Charles Baudelaire looking at a marble bust in Paris

Beauty speaks from stone

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) was a French poet. In the sonnet “La Beauté”, Beauty herself speaks. Her address establishes distance: she calls people mortals as though their measure of time did not apply to her.

A closeness that hurts

The opening image allows both the lure of a dream and the hardness of stone. Those who draw close find no embrace; the breast leaves a bruise.

I am beautiful, mortals, like a dream of stone,
And my breast, on which each in turn has bruised himself,
Is made to inspire in the poet a love
As eternal and mute as matter.

– Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal, p. 46.[1]

The contradiction in the voice

Matter is mute, yet becomes the measure of a poet’s love. And the figure that prizes stillness needs four moving lines to make that stillness heard.