Click here to read more Baudelaire poetry in French.
|
Akhmatova, Anna | Arabian Nights | Arp, Jean Hans | Attar | Atwood, Margaret | Baba Tahir Oryan of Hamadan | Baudelaire, Charles | Behramoglu, Ataol | Blake, William | Brecht, Bertolt | Breton, André | Byron, Gordon George (Lord) | Carroll, Lewis | C'hang Ling, Wan | Chen, Yuan | Clough, Arthur Hugh | Coleridge, Samuel Taylor | Confucius | Cosbuc, George | Cummings, Edward Estlin | Dario, Ruben | De Cleyre, Voltairine | De Vere, Aubrey | Dickinson, Emily | Donne, John | Eluard, Paul | Emerson, Ralph Waldo | Emre, Yunus | Faiz, Faiz Ahmed | Farrokhzad, Forough | Ferdowsi | Gay, John | Gibran, Khalil | Ginsberg, Allen | Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von | Hafiz | Herrick, Robert | Hikmet, Nazim | Homer | Hughes, Langston | Hung, Han | Jamal, Mo | Jones, LeRoi | Keats, John | Kipling, Rudyard | Kushrau, Amir | Lawson, Henry | Lennon, John | Levertov, Denise | Lindsay, Vachel | Mayakovsky, Vladimir | Milligan, Spike | Mistral, Gabriela | Morrisson, Jim | Neruda, Pablo | O'Shaughnessy, Arthur | Parker, Dorothy | Paterson, Andrew Barton "Banjo" | Paz, Octavio | Plath, Sylvia | Poe, Edgar Allen | Pope, Alexander | Rilke, Rainer Maria | Rumi, Djalal-ud-Din | Saales, Akhavan | Scott, F.R. | Sepehri, Sohrab | Shakespeare, William | Shamlu, Ahmad | Shelley, Percy Bysshe | Sheridan, Richard B. | Tennyson, Alfred | Thomas, Dylan | Turold | Veli Kanik, Ohran | Whitman, Walt | Wilde, Oscar | Williams, William Carlos | Wordsworth, William | Yeats, William Butler | Yushij, Nima
Baudelaire, Charles
Get Drunk
Always be drunk.
That's it!
The great imperative!
In order not to feel
Time's horrid fardel
bruise your shoulders,
grinding you into the earth,
get drunk and stay that way.
On what?
On wine, poetry, virtue, whatever.
But get drunk.
And if you sometimes happen to wake up
on the porches of a palace,
in the green grass of a ditch,
in the dismal loneliness
of your own room,
your drunkenness gone or disappearing,
ask the wind,
the wave,
the star,
the bird,
the clock,
ask everything that flees,
everything that groans
or rolls
or sings,
everything that speaks,
ask what time it is;
and the wind,
the wave,
the star,
the bird,
the clock
will answer you:
"Time to get drunk!
Don't be martyred slaves of Time,
Get drunk!
Stay drunk!
On wine, virtue, poetry, whatever!"
|