Billie Holiday, Gloomy Sunday (Hungarian Suicide Song)

Explorers by Charles Simic  

They arrive inside
The object at evening.
There’s no one to meet them.
 
The lamps they carry
Cast their shadows
Back into themselves.
 
They make notations:
The sky and the earth
Are of the same impenetrable color.
There’s no wind. If there are rivers,
They must be beneath the ground.
Of the marvels we sought, no trace.
Of the native girls, nothing.
There’s not even dust, so we must conclude
That someone passed recently
With a broom...
 
As they write, the tiny universe
Stitches its black thread into them.
 
Eventually nothing is left
Except a faint voice
Which might belong
Either to one of them
Or to someone who came before.
 
It says: I’m grateful
That you’ve finally come.
It was beginning to get lonely.
I recognize you. You are all
That has eluded me.
 
May this be my country.

Jean Delville , The cycle of passions , 1890

Jacob Jordaens , Triumph of Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange , 1652

Ernst Fuchs, Floating Venus, 1930

The Night Has A Thousand Eyes by Francis William Bourdillon

The night has a thousand eyes,
    And the day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
    With the dying sun.

The mind has a thousand eyes,
    And the heart but one:
Yet the light of a whole life dies
    When love is done.

The River by Sara Teasdale

I came from the sunny valleys 
And sought for the open sea, 
For I thought in its gray expanses 
My peace would come to me. 

I came at last to the ocean 
And found it wild and black, 
And I cried to the windless valleys, 
"Be kind and take me back!" 

But the thirsty tide ran inland, 
And the salt waves drank of me, 
And I who was fresh as the rainfall 
Am bitter as the sea. 

Drunken Morning by Arthur Rimbaud

Oh, my Beautiful! Oh, my Good!
Hideous fanfare where
yet I do not stumble!
Oh, rack of enchantments!

For the first time,
hurrah for the unheard-of work,
For the marvelous body!
For the first time!

It began with the laughter of children,
and there it will end.
This poison will stay in our veins even when,
as the fanfares depart,
We return to our former disharmony.

Oh, now, we who are so worthy of these tortures!
Let us re-create ourselves
after that superhuman promise
Made to our souls and our bodies at their creation:
That promise, that madness!
Elegance, silence, violence!

They promised to bury in shadows the tree of good and evil,
To banish tyrannical honesty,
So that we might flourish in our very pure love.
It began with a certain disgust, and it ended--
Since we could not immediately seize upon eternity--

It ended in a scattering of perfumes.
Laughter of children, discretion of slaves, austerity of virgins,
Horror of faces and objects here below,
Be scared in the memory of the evening past.

It began in utter boorishness,
and now it ends In angels of fire and ice.
Little drunken vigil, blessed!
If only for the mask you have left us!
Method, we believe in you!

We never forgot that yesterday
You glorified all our ages. We have faith in poison.
We will give our lives completely, everyday.
For this is the assassin's hour.

John D. Graham , Head of a Woman , 1954

Hans Dammann , Salome, 1913

Edvard Munch, The Day After, 1894

Edvard Munch , The Vampire , 1900

Charles Picqué , Hebe , 1826

"To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight." ~ e.e. cummings

“In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love. In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile. In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm. I realized, through it all, that… In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.” ~ Albert Camus

Luis Ricardo Falero, Faust's Dream, 1880

Luis Ricardo Falero, The Witches Sabbath, 1880

Her Kind by Anne Sexton

I have gone out, a possessed witch,   
haunting the black air, braver at night;   
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch   
over the plain houses, light by light:   
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.   
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.   
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,   
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,   
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:   
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,   
learning the last bright routes, survivor   
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.   
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.   
I have been her kind.

Honoré Daumier , Smoker with Absinthe Drinker , 1856-60