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Photo of Charles Baudelaire

Baudelaire, Charles

One of the most influential French poets of the nineteenth century.. French poet essayist art critic and translator

Email Poem - BeautyEmail Poem

Beauty

 WHAT does it mean? Tired, angry, and ill at ease, 
No man, woman, or child alive could please 
Me now. And yet I almost dare to laugh 
Because I sit and frame an epitaph-- 
"Here lies all that no one loved of him 
And that loved no one." Then in a trice that whim 
Has wearied. But, though I am like a river 
At fall of evening when it seems that never 
Has the sun lighted it or warmed it, while 
Cross breezes cut the surface to a file, 
This heart, some fraction of me, hapily 
Floats through a window even now to a tree 
Down in the misting, dim-lit, quiet vale; 
Not like a pewit that returns to wail 
For something it has lost, but like a dove 
That slants unanswering to its home and love. 
There I find my rest, and through the dusk air 
Flies what yet lives in me. Beauty is there



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