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Morton Marcus: Good evening, everybody, this is Mort Marcus and welcome to the Poetry Show with the strings of the mad ball in the background from the "Symphonie Fantastique" by Hector Berlioz, marking almost the exact time, certainly, the

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wild atmosphere of tonight's poet. Tonight we have the birthday celebration of Charles Baudelaire, the great French poet of the middle of the 19th century, who was born on April 9th, 1821, one hundred sixty-six years ago, this year, and who

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was maybe the first modern poet and I will explain what I mean by that later on. And tonight, I thought we would just read some very plain, unadorned, prose versions of Baudelaire's poetry, though, it will not seem like prose. And so tonight, a

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celebration of the birthday of one of the most original and also one of the most shocking poets in the French language, or any other language, Charles Baudelaire. Charles Baudelaire was born on April the ninth, 1821. And his

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mother remarried seven years afterwards. He was very close to his mother. His father was sixty-one when he married a twenty-six year old woman. His father had been a soldier from Napoleon and then a very important diplomat in

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post-revolutionary France. And then the mother married a professional soldier and from that point on, so family diaries reveal, Baudelaire's personality, which is a very warm, affectionate child, began to change. He began to be

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withdrawn, he began to be hostile, and he began to isolate himself and concern himself with morbid things. Certainly, we can date from this time in his life the concern with excess, the concern with self-destructive uses of drugs, with actually

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living a life of complete desolution in Paris, which he came to do after his 21st birthday. He decided he would have no profession, he would not be a respectable member of the bourgeoisie. He would, in fact, make his money from writing. And

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though I will not say this again, it should be very clear from the beginning that not only is he a poet, but he wrote voluminously in prose and is one of the great art critics of the world. He is also the translator, which took him years

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to translate, of the works of Edgar Allan Poe, the American author, and shares with Edgar Allan Poe the love of a pure beauty, and that beauty being expressed in strangeness, even in grotesqueness, symbolizing the dual nature of reality that

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is angelic and demonic, or the beautiful, the ugly; the good, the evil. And his poems are modern first because they enter into not really a confessional mode, but they enter into a mode in which he lays bare the psyche of man, in which he investigates

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and brings for the first time in world literature those underlying thoughts, which are the thoughts of the unconscious. He did this in poetry that was very, very clear, very, very classical in the way it was written in closed verse, and

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which chose the exactly right word to say this. I'm going to start off with some very, very lovely little poems to give you a sense of the beauty of Baudelaire's sound. Here is a poem called:

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THE HARMONY OF THE EVENING or EVENING HARMONY, and it goes like this: Now comes the hour, when stirring on its stem, each flower exhales like a censer. Sounds and perfumes swirl in the

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evening air, all melancholy waltz and languidly sensuous vertigo. Each flower exhales like a censer. The violin quivers like a heart distressed, a melancholy waltz and languidly sensuous vertigo. The sky is sad and splendid like a great altar.

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The violin quivers like a heart distressed, a tender heart that hates the void. Vast and dark, the sky is splendid and sad like a great altar. The sun has drowned in its own congealing blood. Tender heart that hates the void, vast and dark, gathers

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each trace of the luminous past. The sun has drowned in its own congealing blood, the memory of you shines within me like a monster. Well, there are beautiful images there, but you can already hear

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the beginning of the sense of monstrous imagery. This is how we view the poet, and one of the things we should understand about him was he was looking for the exactly right metaphor, which would express what he wanted to say thematically.

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Well, the albatross is a very famous symbol of the bird of good luck, and when it flies aloft, it is beautiful to watch when one is at sea. But at the same time when it is on land, it is ungainly, its wings are too long, and it has a great deal of

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difficulty balancing itself. This seemed to Baudelaire a perfect example of the poet soaring aloft in inspiration, and then being forced to come to earth by his body and the world around him.

