The Seven Elders

Teeming, swarming city, city full of dreams,

Where the specter in daylight passing by accosts us!

Mysteries all over run like sap in streams

Through the strait canals of the mighty colossus.

One morning, even as in the triste street

The houses, with a fog skimming each upper floor,

Simulated both sides of a river replete,

And as, décor like the very soul of an actor,

A dirty yellow cloud inundated space,

I went on, stiffening my nerves like a hero

And discussing with my soul tired of this place,

The suburb shaken up by tipcarts heavy as Nero.

Suddenly, an elder whose rags of yellow stain

Imitated the color of those rainy skies,

And whose aspect would have made alms fall like rain,

Without the nastiness that shone within his eyes,

Appeared to me. You’d have said his eye was triple-dipped

In pridefulness; his look sharpened the wintry moan,

And his longhaired beard, like an epée untipped

Stood out from him, even as Judas’s very own.

He was not merely stooped, but all broken, his spine

Making with his legs a perfect ninety degrees,

So well that his stick, completing his face fine,

Gave him all the shape and the step with unease

Of a quadruped infirm, or three-legged Jew.

In the snow and mud he went on entangling himself,

As if he crushed out corpses underneath each shoe,

Hostile to the universe and no uncaring elf.

His very likeness followed: beard, eye, back, stick, tatters,

No feature set them apart, come from one same hell,

That centenary twin, and those baroque specters

Walked with one same step whither none could tell.

To what infamous plot was I thus exposed,

Or what nasty bit of chance me humiliated?

For I counted seven times, as the minutes dozed,

That sinistermost elder thus self-replicated!

Let that one there who laughs at my inquietude,

And who is not seized with a shiver fraternal,

Consider well that despite so much decrepitude

Those seven hideous monsters had an air eternal!

Would I have, without dying, contemplated the eighth,

Inexorable double, ironical and fatal,

Disgusting Phœnix, son and father each i’faith?

—But I turned my back upon the cortege infernal.

Exasperated like a drunkard who sees double,

I went inside, I closed my door, terrified,

Sick and quite dejected, mind full of fever and trouble,

Wounded by mystery and by absurdity tried!

Vainly my reason wished to take the helm with effort;

The frolicsome thunderstorm all its works confounded,

And my soul danced and danced, an old gabbart

Mastless, on a sea monstrous and unbounded!

Charles Baudelaire