The Twilight of Morning

Poem by Charles Baudelaire Collection The Flowers of EvilThemes CityPeriod 19th century

The reveille was singing in the barracks courts,
And the morning wind was blowing on the lanterns.

It was the hour when the swarm of evil dreams
Twists brown adolescents on their pillows;
When, like a bloody eye that throbs and moves,
The lamp on the day makes a red stain;
When the soul, under the weight of the surly and heavy body,
Imitates the battles of the lamp and the day.
Like a weeping face that the breezes wipe,
The air is full of the shiver of things that flee,
And man is weary of writing and woman of loving.

The houses here and there were beginning to smoke.
Women of pleasure, eyelids livid,
Mouth open, slept their stupid sleep;
The poor women, dragging their thin and cold breasts,
Blew on their embers and blew on their fingers.
It was the hour when amid cold and miserliness
The pains of women in childbirth grow worse;
Like a sob cut by a foaming blood
The cock’s crow in the distance tore the misty air;
A sea of fogs bathed the buildings,
And the dying in the depths of the hospices
Uttered their last rattle in uneven hiccups.
The debauchees were returning, broken by their toils.

Shivering dawn in a pink and green dress
Advanced slowly over the deserted Seine,
And dark Paris, rubbing its eyes,
Seized its tools, laborious old man.

Charles Baudelaire

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