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THE ALBATROSS Often, for their amusements, sailors catch albatross, those vast birds of the sea. Indolent companions of their voyages that follow the ship gliding across the bitter depths. No sooner

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have the sailors stretch them out on the deck, then those kings of the sky, awkward and ashamed, let their long white wings trail painfully by their side, like oars. How ungainly, how contemptible, the winged traveler becomes. How laughable

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and graceless he, about a moment ago was so full of beauty. A sailor teases his beak with a pipe, another drags his foot to mimic the cripple who once soared through the air. The poet shares the fate of this prince of the clouds, who rejoices in

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the tempest, mocking the archer below. Exiled on Earth, an object of scorn, his giant wings impede him as he walks. Let me read a few more of these poems. Certainly one should read, "Correspondences." And this is another thing that he

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brought to poetry, which is a sense of the relation of things, how one associates one thing and gets an image for it, and it's the effortless movement from one association into another. So one of his important things is the use of psychology before the

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word ever knew of Freud, Freud still forty years away at this point. But here's how he talks about how things relate to each other in nature: Nature is a temple where living columns sometimes murmur

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indistinct words. There, man passes through forests of symbols that watch him with familiar eyes, like prolonged echoes that mingle in the distance, in a shadowy and profound unity, vast as night, and as the light of day,

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perfumes, colors, and sounds respond to one another. There are perfumes fresh as the bodies of children, sweet as oboe music, green as meadows. Others are corrupt, rich, and triumphant, having the expansion of things infinite, like amber,

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musk, benzoin, and frankincense, which sing the raptures of both spirit and of sense. Charles Baudelaire was a man who was obsessed with sin. He delved into all kinds of sin, both sexual, drug related, all kinds

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of philandering. He felt that that was the only way he could really experience life, he should not, he thought, cut himself off from life. So here is how he conceives a beauty again, another early poem, and it's a hymn to beauty and one

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can see this dichotomy in him in this poem. And what he loves to do, as with the albatross, he loves to personify, that is give human qualities to abstraction. So beauty is an abstraction, here he gives a personification to her and makes her a woman.

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Oh, beauty. Do you come from the deep heavens or do you rise from a bottomless pit? Your gaze, demonic and divine, deals out good deeds and crime together, and in this you resemble wine. Your eye contains the sunset and the dawn. You spread perfumes

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about like a stormy evening. Your kisses are a potion, your mouth an amphora. They make heroes cowards and children brave. Beauty, do you [unidentified] from the infernal pit. Well, do you descend from the stars? Bewitched destiny

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follows your skirts like a dog. Without discrimination, you sow the seed of joy and disasters, you govern all things but answer for none. You walk upon the dead, oh beauty, scorning them. Horror is not the least fascinating of your jewels.

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Murder, one of your most cherished trinkets, dances lustfully on your proud naval, a dazzled moth wings toward you its candle and sizzles in flames yet cries, "How blessed be this torch!" The quivering lover, outstretched on top of his

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beloved, looks like a dying man caressing his tomb. Whether you come from heaven or hell, oh beauty, huge, frightening, ingenuous monster, what does it matter? What does it matter so long as your eye, your smile, your foot, open to me the gate

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of an infinite which I love and have never known? Why does it matter if you come from Satan or from God? Angel or siren, velvet-eyed fairy, all rhythm, perfume and light, so long as you make the world less hideous and lighten the leaden hours.

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Well, Baudelaire is known as a great love poet. And his poems are extremely sensual, and I'm going to read them, two of them to you right now. When he was in Paris, he had a long love affair with a mulatto woman, which went on for eighteen years. She was a

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housekeeper and very, very loose morally, and she drove him to despair. And he seemed to enjoy the ecstasy with her as much as he enjoyed the despair. He loved pain, and yet he loved pleasure. Everything was a dichotomy to him. So here is a poem of his,

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one I really love, and it's a prose poem. It's one of the other things that he brought into poetry, and that was the prose poem. He is considered to be the father of the prose poem. He, as I said, he worked at rhymes, many of his poems are

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actually sonnets, but what he does in the prose poem is he relaxes, and he gives very intimate speculations on different areas of life in his prose poems, but they are gorgeous, and a lot of times extremely vivid. Here is the

