The Swan
by Charles Baudelaire
To Victor Hugo
I
Andromache, I think of you! This small river,
Poor sad mirror where once shone
The immense majesty of your widow's grief,
This deceptive Simois which grows with your tears,
Suddenly enriched my fertile memory,
As I crossed the newly built Carousel.
Old Paris is no more (the form of a city
Changes more quickly, alas, than the heart of a man);
I see only in my mind that camp of booths,
The piles of rough-hewn captials and shafts,
The grass, the heavy blocks turned green by the water
of pools,
And, shining on the tiles, the crowded bric-a-brac.
There once a menagerie spread out;
There I saw, one morning, at the time when under a cold
Clear sky Labor awakens, when the road
Pushes a dark storm through the silent air,
A swan which had escaped from its cage,
And, with its webby feet rubbing the dry pavement,
Was dragging its white plumage over the level ground.
Near a stream without water the bird opening its beak.
Nervously bathed its wings in the dust,
and said, its heart full of its beautiful native lake:
"Water, when will you rain down? when will you
thunder, O lightning?"
I see that wretched bird, a strange and fatal myth,
Toward the sky at times, like the man of Ovid,
Toward the ironic and cruelly blue sky,
Stretching its avid head over its convulsed neck,
As if it were addressing reproaches to God!
II
Paris changes! But nothing in my sadness
Has moved! new palaces, scaffoldings, blocks,
Old suburbs, everything becomes an allegory for me,
And my dear memories are heavier than rocks.
In front of the Louvre an image vexes me:
I think of my great swan, with its mad gestures,
Like exiles, ridiculous and sublime,
And devoured by an unrelenting desire! And then of
you,
Andromache, fallen from the arms of a great husband,
A degraded animal, in the hands of proud Pyrrhus,
Near an empty tomb bent over in ecstasy;
Widow of Hector, alas, and wife of Helenus!
I think of the Negress, thin and physical,
Walking in mud, and looking, with haggard eyes,
For the absent palm trees of proud Africa
Behind the huge wall of fog;
Of whoever has lost what can never
Be found again! Of those who collapse in tears
And suckle Grief as if she were a kind of wolf!
Of sickly orphans drying like flowers!
As if in a forest where my mind is exiled
An old memory sounds as in a blast from a horn!
I think of sailors forgotten on an island,
Of prisoners, of conquered men!... And of many
others!