I've been wanting to have an electronic version of this prose poem for a long time, so here it is. I typed it.
The Good Deeds of the Moon
The moon, who is whimsicality itself, gazed into the window while you were sleeping in your cradle, and said to herself: “This child is my favorite.”
And she descended with velvet steps down her staircase of cloud, and making no sound slipped through the windowpanes. Then she threw herself over your body with the downy endearments of a mother, and she pressed her colors on your face. Ever after you’ve had green pupils, and remarkably pale cheeks. It was while brooding on your visitor that your eyes grew so astonishingly large; and she folded her arms so firmly and tenderly around your neck that you have ever since the desire to weep.
Meanwhile, as her delight grew, the Moon charged the whole room with a kind of phosphorescence or light-filled poison; and this fully alive light began to think and said, “You will be forever under the influence of my kiss. Your beauty will be my sort of beauty. You will love what I love, and love who loves me: the water and the clouds, also silence and the night; the endless and green ocean; waters chaotic and elegant, the place where you are not, the beloved whom you do not know; the grotesque blossoms; perfumes that make you rave, and cats that drape themselves on pianos and who groan like a woman, with the voice husky and delicious.
“And you will be adored by those who adore me, and flattered by those who fawn on me. You will be queen of all green-eyed men whose neck I have firmly enfolded in my nighttime attentions; of those who love the ocean, the immense green troubled and tumbling ocean, the chaotic rivers and the elegant rivers, the place where you are not, the woman whom you have never met, the ominous flowers that resemble encensoirs from some unknown religion, the perfumes that disturb the will, and those savage and sensuous animals that are the symbols of such madness.”
That is the reason, my dear spoiled and miserable boy, that I stay here, watching at your feet, trying to glimpse anywhere in your being the reflected light from that terrible Goddess, from that godmother san merci, the wetnurse who gives her poisoned breasts to the moon-maddened men.
Charles Baudelaire
Translated by R.B.
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