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prose poem, "A Hemisphere In A Woman's Hair." And just listen to the beauty of associations in here, which makes this a modern poem, and how easily he moves from one association to another. Everything is based on the logic of the metaphor, and the exactly

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right phrase to express his feelings. A HEMISPHERE IN A WOMAN'S HAIR Let me breathe long the odor of your hair, and dip my whole face in it, as a parched man does in the water of a spring, and shake

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it in my hand like a perfumed handkerchief, so I might wave memories in the air. If you could but know all that I see, all that I can smell in hair here, in your hair. My soul floats away on perfume, as other men's do on music. Your hair

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contains an entire dream full of sails and rigging. It contains vast seas whose monsoons bear me away to enchanting climes, where space is more blue and more profound, where the air is redolent with the smell of fruits and leaves and the skin

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of sweating human beings. In the ocean of your hair I glimpse a harbor alive with sad sea songs, with hardy men of every race, and with ships of every trim outlining their delicate complex structures on a huge sky in which the everlasting heat

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reposes. In your hair's caresses I find again the languor of long hours, whiled away on a divan in a fine ship's berth, rocked to and fro by the harbor's gentle swell between the pots of flowers and the refreshing decanters. In your hair's

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burning hearth I breathe the fragrance of tobacco together with opium and sugar. In your hair's night I see the glittering infinitude of tropical skies. On your hair's downy shores, I am exalted by the confused aromas of tar and

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musk and coconut oil. Let me bite a while your ponderous black tresses. When I take your elastic, rebellious hair between my teeth, it's as though I were eating memories. Now, let me read one of- when the book came out in its first

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edition of 1857, the book I'm talking about, the Collected Poems of Charles Baudelaire, he only wrote one book of poems and the book is called, "Les Fleurs Du Mal," which means the "Flowers of Evil." And when it came out, Baudelaire was- the

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book was put out in thirteen hundred copies, and Baudelaire was brought to trial by the French government on charges of reveling in and exposing to others his absolute debauchery, and diving into sin. Therefore, he was corrupting the morality

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of the general populace. After the trial, which he was declared guilty and the public prosecutor demanded that he take several poems out of the book, in fact, six poems, and one of my favorites, believe it or not, is one of those poems, and I'm

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going to read it. It's a wonderful poem which is called, "Jewels." And I'm looking for it right now. And not finding it in my notes here, so I will very simply find it right there. JEWELS, and it's- again, you can see how they felt, he was

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exposing his licentiousness to the public. This is on his mulatto girlfriend and her name was Jeanne Duval, and he was with her from 1842 till around 1860. This is how he luxuriated in sensuality.

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My darling was naked and, knowing my heart, was dressed only in her sonorous jewelry, whose rich splendor gave her the triumphant air that Moorish slave women have in their daze of happiness. When, as it dances, it throws out its sharp

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mocking noise, that glittering world of metal and stone thrills me to ecstasy. And I madly love those things in which sound and light commingle. So she reclined and let herself be loved. And high on the divan she smiled for joy upon my love as deep and

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gentle as the sea which rose toward her as to a cliff. With her eyes intent on me, like a tame tigress, with a vague dreamy look, she tried this pose and that. And candidness and wantedness together gave a novel charm to her variations. Her

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arms and legs, her thighs and loins glisten like oil, rippling swan-like, passed before my clairvoyant and serene eyes. And her belly and her breasts, those clusters of fruit upon my vine, thrust themselves forward more alluring than the angels of evil

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to trouble the rest my soul had found and cast it down from the crystal rock whereon it was settled, calm and solitary. I thought I saw before me, united in a new pattern, Antiope's hips and a young boy's bust, so strongly did her narrow waist

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accentuate her groin. The rouge was superb on that wild, tawny complexion, and as the lamp had gone out and the hearth alone lit up the room now, each time it gave a sigh of fire it flowed like blood over her amber skin.

