The Cracked Bell - (Twelve Translations From Charles Baudelaire)

    'Tis bitter-sweet, when winter nights are long,
        To watch, beside the flames which smoke and twist,
    The distant memories which slowly throng,
        Brought by the chime soft-singing through the mist.

    Happy the sturdy, vigorous-throated bell
        Who, spite of age alert and confident,
    Cries hourly, like some strong old sentinel
        Flinging the ready challenge from his tent.

    For me, my soul is cracked; when sick with care,
    She strives with songs to people the cold air
        It happens often that her feeble cries

        Mock the harsh rattle of a man who lies
    Wounded, forgotten, 'neath a mound of slain
    And dies, pinned fast, writhing his limbs in pain.

John Collings Squire, Sir

John Collings Squire, also known as Sir John Squire, was an influential British poet, writer, historian, and influential literary editor of the early 20th century. He is best known for his role as editor of the London Mercury, a powerful literary journal of the time. Squire was a leading figure in the Georgian poetry movement, which sought to return English poetry to its traditional form and diction.

John Collings Squire, Sir

Song

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The Lily Of Malud

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Florian's Song

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The Three Hills

John Collings Squire, Sir, Simple Poetry

English

Suggested Poems

Explore a curated selection of verses that share themes, styles, and emotional resonance with the poem you've just read.

The Cracked Bell

How bittersweet it is on winter nights
To hear old recollections raise themselves
Around the flickering fire's wisps of light
And through the mist, in voices of the bells.

Blessed is the bell of clear and virile throat
Alert and dignified despite his rust,
Who faithfully repeats religion's notes
As an old soldier keeps a watchman's trust.

My spirit, though, is cracked; when as she can
She chants to fill the cool night's emptiness,
Too often can her weakening voice be said

To sound the rattle of a wounded man
Beside a bloody pool, stacked with the dead,
Who cannot budge, and dies in fierce distress!

Charles Baudelaire

The Flawed Bell

Its bitter, yet sweet, on wintry nights,
near to the fire that crackles and fumes,
listening while, far-off, slow memories rise
to echoing chimes that ring through the gloom.

Lucky indeed, the loud-tongued bell
still hale and hearty despite its age,
repeating its pious call, true and well,
like an old trooper in the sentrys cage!

My soul is flawed: when, at boredoms sigh,
it would fill the chill night air with its cry,
it often happens that its voice, enfeebled,

thickens like a wounded mans death-rattle
by a lake of blood, vast heaps of the dying,
who ends, without moving, despite his trying.

Charles Baudelaire

Spleen - (Twelve Translations From Charles Baudelaire)

    When the low heavy sky weighs like a lid
        Upon the spirit aching for the light
    And all the wide horizon's line is hid
        By a black day sadder than any night;

    When the changed earth is but a dungeon dank
        Where batlike Hope goes blindly fluttering
    And, striking wall and roof and mouldered plank,
        Bruises his tender head and timid wing;

    When like grim prison-bars stretch down the thin,
        Straight, rigid pillars of the endless rain,
    And the dumb throngs of infamous spiders spin
        Their meshes in the caverns of the brain;,

    Suddenly, bells leap forth into the air,
        Hurling a hideous uproar to the sky
    As 'twere a band of homeless spirits who fare
        Through the strange he...

John Collings Squire, Sir

Evening Twilight

Heres the criminals friend, delightful evening:
come like an accomplice, with a wolfs loping:
slowly the skys vast vault hides each feature,
and restless man becomes a savage creature.

Evening, sweet evening, desired by him who can say
without his arms proving him a liar: Today
weve worked!  It refreshes, this evening hour,
those spirits that savage miseries devour,
the dedicated scholar with heavy head,
the bowed workman stumbling home to bed.
Yet now unhealthy demons rise again
clumsily, in the air, like busy men,
beat against sheds and arches in their flight.
And among the wind-tormented gas-lights
Prostitution switches on through the streets
opening her passageways like an ant-heap:
weaving her secret tunnels everywhere,
like an enemy pl...

Charles Baudelaire

The Alchemy Of Grief - (Twelve Translations From Charles Baudelaire)

    One, Nature! burns and makes thee bright,
        One gives thee weeds to mourn withal;
        And what to one is burial
    Is to the other life and light.

    The unknown Hermes who assists
        And alway fills my heart with fear
        Makes me the mighty Midas' peer
    The saddest of the alchemists.

    Through him I make gold changeable
    To dross, and paradise to hell;
    Clouds for its corpse-cloths I descry.

    A stark dead body I love well,
        And in the gleaming fields on high
        I build immense sarcophagi.

John Collings Squire, Sir

The Sadness Of The Moon - (Twelve Translations From Charles Baudelaire)

    This evening the Moon dreams more languidly,
        Like a beauty who on mounded cushions rests,
    And with her light hand fondles lingeringly,
        Before she sleeps, the slope of her sweet breasts.

    On her soft satined avalanches' height
        Dying, she laps herself for hours and hours
    In long, long swoons, and gazes at the white
        Visions which rise athwart the blue like flowers.

    When sometimes in her perfect indolence
    She lets a furtive tear steal gently thence,
        Some pious poet, a lone, sleepless one,

    Takes in his hollowed hand this gem, shot through,
    Like an opal stone, with gleams of every hue,
        And in his heart's depths hides it from the sun.

John Collings Squire, Sir