Explore "Crepuscular" by Charles Pierre Baudelaire on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
No creature stirs in the wide fields. / The rifted western heaven yields / The dying sun's illumination. / This is the hour of tribulation / When, with clear sight of eve engendered, / Day's homage to delusion rendered, / Mute at her window sits the soul.
Clouds and skies and lakes and seas, / Valleys and hills and grass and trees, / Sun, moon, and stars, all stand to her / Limbs of one lordless challenger, / Who, without deigning taunt or frown, / Throws a perennial gauntlet down: / "Come conquer me and take thy toll."
No cowardice or fear she knows, / But, as once more she girds, there grows / An unresigned hopelessness / From memory of former stress. / Head bent, she muses whilst he waits: / How with such weapons dint his plates? / How quell this vast and sleepless giant / Calmly, immortally defiant,
How fell him, bind him, and control / With a silver cord and a golden bowl?