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Baudelaire- I guess what I should read before the break -- and we will come back and I will read poems of the city and then some of his great voyage poems -- Baudelaire says this about himself. When he invites the reader to listen to him in the

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first poem of the book, this is what has become the first poem of the book in the, "Fleurs Du Mal," what he did was he revised the, "Fleurs Du Mal," over and over again and attempted to put new poems into it, take old ones out, improve upon poems that

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were already in the book so that the, "Fleurs Du Mal," went through three editions. And the total output of his poetry in his lifetime was a hundred and sixty poems. It would not be until twenty years after his death that he would be

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celebrated and rediscovered mostly by the symbolists, people like Mallarmé, who would claim him to be their great spiritual father. Anyway, here we can begin to get to the sense of this man, the horror that he felt in his body, yet the love

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of it at the same time, these dichotomies, these paradoxes going on within him. He knew that he had to live in this world because living in this world was what life was all about. Yet, at the same time, he also yearned towards a beauty,

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remember the poem, "Hymns of Beauty," he yearned towards a beauty that would transcend the hideousness of both the mediocrity, the boredom, and the horror and evil that he found in this world. I think if we have any people of religious

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persuasion out there, what I am talking about is a man who was very definitely a Catholic. And when he died at the age of forty-six of brain damage, very possibly through syphilis, he called for a priest to give him final words. And it seems to me

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that as satanic as a lot of these poems seem, there is a yearning -- and I think I'll show that very definitely in the second half of this program -- towards a much purer life. But since he is human, he both contains the soul and the body.

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Anyway, here is his poem, which really is the first or should be the first poem in, "Fleurs Du Mal," and it's called: TO THE READER, OR: AU LECTEUR Ignorance, error, stupidity, and sin possess our souls and

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exercise or flesh. Habitually, we cultivate remorse as beggars entertain and nurse their lice. Our sins are stubborn. Cowards when contrite, we overpay confession with our pains. And when we're back again in human mire, vile tears we think will

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wash away our stains. Three-headed Satan in our cursed bed lulls us to sleep, a spirit over-kissed, until the precious metal of our will is vaporized. Oh, that cunning alchemists. Who but the devil pulls our waking strings, abominations lure us to

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their side. Each day we take another step to hell, descending through the stink unhorrified. Like an exhausted playboy who mouths and chews the martyred breast of an old withered whore. We steal in passing whatever joys we can, squeezing the

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dryest orange all the more. Packed in our brains, incestuous as worms, our demons celebrate in drunken gangs, and when we breathe, that hollow rasp is death, sliding invisibly down into our lungs. If the dull canvas of our wretched life is

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unembellished with such pretty wear as knives or poison, pyromania, rape, it is because our souls are too weak to dare. But in this den of jackals, monkeys, [unidentified], scorpions, buzzard, snakes, this paradise of filthy beasts that

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screech, howl, grobble, grunt in this menagerie of mankind's vise. There's one supremely hideous and impure, soft-spoken, not the type to cause a scene, he'll willingly make rubble of the earth and swallow up creation in a yawn. I mean

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boredom, who in his pipe dreams produces hangmen and real tears together. How well you know this fastidious monster, reader, hypocrite, reader, you, my double, my brother. We are reading the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, who was born

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on April 9th, 1821, and this is a birthday celebration for him. Let me go into two other kinds of poems he wrote. Cityscapes, that is he was a wonderful reporter of life in Paris and really brought the life of contemporary Paris of the 1850s

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especially to very, very vivid life in his poems and made much more of them. Here is a picture of himself and what he calls a landscape, I would call it a cityscape. The title is: PAYSAGE, which means landscape, and in translation by Vernon

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Watkins. I want, the more chastely to compose my poems, to sleep close to the sky, like the old astrologist and neighbor of steeples as I dream to attend to their grave anthems, carried

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away by the wind. Chin in my hands, from the height of my garrett, I'll discern the workshop that sings and that gossips in turn, the smokestacks, the steeples, those masts of the city and the great skies that forced the dreams of

