Weird Tales/Volume 7/Issue 2/Spleen
Spleen
By Charles Baudelaire
Translated by Clark Ashton Smith
When the low sky weighs oppressive like a coffin-cover
Upon the groaning spirit, prey to long ennuis;
When all the horizons, and the charnel clouds that hover,
Pour out a black day sadder than the darknesses;
When the earth is changed into a humid prison-house,
Where Hope, with futile fearful wing, time after time,
Beats on the dripping wall as might a flittermouse,
Or soars to meet the ceiling's rottenness and grime;
When all the suns are impotent to succor us,
In a vast dungeon barred with ever-shafting rain;
And when a silent people of spiders infamous
Have come to weave their filaments upon our brain.
The bells of all the town, with rage funereal,
Leap out and launch toward the heaven a frightful howling,
Like that of demons homeless and inimical
Who whine for blood and souls, about the steeples prowling.
—And the long hearses, with no music and no drums,
Defile with lentor in my mournful soul; Despair
Weeps, even as Hope, and dire, despotic Anguish comes
To hang her stifling sable draperies everywhere.
This work is a translation and has a separate copyright status to the applicable copyright protections of the original content.
| Original: |
This work was published before January 1, 1929, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago.
Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse |
|---|---|
| Translation: |
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929. The longest-living author of this work died in 1961, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 62 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse |
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