Fun_People Archive
28 Jun
LIT BITS V3 #176

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Wed, 28 Jun 100 11:44:48 -0700
To: Fun_People
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Subject: LIT BITS V3 #176

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Excerpted-from: LITERARY CALENDAR V3 #176
From: ptervin@pent.yasuda-u.ac.jp

Today is Sunday, 25 June 2000; on this day,

143 years ago (1857),

	Baudelaire's volume of poems _Les Fleurs du Mal_ is published. He
     and his publishers are swiftly prosecuted for offending public morals.

97 years ago (1903),

	George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) is born at Motihari in Bengal,
     India. His first book, _Down and Out in Paris and London_, will be
     based on his experience of near-destitution while he struggles to
     become a writer.

Today's poem:

                          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 dozen 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?

                                          Charles Baudelaire

© 2000 Peter Langston