The Poetry Corner

A Fantastical Engraving

By Charles Baudelaire

This freakish ghost has nothing else to wear But some cheap crown he picked up at a fair Grotesquely perched atop his bony corpse. Without a whip or spur he drives his horse Ghostly as he, hack of apocalypse To pant and drool like someone in a fit. This duo makes its charge through endless space, Trampling the infinite with reckless pace. The horseman waves a blazing sword around The nameless crowds he's trampled to the ground, And like a prince inspecting his domain He travels to a graveyard's empty plain Where lie, with pallid sunshine overhead, From old and modem times, the storied dead.