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eternity. It is nice through the mists to see begin to glow the star in the darkening blue, the lamp at the window. The rivers of cold smoke ascending to the height, the moon with enchantment spending her pale light. I shall witness the

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springs, the summers, the falls. And when winter comes with monotonous snow falls, I shall close all around the shutters and lattices to build into the night my fairy palaces. And I'll dream of horizons, the blue of heaven controls, of gardens,

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fountains weeping in alabaster bowls, of kisses, of birds singing morning and night, and of all that's most childlike, that an idol has to give. The winter tumbles at my window vainly raging, grotesque, shall not cause me to lift my forehead

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from my desk, for I shall be absorbed in that this exquisitely still delight of evoking the spring with my pen, of wresting a sun from my own heart and in calm, drawing from my burning thoughts an atmosphere of balm.

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Let me read you one of my favorite poems of his, and it is one of the city poems. And it is called, "The Little Old Women." Oh, well, not in there. I thought it was and I'm pretty sure it is, okay on a branch. All right, it's not there. So,

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now looking for a book, which is right here. And I'm going to read this poem, it's rather lengthy, but I think it has very, very vivid imagery. And I think it will be very understandable by you at first hearing. And what's so beautiful

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about it, really, is that very simply it has not only vivid imagery, but it is very, very compassionate, and really gives a sense of people. So I'm going to read now poems in the cities that are also about people. And this is another thing that I

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love about Baudelaire. He never just takes off into that garden he says he wanted to in the last poem, but he is always concerned with people and very, very compassionately, though sometimes disgustedly, giving you a sense of that life.

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LITTLE OLD WOMAN In the twisting folds of old cities where everything, even horror, turns into magic, obeying my irresistible impulses, I spy on odd decrepid charming creatures. Let us love

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these disjointed freaks who once were women. Broken down monsters, hunched back or bent double, but they are still human souls. Under their tattered skirts and skimpy garments, they crawl along whipped by the malignant winds, trembling at

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the size of the buses thundering past them, clutching against their ribs like holy relics their little handbags embroidered with flowers or strange patterns. They trot along like puppets, or hobble like lame animals, or though

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they don't intend to, they do a kind of jig like puny bells swung by a merciless demon. Though they are falling to pieces, their eyes are as piercing as drills. They glint like holes where water sleeps at night. They have the divine eyes

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of little girls, full of wonder and laughing at anything shining. Have you ever noticed that many old women's coffins are almost as small as little children's. Cunning old death gives these similar coffins a strange and entrancing

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symbolism. When I catch a glimpse of a flimsy ghost passing through the swarming Parisian landscape, I always have the feeling that this frail creature is gently advancing towards her second cradle. Unless, turning my thoughts to

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geometry, as I see those incongruent limbs, I reflect on how often the carpenter has to vary the shape of the boxes, in which all those bodies are laid. Those eyes are the wells of a million tears, crucible spangled with cool metal. Those enigmatic

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eyes have compelling charms for whoever was suckled on the milk of austere misfortune. They're still enamored of some dead Frascati, priestess of Thalia, or alas, whose name is known only to the buried

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prompter. Illustrious beauty whom Tivoli once sheltered in her bloom, they all intoxicate me, these old women, but among these frail beings, there are those who turning their grief to honey have implored the devotion which lent them wings saying,

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"Almighty Hippogriff, bear me up to heaven." One whose homeland schooled her in misfortune, another who her husband overwhelmed with suffering, or she who through her child became a Madonna pierced to the heart. All have made a river with their

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tears. How many of these little old women I have followed. One of them, at the hour when the setting sun bloodens the sky with scarlet wounds, used to sit thoughtfully alone on a bench,

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listening to one of those recitals for the brass, with which the military sometimes flood our parks, and which, on those golden evenings when you feel yourself coming to life again, pour a certain heroism into the hearts of city folk.

