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Autumn Song
By Charles Baudelaire
I.
Now will we plunge into the frigid dark,
The living light of summer gone too soon!
A1ready I can hear a dismal sound,
The thump of logs on courtyard paving stones.
All winter comes into my being: wrath,
Hate, chills and horror, forced and plodding work,
And like the sun in polar underground
My heart will be a red and frozen block.
I Shudder as I hear each log that drops;
A gallows being built makes no worse sound.
My mind is like the tower that succumbs,
Under a heavy engine battered down.
It seems to me, dull with this constant thud,
That someone nails a coffin, but for whom?
Yesterday summer, now the fall! something
With all this eerie pounding will be gone.
II.
I love the greenish light in your long eyes
My sweet! but all is bitterness to me,
And nothing, not the boudoir nor the hearth,
Today is worth the sunlight on the sea.
But love me anyway, o tender heart!
Be mother of this mean, ungrateful one;
O lover, sister, be the fleeting sweetness
Of the autumn, of the setting sun.
Brief task! The Tomb is waiting in its greed!
Kneeling before you, let me taste and hold,
While I lament the summer, fierce and white,
A ray of the late fall, mellow and gold.
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