"The Vampire" by Charles Baudelaire (poetry reading)

I don't usually analyse poems but this one isn't that obvious.

It isn't a gothic fantasy. The interesting words are "lust" and "Strumpet". He's talking about a real woman, a succubus who sucks the life out of him, but from whose clutches he cannot free himself.

Unable to give her up he thinks about killing her with sword or poison, but his mind mocks him with the thought that he still wouldn't be free from her because in his imaginination he would revive her corpse.

Aconite is monkshood or wolfsbane, a poison,

The picture is a still from the film "Nosferatu" of 1922

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• Vampire
• Baudelaire
• poem

[MrRobfullarton]

I sounds very like Bukowski

[SpokenVerse]

@MrRobfullarton Probably because I read Bukowski too. I don't sound anything like him.

[FrankSavages]

More wonders from Jim Clarke! I have added some beautiful words here to my late night listening playlist Jim

Merci for the Victor Hugo and Baudelaire old friend...

Savage.

[SpokenVerse]

@FrankSavages Thank you for the kind words, but I'm not Jim Clarke. His channel is poetryanimations - and very good it is too.

Everything in this SpokenVerse channel is read by me, Tom O'Bedlam.

[mistacramer]

I read this poem much like your commentary. Vampire (Vampyre) being a hypnotic seductress, rather than a monstrous bloodsucker, who has spurred a fastidious lust in the narrator. As for translations, I am curious if Baudelaire himself ever translated "The Flowers of Evil." If he translated Poe to French, then I assume he was literate in English. Of course, he might have chose not to translate.

[SpokenVerse]

@mistacramer Thank you for your comment. I agree, but would say that translators of literature almost always translate into their native language.

[ROSECROIX21]

great poem...

dead poets society...

ボードレール...最高...

[viefuture]

Is necessary to have very passionate nature that so deeply to understand authority of demons above man's will . Alsо simultaneously - to have a pure soul reaching for ideal.

I think: only Frenchman for some mysterious reason (it is secret of his femenin nature) can cognize a chasm which is demonic authority of sensuality.

Fortunately the nature has limited any dissoluteness - the body collapses very quickly from excesses, demons conduct their victim to premature death.

[thissong4you]

I do not recall having read/heard this poem before. Thanks for the reading and the analysis. I will be listening to this again.

[prakritozon]

excellent