Hast thou found any likeness for thy vision?

              A gardener of strange flowers, what bud, what 

              Hast thou found sown, what gathered in the gloom?

        What of despair, of rapture, of derision,

              What of life is there, what of ill or good?

              Are the fruits grey like dust or bright like blood?

        Does the dim ground grow any seed of ours,

              The faint fields quicken any terrene root,

              In low lands where the sun and moon are mute

        And all the stars keep silence? Are there flowers

              At all, or any fruit?

-Algernon Charles Swinburne, from Ave Atque Vale, In Memory of Charles Baudelaire