Both the nineteenth-century poet, Charles Baudelaire and the twentieth-century literary critic Roland Barthes considered the concept of pleasure in their writings. Baudelaires life was so bleak that pleasure and its counterpart spleen became natural objects of his artistic endeavors. The resulting works, especially Les Fleurs du mal, have evoked a mass of critical comment, but only limited amounts concerning his pomes en prose. A small subset of his prose poems seem intent on subverting the usual dark side of his work in order to prove that indeed one can find the pleasure of the text in this poetry. Baudelaire fashions a working definition for the enigmatic prose poem and then uses his own concept of pleasure as a major ingredient in these prose poems. Roland Barthes wrote in 1973 Le Plaisir du texte where he discusses the less evident ways of experiencing the pleasure of literature. Here we have two littrateurs separated by two generations, yet both writing with an essential motivation in mind, the pleasure of the text. The discussion begins with some history of the prose poem, a genre difficult to define. Next is a short history of Baudelaires shift from rhymed verse towards the prose poem. The pleasure as defined by Baudelaire leads to the same concept as elaborated by Barthes. These theories help in commenting the six pomes nocturnes as quintessential texts of pleasure. Finally, one particular prose poem is discussed as an unusual title having over the years been variously incorporated into music, theater, rhymed poetry, prose poetry, and painting.