Poems and Baudelaire Flowers/The Blind

by Charles Baudelaire

THE BLIND

Look at them, Soul! They are horrible. Lo! there,
Like shrunk dwarfs, vaguely ludicrous; yet they keep
An aspect strange as those who walk in sleep,
Rolling their darkened orbs one knows not where.

Their eyes, from which the godlike spark has flown,
Stare upward at the sky as though to see
Some far thing; never hang they dreamily
Those eyes toward the barren pavement-stone.

Thus cross they the illimitable dark,
That brother of eternal silence. Mark!
O frenzied city, as thou roarest by.


Drunk with thy song and laughter, I too stray
With crawling feet! but ask, more dull than they,
“What seek they, all these blind men, in the sky?”