Read "Antinomies on a Railway Station" by Charles Pierre Baudelaire online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
As I stand waiting in the rain / For the foggy hoot of the London train, / Gazing at silent wall and lamp / And post and rail and platform damp, / What is this power that comes to my sight / That I see a night without the night, / That I see them clear, yet look them through, / The silvery things and the darkly blue, / That the solid wall seems soft as death, / A wavering and unanchored wraith, / And rails that shine and stones that stream / Unsubstantial as a dream? / What sudden door has opened so, / What hand has passed, that I should know / This moving vision not of trance / That melts the globe of circumstance, / This sight that marks not least or most / And makes a stone a passing ghost?
Is it that a year ago / I stood upon this self-same spot; / Is it that since a year ago / The place and I have altered not; / Is it that I half forgot, / A year ago, and all despised / For a space the things that I had prized: / The race of life, the glittering show? / Is it that now a year has passed / Of vain pursuit of glittering things, / Of fruitless searching, shouting, running, / And greedy lies and candour cunning, / Here as I stand the year above / Sudden the heats and the strivings fail / And fall away, a fluctuant veil, / And the fixed familiar stones restore / The old appearance-buried core, / The moveless and essential me, / The eternal personality / Alone enduring first and last?