T`h`e
P o e t i c a l
V a m p i r e
In his sudden fright, the youthful lover
Tries the flimsy veil the maid has shed,
Tries the carpet for his love as cover,
She unwinds, at once, what he has spread.
As with ghostly might,
To her fullest height,
Slowly she lifts up her form in bed.
"Mother," says she -- hollow sounds her chiding--
"Thou dost grudge a night beside my groom!
Thou dost drive me from this cosy biding,
Have I wakened only to my doom?
Not enough thou vowed
Me into the shroud,
And so soon hast brought me to the tomb?
"He, this youth, was pledged to me by token,
When still Venus' temples graced the land.
But thy word, O mother, thou has broken,
At a false, and foreign vow's command!
Yet no god forbears
When a mother swears,
To refuse her daughter's promised hand.
"From the silent graveyard I am driven,
Still to seek the joys I missed, -- though dust--,
Still to love hiim, who from me was riven.
Suck his life-blood from his heart with gust.
Once he is destroyed,
Others are destroyed,
And the young fall victims to my lust.
"Handsome youth, to death thou hast awoken!
Thou wilt pine away here, in despond.
I have given thee my chain as token,
And I take thy lock of hair as bond.
Look at it today,
Morrow finds thee gray,
Brown-haired thou appear'st in the beyond.
"Mother, this my last wish, is compelling:
Build a pyre! Let this be thy aim!
Open up my small and narrow dwelling,
Lay the lovers to their rest in flame!
While the sparks fly,
Ere the embers die,
We, above, the acient gods acclaim."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1797
Die Braut von Cornith (The Bride of Cornith)
Translated by Helen Kurz Roberts, 1980
In 1857, just as Charles-Pierre Baudelaire's collection of poems Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) was about to be published, six of the poems were deemed by the censors to be immoral and obscene and had to be suppressed. "Les Metamorphoses de Vampire" (Metamorphoses of the Vampire) was one of those. (It was resented in later editions.)
The woman, meanwhile, writhing like a snake
across hot coals and hiking up her breasts
over her corset-stays, began to speak as if her mouth had steeped each word in musk:
"My lips are smooth, and with them I know how
to smother conscience somewhere in these sheets.
I make the old men laugh like little boys, and on my triumphant bosom all tears dry.
Look at me naked, and I will replace sun and moon and every star in the sky.
So apt am I, dear scholar, in my lore that once I fold a man in these fatal arms
or forfeit to his teeth my breasts which are
timid and teasing, tender and tyrannous,
upon these cushions swooning with delight
the impotent angels would be damned for me!"
When she had sucked the marrow from my bones,
and I leaned toward her listlessly to return her loving kisses, all I saw
was a kind of slimy wineskin brimming with pus!
I closed my eyes in a spasm of cold fear,
and when I opened them to the light of day,
beside me, instead of that potent mannequin
who seemed to have drunk so deeply of my blood,
there trembled the wreckage of a skeleton
which grated with the cry of a weathervane
or a rusty signboard hanging from a pole,
battered by the wind on winter nights.
Charles-Pierre Baudelaire
Les Metamorphoses du Vampire
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