Obsession
Great forests, you alarm me like a mighty fane;
Like organ-tones you roar, and in our hearts of stone,
Where ancient sobs vibrate, O halls of endless pain!
The answering echoes of your “De Profundis” moan.
I hate thee, Ocean! hate thy tumults and thy throbs,
My spirit finds them in himself. This bitter glee
Of vanquished mortals, full of insults and of sobs,
I hear it in the mighteous laughter of the sea.
O starless night! thy loveliness my soul inhales,
Without those starry rays which speak a language known,
For I desire the dark, the naked and the lone.
But e’en those darknesses themselves to me are veils,
Where live—and, by the millions ’neath my eyelids prance,
Long, long departed Beings with familiar glance.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on July 19, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Obsession” appears in The Flowers of Evil (Elkin Mathews, 1909), translated into English verse by Cyril Scott. Les Fleurs du mal [Flowers of Evil] by Charles Baudelaire was first published in 1857. According to translator and author Claire Ortiz Hill, in The Roots and Flowers of Evil in Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and Hitler (Open Court, 2006), “[A]n eloquent disseminator of ideas is not necessarily a theoretician. […] As for Baudelaire, he was a poet. Poets are not systematic thinkers, and systematic thought is so inherently different from poetry that any attempt to lend poetic insights a didactic form always constitutes a grave and serious threat to the art. And Baudelaire was the first to insist upon this. ‘Poetry,’ he once wrote, ‘cannot, under pain of death or of failure, become assimilated to science or to morality; it does not have Truth as its goal. It only has itself. The methods of demonstrating temperament thrusts aside the diamonds and the flowers of the muse; it is therefore absolutely the inverse of the poetical temperament. The artifices involved in rhythm are an insurmountable obstacle to that meticulous development of thoughts and expressions whose goal is the truth.’”
Charles Baudelaire
