Music (by Charles Baudelaire)

Music will often take me like the sea!
When clouds are low
Or in clear ether, I, towards my pale star,
Set sail and go;

With chest thrust forward and with lungs puffed out
My sails are tight;
I climb the backs of all the heaped-up waves
As day turns night;

Throbbing within me are the passions of
A suffering ship;
The mild breeze, or the tempest and its throes

On the abyss
Rock me. At other time, dead calm, the glass
Of hopelessness.

To a Passer-By

The street about me roared with a deafening sound.
Tall, slender, in heavy mourning, majestic grief,
A woman passed, with a glittering hand
Raising, swinging the hem and flounces of her skirt;

Agile and graceful, her leg was like a statue’s.
Tense as in a delirium, I drank
From her eyes, pale sky where tempests germinate,
The sweetness that enthralls and the pleasure that kills.

A lightning flash…then night! Fleeting beauty
By whose glance I was suddenly reborn,
Will I see you no more before eternity?

Elsewhere, far, far from here! too late! never perhaps!
For I know not where you fled, you know not where I go,
O you whom I would have loved, O you who knew it!