Message from Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire

“You must always be high. Everything depends on it: it is the only question. So as not to feel the horrible burden of Time wrecking your back and bending you to the ground, you must get high without respite.

But on what? On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, whatever you like. But get high.

And if sometimes you wake up, on palace steps, on the green grass of a ditch, in your room’s gloomy solitude, your intoxication already waning or gone, ask the wind, the waves, the stars, the birds, clocks, ask everything that flees, everything that moans, everything that moves, everything that sings, everything that speaks, ask what time it is. And the wind, the waves, the stars, the birds, clocks, will answer, ‘It is time to get high! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get high; get high constantly! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.’”

Charles Baudelaire, Le Spleen de Paris

My Top 10 Favorite Poems

I don’t get the chance to read much poetry these days, but I used to read poetry a lot, and over the years, certain poems have resonated with me time and time again (I even created a song from one of them). Here are my top 10 favorite poems:

  • The Darkling Thrush (Thomas Hardy)
  • Fire and Ice (Robert Frost)
  • Howl (Allen Ginsberg)
  • Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now (A. E. Housman)
  • My Love in Her Attire (Anonymous)
  • The Owls (Charles Baudelaire; translated by Edna St. Vincent Millay)
  • Sometime during eternity (Lawrence Ferlinghetti)
  • Terrible (Lawrence Ferlinghetti)
  • This Is Just to Say (William Carlos Williams)
  • The world is a beautiful place (Lawrence Ferlinghetti)