This is a wonderful thread and thank you whoever resurrected it. (And a special congrats to William for daring to post. Beautiful!)
I'd forgotten just how much I liked Baudelaire - only glad to get back to him when I have learned a little more about poetry and can appreciate the cleverness of some of the stuff he does. Look at the form and the way the lines repeat! As for the rest of it - wow!
Not strictly relevant, but one of my most treasured possessions is a book my grandmother gave me. It's a simple black-bound book, but through her life she used to write in it poems and extracts from books that particularly struck her. A very personal anthology. She gave it to me when I was at university, with blank pages still in the back, and since then I've carried on, writing in poems and passages that strike me. I hope that one day I too will have someone to pass the book on to. And I recommend that anyone who loves words considers keeping a book like this. It's the nearest I think she could have got to letting me into her soul. I get all soggy thinking about it even now, years later.
