Autumn

by Charles Baudelaire

Autumn

Soon we will plunge ourselves into cold shadows,

And all of summer's stunning afternoons will be gone.

I already hear the dead thuds of logs below

Falling on the cobblestones and the lawn. 

All of winter will return to me:

derision, Hate, shuddering, horror, drudgery and vice,

And exiled, like the sun, to a polar prison,

My soul will harden into a block of red ice.

I shiver as I listen to each log crash and slam:

The echoes are as dull as executioners' drums.

My mind is like a tower that slowly succumbs

To the blows of a relentless battering ram.

It seems to me, swaying to these shocks, that someone

Is nailing down a coffin in a hurry somewhere.

For whom? -- It was summer yesterday; now it's autumn.

Echoes of departure keep resounding in the air. 

The Eyes Of Beauty 

YOU are a sky of autumn, pale and rose; 

But all the sea of sadness in my blood 

Surges, and ebbing, leaves my lips morose, 

Salt with the memory of the bitter flood. 

In vain your hand glides my faint bosom o'er, 

That which you seek, beloved, is desecrate 

By woman's tooth and talon; ah, no more 

Seek in me for a heart which those dogs ate. 

It is a ruin where the jackals rest, 

And rend and tear and glut themselves and slay- 

A perfume swims about your naked breast! 

Beauty, hard scourge of spirits, have your way! 

With flame-like eyes that at bright feasts have flared 

Burn up these tatters that the beasts have spared! 

The sky 

Where'er he be, on water or on land,

Under pale suns or climes that flames enfold;

One of Christ's own, or of Cythera's band,

Shadowy beggar or Crœsus rich with gold;

Citizen, peasant, student, tramp; whate'er

His little brain may be, alive or dead;

Man knows the fear of mystery everywhere,

And peeps, with trembling glances, overhead.

The heaven above? A strangling cavern wall;

The lighted ceiling of a music-hall

Where every actor treads a bloody soil- 

The hermit's hope; the terror of the sot;

The sky: the black lid of the mighty pot

Where the vast human generations boil!