A Poem by Charles Baudelaire...for Paradox

Fervent lovers and austere scholars
Both love, in their mature season,
The powerful gentle cats, pride of the house,
Which like them are sensitive to the cold and sedentary.

Friends of science and ecstasy,
They search for silence and the horror of darkness;
Erebus would have taken them for his funereal steeds,
If they could bend their pride to slavery.

While dreaming they take the noble attitudes
Of great Sphinxes stretched out in the heart of the desert,
which seem to sleep in an endless revery;

Their fecund loins are full of magic sparks,
And specks of gold, like fine sand,
Add vague stars to their mystical eyeballs.

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