Baudelaire and “The Seven Deadly Sins”

Seven Deadly Sins - Diane

The Giantess

In times of old when Nature in her glad excess
Brought forth such living marvels as no more are seen,
I should have loved to dwell with a young giantess,
Like a voluptuous cat about the feet of a queen;

To run and laugh beside her in her terrible games,
And see her grow each day to a more fearful size,
And see the flowering of her soul, and the first flames
Of passionate longing in the misty depths of her eyes;

To scale the slopes of her huge knees, explore at will
The hollows and the heights of her — and when, oppressed
By the long afternoons of summer, cloudless and still,

She would stretch out across the countryside to rest,
I should have loved to sleep in the shadow of her breast,
Quietly as a village nestling under a hill.

— Charles Baudeliare, (Translated by George Dillon, Flowers of Evil; NY: Harper and Brothers, 1936)

***

I ran across this poem last night while reading a selection from Charles Baudelaire and thought of this character, Diane the giantess. I doubt very much that Baudelaire would mind being associated with an anime called Seven Deadly Sins (the sinful old scallawag), so I went there.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s