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Charles Baudelaire

O Autumns, Winters, Springs! Seasons of mire!
Soul-drowsing times! I love you. Take my praise
For shrouding thus my heart and brain entire
In a vague tomb and winding-sheet of haze.

Through the long nights when the south-wester swings
The rusty vanes that shriek upon the towers,
My soul can fully stretch its raven wings
More easily than in the warmer hours.

Nothing is sweeter to funereal hearts
On whom the frost of ages has been laid —
Wan seasons, when you queen it round these parts, —

Than the eternal sight of your pale shade:
Unless on moonless midnights, pair by pair,
To lull, upon chance beds, our hearts' despair.

Conversation

You're like an autumn sky, rose, clear, and placid.
But sorrow whelms me, like the tide's assault,
And ebbing, leaves upon my lips the acid
And muddy-bitter memory of its salt.

Your hand may stroke my breast, but not console.
What it seeks there is but a hole, deep caverned
By women's claws and fangs, and ransacked whole.
Seek not my heart, on which the beasts have ravened.

My heart's a palace plundered by the rabble:
They tope, they kill, in blood and guts they scrabble:
— A perfume swims around your naked breast!

O Beauty, flail of spirits, you know best!
With your eyes' fire, lit up as for a spree,
Char the poor rags those beasts have left of me!