English poem
The Snake That Dances
by Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
How I love to watch, dear indolence, like a bright shimmer, of fabric, the skin of your elegant body glimmer! Over the bitter-tasting perfume, the depths of your hair, odorous, restless spume, blue, and brown, waves, there, like a vessel that stirs, awake when dawn winds rise, my dreaming soul sets sail for those distant skies. Your eyes where nothing's revealed either acrid or sweet, are two cold jewels where steel and gold both meet. Seeing your rhythmic advance, your fine abandon, one might speak of a snake that danced at the end of the branch it's on. Under its burden of languidness, your head's child-like slant, rocks with weak listlessness like a young elephant's, and your body heels and stretches like some trim vessel that rocking from side to side, plunges its yards in the swell. As when the groaning glacier's thaw fills the flowing stream, so when your mouth's juices pour to the tip of your teeth, I fancy I'm drinking overpowering, bitter, Bohemian wine, that over my heart will scatter its stars, a liquid sky!