L'Ame du vin

Details

Illustration for a poem by the French Decadent/Symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire. Was included in his poetry book The Flowers of Evil..

Translation of Baudelaire's L'ame Du Vin by William Aggelar:

The Soul of Wine

One night, the soul of wine was singing in the flask:

"O man, dear disinherited! to you I sing

This song full of light and of brotherhood

From my prison of glass with its scarlet wax seals.

I know the cost in pain, in sweat,

And in burning sunlight on the blazing hillside,

Of creating my life, of giving me a soul:

I shall not be ungrateful or malevolent,

For I feel a boundless joy when I flow

Down the throat of a man worn out by his labor;

His warm breast is a pleasant tomb

Where I'm much happier than in my cold cellar.

Do you hear the choruses resounding on Sunday

And the hopes that warble in my fluttering breast?

With sleeves rolled up, elbows on the table,

You will glorify me and be content;

I shall light up the eyes of your enraptured wife,

And give back to your son his strength and his color;

I shall be for that frail athlete of life

The oil that hardens a wrestler's muscles.

Vegetal ambrosia, precious grain scattered

By the eternal Sower, I shall descend in you

So that from our love there will be born poetry,

Which will spring up toward God like a rare flower!"