Charles Baudelaire – The Rag-Picker’s Wine

Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire was born in Paris in 1821. He died in the same city in 1867. He embodies the word “poetry” in all its grandeur all by himself. He wrote the most beautiful poems on wine: The soul of wine, The wine of lovers, etc.

The Rag-Picker’s Wine

Often, in the red light of a street-lamp
Of which the wind whips the flame and worries the glass,
In the heart of some old suburb, muddy labyrinth,
Where humanity crawls in a seething ferment,

One sees a rag-picker go by, shaking his head,
Stumbling, bumping against the walls like a poet,
And, with no thought of the stool-pigeons, his subjects,
He pours out his whole heart in grandiose projects.

He takes oaths, dictates sublime laws,
Lays low the wicked and succors victims;
Beneath the firmament spread like a canopy
He gets drunk with the splendor of his own virtues.e vertu.

Yes, these people harassed by domestic worries,
Ground down by their work, distorted by age,
Worn-out, and bending beneath a load of debris,
The commingled vomit of enormous Paris,

Come back, smelling of the wine-cask,
Followed by companions whitened by their battles,
And whose moustaches bang down like old flags;
Banners, flowers, and triumphal arches

Rise up before them, a solemn magic!
And in the deafening, brilliant orgy
Of clarions and drums, of sunlight and of shouts,
They bring glory to the crowd drunk with love!

It is thus that throughout frivolous Humanity
Wine, the dazzling Pactolus, carries flakes of gold;
By the throats of men he sings his exploits
And reigns by his gifts like a veritable king.ais rois.

To drown the bitterness and lull the indolence
Of all these accurst old men who die in silence,
God, touched with remorse, had created sleep;
Man added Wine, divine child of the Sun!