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Cats

They are alike, prim scholar and perfervid lover:

When comes the season of decay, they both decide

Upon sweet, husky cats to be the household pride;

Cats choose, like them, to sit, and like them, shudder.

Like partisans of carnal dalliance and science,

They search for silence and the shadowings of dread;

Hell well might harness them as horses for the dead,

If it could bend their native proudness in compliance.

In reverie they emulate the noble mood

Of giant sphinxes stretched in depths of solitude

Who seem to slumber in a never-ending dream;

Within their fertile loins a sparkling magic lies;

Finer than any sand are dusts of gold that gleam,

Vague starpoints, in the mystic iris of their eyes.

The Cat

Come, my fine cat, against my loving heart;

Sheathe your sharp claws, and settle.

And let my eyes into your pupils dart

Where agate sparks with metal.

Now while my fingertips caress at leisure

Your head and wiry curves,

And that my hand’s elated with the pleasure

Of your electric nerves,

I think about my woman — how her glances

Like yours, dear beast, deep-down

And cold, can cut and wound one as with lances;

Then, too, she has that vagrant

And subtle air of danger that makes fragrant

Her body, lithe and brown.

Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) is one of the most important poets in French literature (he also made a name for himself as a literary and art critic). While his early poems displayed the influence of Romanticism, he eventually developed a counter-Romantic style, exhibited in Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil), a book of poems which express a candid, often shocking, realism that later generations, especially the Modernist poets, would also adopt. In fact, Baudelaire is credited with coining the term “modernity” as a way of describing through verse the ephemera of life in contemporary urban settings, a task which he charged all poets to take up through their work.