Correspondences

(From the French of Charles Baudelaire)

All nature is a temple where the alive

Pillars breathe often a tremor of mixed words;

Man wanders in a forest of accords

That peer familiarly from each ogive.

Like thinning echoes tumbling to sleep beyond

In a unity umbrageous and infinite,

Vast as the night stupendously moonlit,

All smells and colors and sounds correspond.

Odors blown sweet as infants' naked flesh,

Soft as oboes, green as a studded plain,

Others, corrupt, rich and triumphant, thresh

Expansions to the infinite of pain:

Amber and myrrh, benzoin and musk condense

To transports of the spirit and the sense!