Explore "The Flask" by Charles Pierre Baudelaire on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
There are some powerful odours that can pass / Out of the stoppered flagon; even glass / To them is porous. Oft when some old box / Brought from the East is opened and the locks / And hinges creak and cry; or in a press / In some deserted house, where the sharp stress / Of odours old and dusty fills the brain; / An ancient flask is brought to light again, / And forth the ghosts of long-dead odours creep. / There, softly trembling in the shadows, sleep / A thousand thoughts, funereal chrysalides, / Phantoms of old the folding darkness hides, / Who make faint flutterings as their wings unfold, / Rose-washed and azure-tinted, shot with gold.
A memory that brings languor flutters here: / The fainting eyelids droop, and giddy Fear / Thrusts with both hands the soul towards the pit / Where, like a Lazarus from his winding-sheet, / Arises from the gulf of sleep a ghost / Of an old passion, long since loved and lost. / So I, when vanished from man's memory / Deep in some dark and sombre chest I lie. / An empty flagon they have cast aside, / Broken and soiled, the dust upon my pride, / Will be your shroud, beloved pestilence! / The witness of your might and virulence, / Sweet poison mixed by angels; bitter cup / Of life and death my heart has drunken up!