet, translator, and critic, published one collection of poems during his lifetime, the highly controversial and immensely influential Les Fleurs du mal (1857); a posthumous compilation, Le Spleen de Paris (1869), explores the form of prose poetry. Baudelaire also translated several works of Edgar Allan Poe into French, and these translations are widely read to this day.
John Kinsella's most recent book of poetry is Jam Tree Gully (Norton, 2011). He is a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University.
