sweet fascination and fatal pleasure

Around me roared the nearly deafening street. 

Tall, slim, dressed in mourning, majestic grief, 

A woman passed by, with ceremonious hand 

lifting, swaying her festoon and hem; 

Agile and noble, with the leg of a statue. 

Clenched and extravagant, I drank

from her eye, a livid sky where hurricanes

take seed, sweet fascination and fatal pleasure. 

A flash of lightning ... then night! —Lovely fugitive, 

with eyes that suddenly resurrected me, 

will I not see you again outside eternity? 

Someplace, far away from here! too late! never perhaps! 

For I know not where you flee, nor you where I go,

O you I could have loved, o you who knew it! 

[Charles Baudelaire {1821-1867} 'To a Woman Passing By'—trans. from the French by Beryl F. Schlossman— from The Poetry of Baudelaire]