Spleen: When a Heavy Lid of Low Sky…
When a heavy lid of low sky
covers a soul moaning with ennui and fright,
and the whole horizon is rounded by
a black day pouring down, sadder than any night;
When the earth is turned to a muggy dungeon
where Hope is the shadow of a bat, feeling
with feeble, flapping wings along the grunge on
walls and bumping its head against a putrid ceiling;
When the crawling spiders of scattershot rains
drop cold bars that imprison us,
water trickles along the channels in our brains,
and the people around us feel poisonous—
the bells speak out suddenly with fury
and lance the sky with dreadful howls,
and frightened strays and exiles, sorry
and homeless, rage from deep within their bowels.
Long hearses roll, slow, silent, hypnotic,
through my soul. Hope, defeated, cries
out its atrocious anguish—despotic.
A black hood slides over my ferocious eyes.
Spleen: I am like the King of a Rainy Country
I am like the King of a Rainy Country,
Rich, but powerless; young, yet feeling wintry;
no longer flattered by the obsequious bow;
Bored by my dogs and by every other creature now,
Nothing brightens my day, not the Hunt, not falconry,
Not the dying people below my balcony.
My fool’s grotesque ballading
does not distract me from my malady.
Carved with fleur-de-lys, my bed is a tomb
while sequestered ladies who think every prince a bloom
hope by their impudent dress to make me their own;
they will never coax a mouse out of this young skeleton.
Shall we turn to those who claim they turn lead
to gold though they and we remain the living dead?
I bathe in the baths of blood the Romans brought us
back in the days of great power and purpose.
Even they cannot warm this dazed cadaver
slipping into the place where the salt has lost its savor.
Landscape
I would be chaste as I compose my verses
so I sleep up high, near starry courses.
Bells sail through my dreams where they find
their solemn hymns singing in the wind.
From workshops below, I hear men’s jibes and banter.
The masts of the city—chimneys and steeples—splinter
the sky’s eternal immensity into streaming reveries.
How sweet to watch the night open its eyes—
first lamp light, first star born in the azure deep.
The dark river of coal smoke begins to creep
up, painting the moon with a sallow charm.
My head on my hands, I watch from my lofty home
spring, summer, autumn, and then, with winter’s monotone
of snow, I close my shutters—a time to be alone:
I dream my way into flowery, rural labyrinths
where jets of water weep on alabaster plinths—
a world all kisses, and birds singing above a brook,
or anything else you might discover in a children’s book.
No matter what storms in the street may command,
nothing draws me away from my homeland.
Plunging ever more deeply into winter and night,
I wander through my faery palaces of light.
Another sun rising in my heart, I awaken a spring within,
warming the world with the fires of imagination.
The Albatross
Often, to amuse themselves, sailors
snare that great seabird, the albatross,
that flies with these indolent companions as their ship
glides over the depths of boredom and despair.
Once they have set their captive on the deck,
the king of the sky, awkward and in shame,
piteously drags along his great white wings,
like idle oars bouncing useless on the foam.
The winged voyager looks foolish now and weak—
yesterday he was beautiful; today, ugly and ridiculous.
One tries to force a burning pipe into his beak.
Another mimes the limp of one that used to fly.
The Poet resembles this prince from the clouds:
Each hangs in the tempest and laughs at the archer,
and finds his exile in a circle of hooting humans
where his wide wings are impediments.
Meditation
Wise up, Sorrow. Calm down.
You always lay claim to twilight. Well, here it is, brother,
It descends. Obscurity settles over the town,
bringing peace to one, worry to another.
The restless crowd, whipped on by pleasure—
our dogged torturer—carry their hearts’ raw
remorse with them as they serve their vapid leisure,
while you, my Sorrow, drop by here, take my hand, and draw
me apart from them. We watch the dying years
in faded gowns lean out from heaven’s balconies, as Regret rears,
smiling, out of the deep dark where the dead ones march.
Dragging its long train—now a shroud—from its early light
in the East, the sun goes to sleep under an arch.
Listen, Sorrow, beloved, to the soft approach of Night.