The Monday Poem: ‘Autumn’ by Charles Baudelaire

The Monday Poem is brought to you by Professor Kristin Bensen-Hause of the English Department. Enjoy!

by Charles Baudelaire

Translated by Robert Lowell

Now colder shadows . . . Who’ll turn back the clock?

Goodbye bright summer’s brief too lively sport!

The squirrel drops its acorn with a shock,

cord-wood reverberates in my cobbled court.

Winter has entered in my citadel:

hate, anger, fear, forced work like splitting rock,

and like the sun borne to its northern hell,

my heart’s no more than a red, frozen block.

Shaking, I listen for the wood to fall;

building a scaffold makes no deafer sound.

Each heart-beat knocks my body to the ground,

like a slow battering ram crumbling a wall.

I think this is the season’s funeral,

some one is nailing a coffin hurriedly.

For whom? Yesterday summer, today fall —

the steady progress sounds like a goodbye.