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This woman, still upright, full of pride, and radiating a sense of discipline, eagerly used to drink in that lively warlike song making. Sometimes her eye would open like an old eagle's, and her marble brow looked as though shaped for a laurel

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crown. Thus, you pass on, stoical and uncomplaining, through the chaos of our living cities, mothers whose hearts are bleeding, courtesans and saints whose names were once on everybody's

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lips. You, who are grace itself, and you who are glory, nobody recognizes you now. A foul mouthed drunkard insults you as he goes by, with his mock advances, or some cowardly, despicable urchin dances mockingly at your heels. Ashamed

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to be alive, shriveled shadows, timorous and bent back, you hug the walls, and nobody takes his hat off to you. Oh, strangely faded ones. Oh, human wrecks, ripe for eternity. But I, who watch you tenderly from afar, with my uneasy eyes fixed on

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your tottering steps as though, what next, I were your father. Unknown to you, I enjoy secret pleasures. I watch your untutored passions flower, and dark or bright, I relive your vanished days. My manifold heart delights in all your vices, and

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my soul is resplendent with all your virtues. Oh, ruins! Oh, you my flesh and blood. Oh, you like-minds! I bid you every evening a grave farewell. Where will you be tomorrow, Octogenarian Eves, on whom God's terrible claw is poised.

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I think that's one of the great poems. But if I give you- wow, look at the time! I'm not going to give it to you. I'm going to go right to the voyage poems. And I'm going to read "Invitation to the Voyage." And this is -- you should really

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listen to this closely -- this is a translation using the exact same meter and rhyme by the master American poet Richard Wilber, and really captures the sound, the sense and the phrasing of Baudelaire. So here is the:

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INVITATION TO THE VOYAGE My child, my sister, dream how sweet all things would seem were we in that kind land to live together, and there love slow and long. There love and die among those scenes that image

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you, that sumptuous weather. Drowned suns that glimmer there through cloud-disheveled air, move me with such a mystery as appears within those other skies of your treacherous eyes when I behold them shining through their tears.

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There, there is nothing else but grace and measure, richness, Furniture that wears the luster of the years softly would glow within your glowing chamber. Flowers, the rarest bloom, proffering their perfume mixed with the vague fragrances of

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amber. Gold ceilings would there be, mirrors deep as the sea, the walls all in an Eastern splendor hung. Nothing but should address the soul's loneliness, speaking her sweet and secret native tongue. There, there is nothing else but grace and measure, richness,

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quietness and pleasure. quietness, and pleasure. See, sheltered from the swells, there in the still canals, those drowsy ships that dream of sailing forth. It is to satisfy

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your least desire, they ply hither through all the waters of the earth. The sun at close of day, clothes the fields of hay, then the canals, at last the town entire in hyacinth and gold: slowly the land is rolled sleepward under a sea of gentle

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fire. There, there is nothing else but grace and measure, richness, quietness, and pleasure. And if you've just tuned in, we are reading the poems of Charles

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Baudelaire who is one hundred and sixty-six years old on THE VOYAGE TO CYTHERA Thursday, and I'm going to end with two voyage poems: one a rather horrid one, and the other a long poem I hope I have time

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for, which is called, "The Voyage," and is also one of his great poems, so is this other one. And this other one is: And what is interesting about it is this Cythera, if I'm saying it right, is an island right under the Peloponnese in Greece,

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where it is said Venus was born, the goddess of love. And he is on a trip, on a voyage, and it is all an allegorical or metaphorical or symbolic voyage, as you will see. And here is the poem:

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Oh, Venus! On your island I found nothing standing but a And finally, the long poem, "The Voyage," or as much of it as I can get in. And I will say right now that this program, the symbolic gallows with my own image hanged upon it. Oh

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Poetry Show, is presented in part by Plaza Books on Pacific heavenly father, give me strength and courage to Avenue, thanks to their donation. Stay tuned for "Things Ain't What They Used To Be" with Tim Folger. And then tune in

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contemplate my heart and body without disgust. next week, when Joe will do a program on the wonderful American poetess, Muriel Rukeyser. THE VOYAGE, by tonight's subject, Charles Baudelaire

