SPECIAL Poetry Monday!: "La chambre double" by Charles Baudelaire

« Et hue donc ! bourrique ! Sue donc, esclave ! Vis donc, damné ! »

This continues my 100-YouTube-subscriber celebration. (As of right now, I have 114 subscribers; my YouTube channel mostly consists of my Sasha Reads playlist, plus a smattering of law-related songs.) Today, I'm reading "La chambre double" by Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) -- technically, in prose, but it belongs to Baudelaire's "Petits Poèmes en prose" ("Little Prose Poems") collection, published posthumously in 1869.

Charles Baudelaire is my favorite French poet, and is perhaps the most metal of all French poets. This is worth listening to, though it's longer than my usual videos (this one is about 7 minutes long, so set aside a small chunk of time and get yourself a coffee); if you want something shorter by Baudelaire, you could try my earlier Baudelaire reading, "Harmonie du soir".

Je vous assure que les secondes maintenant sont fortement et solennellement accentuées, et chacune, en jaillissant de la pendule, dit : — « Je suis la Vie, l'insupportable, l'implacable Vie ! »

Il n'y a qu'une Seconde dans la vie humaine qui ait mission d'annoncer une bonne nouvelle, la bonne nouvelle qui cause à chacun une inexplicable peur.

For the rest of my "Sasha Reads" playlist, click here. Past poems are:

1. "Ulysses" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
2. "The Pulley" by George Herbert
3. "Harmonie du soir" ("Evening Harmony") by Charles Baudelaire
4. "Dirge Without Music" by Edna St. Vincent Millay
5. "Clancy of the Overflow" by A.B. "Banjo" Paterson
6. "Лотова жена" ("Lotova zhena", "Lot's wife") by Anna Akhmatova
7. "The Jumblies" by Edward Lear
8. "The Conqueror Worm" by Edgar Allan Poe
9. "Les Djinns" ("The Jinns") by Victor Hugo
10. "I Have a Rendezvous with Death" by Alan Seeger
11. "When I Was One-and-Twenty" by A.E. Housman
12. "Узник" ("Uznik", "The Prisoner" or "The Captive") by Aleksandr Pushkin
13. "God's Grandeur" by Gerard Manley Hopkins
14. "The Song of Wandering Aengus" by William Butler Yeats
15. "Je crains pas ça tellment" ("I'm not that scard about") by Raymond Queneau
16. "The Naming of Cats" by T.S. Eliot
17. "The reticent volcano keeps…" by Emily Dickinson
18. "Она" ("Ona", "She") by Zinaida Gippius
19. "Would I Be Shrived?" by John D. Swain
20. "Evolution" by Langdon Smith
21. "Chanson d'automne" by Oscar Milosz
22. "love is more thicker than forget" by e.e. cummings
23. "My Three Loves" by Henry S. Leigh
24. "Я мечтою ловил уходящие тени" ("Ia mechtoiu lovil ukhodiashchie teni", "With my dreams I caught the departing shadows") by Konstantin Balmont
25. "Dane-geld" by Rudyard Kipling
26. "Rules and Regulations" by Lewis Carroll
27. "Vers dorés" by Gérard de Nerval
28. "So That's Who I Remind Me Of" by Ogden Nash
29. "The Epic" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson