Incompatibility

Very high, far from the road that’s sure,

Farms, little valleys, far beyond the hillocks,

Far beyond the woods, the carpeting of verdure,

Far from the last greens trodden by the bullocks,

You find a darkling lake within the gulf enclosed

Made by several peaks desolate and snowbound;

The water, night and day, sleeps in high repose,

And never interrupts its raging lack of sound.

In this gloomy desert, to the unsure ear

There come from time to time noises weak and long,

And echoes deader still than the bell unnear

Of a cow at graze the valley’s slopes along.

Upon these summits where the wind effaces all,

These glaciers full of sequins lit up by the sun,

Upon these lofty rocks whither vertigos call,

In this lake when evening reflects its hue vermilion,

Under my feet, upon my head and all about silence,

The silence which really makes you want to flee full steam,

The silence that is eternal and the mountain immense,

For the air is immobile and all appears to dream.

You would say that the sky, within this solitude,

Regards itself in the wave, and those mountains, down there,

Hearken, musingly, in their grave attitude,

A mystery divine of which man’s unaware.

And if by some chance a sometime cloudlet errant

Shadows in its flight the lake that never sighs,

You’d think you saw the robe or yet the shade transparent

Of a spirit that travels and passes into the skies.

Charles Baudelaire