THE SKY
by: Charles Baudelaire
- HERE'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 Crsus 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!
'The Sky' is reprinted from The
Poems and Prose Poems of Charles Baudelaire. Ed. James Huneker.
New York: Brentano's, 1919. |
MORE POEMS BY CHARLES BAUDELAIRE |
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