Explore "The Seven Old Men" by Charles Pierre Baudelaire on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
O swarming city, city full of dreams, / Where in full day the spectre walks and speaks; / Mighty colossus, in your narrow veins / My story flows as flows the rising sap.
One morn, disputing with my tired soul, / And like a hero stiffening all my nerves, / I trod a suburb shaken by the jar / Of rolling wheels, where the fog magnified / The houses either side of that sad street, / So they seemed like two wharves the ebbing flood / Leaves desolate by the river-side. A mist, / Unclean and yellow, inundated space -- / A scene that would have pleased an actor's soul. / Then suddenly an aged man, whose rags / Were yellow as the rainy sky, whose looks / Should have brought alms in floods upon his head, / Without the misery gleaming in his eye, / Appeared before me; and his pupils seemed / To have been washed with gall; the bitter frost / Sharpened his glance; and from his chin a beard / Sword-stiff and ragged, Judas-like stuck forth. / He was not bent but broken: his backbone / Made a so true right angle with his legs, / That, as he walked, the tapping stick which gave / The finish to the picture, made him seem / Like some infirm and stumbling quadruped / Or a three-legged Jew. Through snow and mud / He walked with troubled and uncertain gait, / As though his sabots trod upon the dead, / Indifferent and hostile to the world.