Set Sail

I.
For children crazed with maps and prints and stamps -
The universe can sate their appetite.
How vast the world is by the light of lamps,
But in the eyes of memory how slight!

One morning we set sail, with brains on fire,
And hearts swelled up with rancorous emotion,
Balancing, to the rhythm of its lyre,
Our infinte upon the finite ocean.

Some wish to leave their venal native skies,
Some flee their birthplace, others change their ways,
Astrologers who've drowned in beauty's eyes,
Tyrannic Circe with the scent that slays.

Not to be changed (chained?)to beasts they have their fling
With space, and splendor, and the burning sky,
The sunds that bronze them and the frosts that sting
Efface the marks of kisses by and by.

But the true travelers are those who go
Only to get away: hearts like balloons
Unballastered, with their fate aglow,
Who know not why they fly with the monsoons:

Those whose desires are in the shape of clouds,
Who dream, as raw recruits of shot and shell,
Of mighty raptures in strange, transient crowds
Of which no human soul the name can tell."

Baudelaire, The Voyage in Flowers of Evil.