April 2003
The Swan
from Parisian Scenes, in The Flowers of Evil
by Charles Baudelaire
translated from the French by Anthony Hecht
To Victor Hugo
I
Andromache, I think of you. The little stream,
A yellowing mirror that onetime beheld
The huge solemnity of your widow's grief
(That other Simois your tears have swelled)
Suddenly flooded the memory's dark soil
As I was crossing the new Place du Carousel.
The old Paris is gone (the face of a town
Is more changeable than the heart of mortal man).
I see what seem the ghosts of these royal barracks,
The rough-hewn capitals, the columns waiting to crack,
Weeds, and the big rocks greened with standing water,
And at the window, a jumble of bric-a-brac.
One time a menagerie was on display there,
And there I saw one morning at the hour
Of cold and clarity when Labor rises
And brooms make little cyclones of soot in the air
A swan that had escaped out of his cage,
And there, web-footed on the dry sidewalk,
Dragged his white plumes over the cobblestones,
Lifting his beak at the gutter as if to talk,
And bathing his wings in the sifting city dust,
His heart full of some cool, remembered lake,
Said, "Water, when will you rain? Where is your thunder?"
I can see him now, straining his twitching neck
Skyward again and again, like the man in Ovid,
Toward an ironic heaven as blank as slate,
And trapped in a ruinous myth, he lifts his head
As if God were the object of his hate.
II
Paris changes, but nothing of my melancholy
Gives away. Foundations, scaffoldings, tackle and blocks,
And the old suburbs drift off into allegory,
While my frailest memories take on the weight of rocks.
And so at the Louvre one image weighs me down:
I think of my great swan, the imbecile strain
Of his head, noble and foolish as all the exiled,
Eaten by ceaseless needs -- and once again
Of you Andromache, from a great husband's arms
Fallen to the whip and mounted lust of Pyrrhus,
And slumped in a heap beside an empty tomb,
(Poor widow of Hector, and bride of Helenus)
And think of the consumptive negress, stamping
In mud, emaciate, and trying to see
The vanished coconuts of hidden Africa
Behind the thickening granite of the mist;
Of whoever has lost what cannot be found again,
Ever, ever; of those who lap up the tears
And nurse at the teats of that motherly she-wolf, Sorrow;
Of orphans drying like flowers in empty jars.
So in that forest where my mind is exiled,
One memory sounds like brass in the ancient war:
I think of sailors washed up on uncharted islands,
Of prisoners, the conquered, and more, so many more.
Walk away from Omelas.