Get Drunk
Charles Baudelaire 1821 (Paris) – 1867 (Paris)
Always be drunk.
That's it!
The great imperative!
In order not to feel
Time's horrid fardel
bruise your shoulders,
grinding you into the earth,
Get drunk and stay that way.
On what?
On wine, poetry, virtue, whatever.
But get drunk.
And if you sometimes happen to wake up
on the porches of a palace,
in the green grass of a ditch,
in the dismal loneliness of your own room,
your drunkenness gone or disappearing,
ask the wind,
the wave,
the star,
the bird,
the clock,
ask everything that flees,
everything that groans
or rolls
or sings,
everything that speaks,
ask what time it is;
and the wind,
the wave,
the star,
the bird,
the clock
will answer you:
"Time to get drunk!
Don't be martyred slaves of Time,
Get drunk!
Stay drunk!
On wine, virtue, poetry, whatever!"
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on May 01, 2023
- 42 sec read
- 371 Views
Quick analysis:
Scheme | abcddefghiajklmnoPQRStuvwxyoPQRSza1 aai |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic dimeter |
Characters | 735 |
Words | 140 |
Stanzas | 1 |
Stanza Lengths | 38 |
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"Get Drunk" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 30 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/4925/get-drunk>.
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