La Géante (The Giantess)
Charles BaudelaireIn times when Nature, filled with fervor limitless, Conceived and brought to birth many a monstrous child, I fain had dwelt anigh to some young giantess, Even as lies a cat, voluptuous and mild, At a queen’s feet. Full happily I would have seen Her soul and body burgeoning in dreadful games; Divining if her heart behind the matutine Mists of her eyes concealed a sun of somber flames. I would have roamed her mighty rondures at mine ease; Crawled on the thighward slope of her enormous knees; Or when at whiles, by summer-swollen suns oppressed, She laid along the field her weary hugeness down, I would have slumbered in the shadow of one breast As at a mountain’s foot a still and peaceful town.
This is Baudelaire — La Géante from Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) — in Smith’s translation. Everything we read from Smith has been about enormity threatening or overwhelming the speaker. This poem wants the opposite: to be tiny. A cat at a queen’s feet. A town at the foot of a mountain. The final image almost dissolves desire into something more elemental: sleeping in the shadow of one breast as a peaceful town sleeps at a mountain’s foot. That is the wish to be held without being seen, sheltered without being known.