Overcast

Are they blue, gray or green? Mysterious eyes

(as if in fact you were looking through a mist)

in alternation tender, dreamy, grim

to match the shiftless pallor of the sky.

That's what you're like- these warm white afternoons

which make the ravished heart dissolve in tears,

the nerves, inexplicably overwrought,

outrage the dozing mind.

Not always, though-sometimes

you're like the horizon when the sun

ignites our cloudy autumn-how you glow!

A sodden countryside in sudden rout,

turned incandescent by a changing wind.

Dangerous woman-demoralizing days!

Will I adore your killing frost as much,

and in that implacable winter, when it comes,

discover pleasures sharper than iron and ice?

The collection entitled Les Fleurs du Mal (flowers of evil) is considered one of the most important and influantial poetry publications of the nineteenth century. This is a poem from that collection