The Poetry Corner

Obsession

By Charles Baudelaire

Great forests you frighten me, like vast cathedrals: You roar like an organ, and in our condemned souls, aisles of eternal mourning, where past death-rattles sound, the echo of your De Profundis rolls. I hate you, Ocean! My mind, in your tumultuous main, sees itself: I hear the vast laughter of your seas, the bitter laughter of defeated men, filled with the sound of sobs and blasphemies. How you would please me without your stars, O Night! I know the language that their light employs! Since I search for darkness, nakedness, the Void! But the shadows themselves seem, to my sight canvases, where thousands of lost beings, alive, and with a familiar gaze, leap from my eyes.