BAUDELAIRE AND SUPERNATURAL

Nov. 4th, 2009 - Charles Baudelaire (1821 - 1867), is a French poet who tried to show in his works the links between Bad and Beauty. In the following poem he speaks about his remorses for having forgotten his nanny who dedicaded her life to care his childhood. Without any family, her grave is deserted and the poet, adult, feels remorses.

In our modern civilizations, specially in Europe and North-America, we seem to deny all things about death because appearing as politically uncorrect. And so all traditions about the respect of the deads disappear specially among the youngest ones.

It’s an error, and some cultures as the asian and mexican ones go on offering a special place to the deads performing particular rites and offerings among buildings and modernity. These peoples have understood that a civilization which denies death, simply denies life and all the respect due by the living world to the great beyond.

The tender servant of whom you were jealous,
And who is sleeping now under a simple grass,
Yet we should bring her some flowers.
The deads, these poor deads, have great distress,
And when October, pruning the old trees,
Its melancholy wind blowing around their graves,
Obviously they must consider the alives as ungrateful,
Sleeping, as they do, in their warm beds,
While, they stay devoured by nightmares,
Without any bedmate, without any good chat,
Frozen old skeletons, eaten by the worms,
They feel the snows of winter dripping over them,
And the century passing over, without any friends or family
Who will replace the rubbish hanging at their fence.

When the log whistles in the fireplace, if in the evening,
Quiet, I saw her sitting in my armchair,
If, on a blue and cold night of December,
I found her lurked in a corner of my bedroom,
Solemn, and coming from the depths of her eternal bed
Watching over the child once she care for as a mother,
What could I say to that devoted soul,
Seeing tears falling from her eyesore sockets?

The Sweet-Hearted Servant
From "The Flowers of Evil".