On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome.
— Edgar Allan Poe, “To Helen”

Viens-tu du ciel profond ou sors-tu de l’abîme,
O Beauté? ton regard, infernal et divin…
Tu contiens dans ton oeil le couchant et l’aurore;
Tu répands des parfums comme un soir orageux.
— Charles Baudelaire, “Hymne à la Beauté”

Should the daring eyes sparkle at you,
do not reject their sparkling,
whispering “amen”
to sins, wine and the amorous night.
— Alexander Blok, “The Devils Speak”, from The Life of my Friend

Your eyes are a pale sea of dreams:
One glance and I saw a thousand visions,
One gaze and I was drowned in ecstasy —
O let me die by the light of your eyes
So that I might live for eternity

I could not look away, not once, never,
For once I beheld your nymphean charms
I was lost, and lost forever —
Like Hylas I drowned in your eyes,
Seeing despair, yet tasting paradise

The taste of you, my perilous darling,
My diaphanous changeling fairy nymph
Dripping liquid elfshot love-sickness
From your moon-kissed skin like pearls
Lustrous with light from your Faërie otherworld

The light of your eyes, my darling surprise,
My soul, my heart, light of my life,
My treasure, my Keatsian fairy’s child,
O ruin me with your desirous gaze,
My delicious witch, my fey grace

I was lured to your light like a moth
Love-drunk on the Elysian flame,
Delirious for a radiant death:
Mort, mon grand péché radieux —
You, my soul, mon cœur, mon dieu!

Dans l’ardent foyer de ta chevelure,
Je respire l’odeur du café noir
Mêlé à l’opium et au sucre

I breathe in your pale pearlescent poison
Sugar-rich with remnants redolent
Of honey-sweet ambrosia venoming 
The Gorgon-magic of your hyacinth hair —
O God, O Sin, O Baudelaire!

Laisse-moi respirer longtemps,
Longtemps, l’odeur de tes cheveux

Your hair is opium-drenched exotic,
A vanilla’d, candy-sweet hypnotic,
Breathing you in until I soar cloud-high,
Dying into Morphean dreams
Of oneiric lucidity

But it was within your eyes, ma pâle beauté,
Where I first died, et pour l’éternité,
Where you came to me on desperate seas,
Perilous nymph, Ophelia-wet and fair,
O Grecian paradise, O sweet despair!

The sunset lives and dies in your eyes —
And so do I — O please never wake me,
Not even for the most perfect sunrise,
For your eyes are my only light,
Glistening sea-stranged and sublime

Your eyes are a pale sea of dreams:
One glance and I saw a thousand visions,
One gaze and I was drowned in ecstasy —
O let me die by the light of your eyes
So that I might live for eternity.

[Clay Franklin Johnson is the author of A Ride Through Faerie & Other Poems (Gothic Keats Press, 2021). His collection’s eponymous poem was presented at “Ill met by moonlight”: Gothic encounters with enchantment and the Faerie realms in literature and culture, a conference organized by the Open Graves, Open Minds Project (OGOM) with the University of Hertfordshire. In December 2024, Clay’s poem “The Faery Wood” won the Highly Commended Award, one of two prizes given for the Brian Nisbet Poetry Award in Huntly, Scotland. His writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Rhysling Award, Elgin Award, received Honorable Mention in The Best Horror of the Year, and has appeared in publications such as Nightingale & Sparrow, The Fairy Tale Magazine, Ghost Orchid Press, Eternal Haunted Summer, Abyss & Apex, Gramarye, and the British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS), among others. He has writing forthcoming in Fairies: A Companion from Peter Lang Oxford in 2025. Find out more on his website at www.clayfjohnson.com, and follow him on Twitter and Instagram @ClayFJohnson.]