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[I.] For the child in love with maps and prints, the universe matches his vast appetite. Ah, how big the world is in the lamplight, but how small viewed through the eyes of memory. One morning we set out, our minds aflame, our heart bursting

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with resentment and bitter longings, and we fare onwards in rhythm with the waves, soothing our infinity on the finite of the seas. Some are overjoyed to quit an infamous homeland, others to

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leave the horror of their infancy behind. Some are astrologist drowned in a woman's eyes, the tyrannical Circe, she of the dangerous perfumes. To avoid being changed into beasts, they drug themselves

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with space and light and blazing skies, and the ices sting, the suns that burn them bronze, gradually efface the kisses scars. But the true travelers are those and those alone, who set out

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only for the journey's sake, and with light balloon-like hearts they never swerve from their destiny. But without knowing why keep saying, "Let us go forward!" Those whose desires are shaped like the clouds, and who like

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the conscript dreaming of his cannon, dream of boundless, ever changing, unexplored sensualities, which the human mind has never been able to name. [II.] We imitate oh loathsome sight, the spinning tops, waltz,

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and the bouncing ball. Even as we sleep, curiosity torments us and drives us on like a cruel Angel whipping suns. A strange destiny this, in which the target is ever shifting and which being nowhere can be anywhere, in which man with

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untiring hope is always rushing like a madman in search of rest. Our soul is a three-master in quest of Icaria: a voice from a bridge booms, "Watch out!" But another from aloft in the rigging, eager and demented cries, "Love... glory...

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happiness!" But no, it's hell let loose. We've struck a rock. Every island sighted by the man on watch is an Eldorado promised by Destiny. Our imagination conjures up an orgy in advance, but in the morning light it proves to be a barren reef.

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Poor lover of non-existent utopias. Should he be cast in irons and hurled into the sea, this drunken sailor who invents Americas, whose mirage only adds more acid to the deep? Like some old tramp trudging in the mud and dreaming with his

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nose in the air of dazzling paradises, his bewitched eyes find a Capua in every candlelit hovel. [III.] Astounding travelers! What noble tales we can read in your seedy eyes. Show us the caskets that are your rich

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memories, those wonderous gems, fashioned from stars and ethers. We would feign travel without steam or sail to enliven the tedium of our prisons, project onto our minds, which are stretched tight like sails, your horizon-framed memories. Tell

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us, travelers, what have you seen? [IV.] "We have seen stars and waves and deserts also. And despite many an alarm and many an unforeseen disaster, we were often bored, just as we are here.

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The glory of the sunlight on the violet sea, the glory of cities and the setting sun, kindled an unquiet longing in our hearts to plunge into the sky's alluring reflection. Richest of cities, the greatest of landscapes, never contained

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the mysterious magnetism of those which chance makes from the clouds. Besides, we were always fretful with desire. Enjoyment adds strength to desire. Oh, desire, ancient tree whose muck is pleasure, while your bark thickens and hardens

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your branches yearn to view the sky more near. Will you grow forever, mighty tree, deeper of root than any cypress? However, we carefully collected a few specimens for your greedy album. Oh, brothers who find beauty in whatever

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comes from afar. We have hailed idols trunked like elephants, thrones bestarred with luminous gems, sculptured palaces whose fiery splendor would be a ruinous dream for your bankers, clothes

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that would make you see double. Women with painted teeth, and fingernails, fakers full of law caressed by snakes. [Commentary] Now I skip on several pages to the ending which reads:

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[VIII.] Oh, death, old navigator, the hour has come. Let us weigh anchor. Oh, death we are weary of this land, let us spread sail. Though sea and sky be black as ink, our hearts which you know well are full of shafts of light.

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Pour us the poison hemlock for our comfort. Its fire so burns our brains that we yearn to dive into the gulf's depths, and what matter if it's heaven or hell, into the depths of the unknown, in quest of something always new!"

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Fitting last words, for the subject of tonight's show, the great French poet, Charles Baudelaire, born April 9th, 1821. This is Mort Marcus, I'll see you in two weeks.