Baudelaire in the Mouth of Leopold Bloom

You’d submit the universe to thrall,
Harlot, whose soul it is ennui hardies?
To keep your nails in point of play
Sharpen them every day on another
Heart? But eyes bright as a shop-display
Or a Christmas tree exploit insolently
The ever obscured berth of their own beauty.

Stealthy, blind machine, parturate in cruelties
At regular intervals, of health an instrument who drinks
The world’s blood, how no shame or not observed
Have you that mirrors make pallid your approach? Scholastic still
In misery, never did recoil from the shot? The shock
That nature uses you, Her dark
Materials, to its own ends though would-be queen
Of sin, a vile creature, just a work of art?

O fanged grandeur, what supreme
Ignominy.