I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror. - Charles Baudelaire

Nous avons psychologisé comme les fous, qui augmentent leur folie en s’efforçant de la comprendre.

THE OWLS

by: Charles Baudelaire

UNDER the overhanging yews,
The dark owls sit in solemn state,
Like stranger gods; by twos and twos
Their red eyes gleam. They meditate.

Motionless thus they sit and dream
Until that melancholy hour
When, with the sun's last fading gleam,
The nightly shades assume their power.

From their still attitude the wise
Will learn with terror to despise
All tumult, movement, and unrest;

For he who follows every shade,
Carries the memory in his breast,
Of each unhappy journey made.
'The Owls' is reprinted from The Poems and Prose Poems of Charles Baudelaire. Ed. James Huneker. New York: Brentano's, 1919.

...and the lamp having at last resigned itself to death.
There was nothing now but firelight in the room,
And every time a flame uttered a gasp for breath
It flushed her amber skin with the blood of its bloom.