I'm about to run off to class. I have to do 90 pgs. of reading for French tomorrow, read several articles for Latin, finish Paradise Lost...I'm going to go blind! I love the Greek reading we're doing (though I'm ashamed to admit it...loving a rhetor is loving rhetoric); Virgil is done. I'm posting the following poem -- the title is perhaps a bit heavy handed. The diction is archaically paratactic, but I like some of the images...it doesn't go anywhere. If anything, it's ekphrasis. If there's anything I really am trying to get to work, it's the ending images. There should be a sentiment of beauty and loss hanging over the flowers, and colors gradually reveal the blazing sky that shines on Lancelot, just as he catches sight of Gwenevere. Never before did his armor gleam so bright, but it seemed malevolently so, as if God conspired with the sun to make him first among men; his beauty yields to death, and so the flowers to the shades of Hell. Otherwise: I'm not sure if the poem is finished.

Les Fleurs du Mal

Infernal dreams, unearthly triumph, all Hell
Raising hollow cry I sing, that rings and rings
Through long caverns where shady things
Slide across the brittle rock and wasting sludge
Glugs in falls and jets across the burning chalk,
Then delays in marshy bogs that feed
The sword-like reeds among which
Flowers grow: red shining like the ether
First in sunset, when the mournful swallow
Sings her lonely lays; gold growing in among
The sweetened yield of bees; blue like azure sky
That burns across the sullen mid-day sun,
And yellow shining like that sun, and silver
Like a gleaming knight, like Lancelot, when first perceived
White lovely sleeves or peach of Lady’s skin as sweet
As grieves him to behold; and the Lord of all who knows
Makes him shine the brighter, just as leaves become
All colors, rustle in the sapless wind, conspicuous in fall;
And so the rosy clouds dispersed are wider lost than rosy dots
Small among this slight bouquet.