Explore "The Eyes of Beauty" by Charles Pierre Baudelaire on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
You are a sky of autumn, pale and rose; / But all the sea of sadness in my blood / Surges, and ebbing, leaves my lips morose, / Salt with the memory of the bitter flood.
In vain your hand glides my faint bosom o'er, / That which you seek, beloved, is desecrate / By woman's tooth and talon; ah, no more / Seek in me for a heart which those dogs ate.
It is a ruin where the jackals rest, / And rend and tear and glut themselves and slay -- / A perfume swims about your naked breast!
Beauty, hard scourge of spirits, have your way! / With flame-like eyes that at bright feasts have flared / Burn up these tatters that the beasts have spared!