When a Heavy Lid of Low Sky by Charles Baudelaire

When a heavy lid of low sky covers a soul moaning with ennui and fright, and the whole horizon is rounded by a black day pouring down, sadder than any night; When the earth is turned to a muggy dungeon where Hope is the shadow of a bat, feeling with feeble, flapping wings along the grunge on walls and bumping its head against a putrid ceiling; When the crawling spiders of scattershot rains drop cold bars that imprison us, water trickles along the channels in our brains, and the people around us feel poisonous— the bells speak out suddenly with fury and lance the sky with dreadful howls, and frightened strays and exiles, sorry and homeless, rage from deep within their bowels. Long hearses roll, slow, silent, hypnotic, through my soul. Hope, defeated, cries out its atrocious anguish—despotic. A black hood slides over my ferocious eyes.