Gautier is best known for his “Parnassian” phase in the 1850s, when he urged l’art pour l’art (“art for art’s sake”), but he started out as a Romantic in Victor Hugo’s circle and the offshoot Petit Cénacle (1830–1833) with Gérard de Nerval and others. The poem here is from his volume La comédie de la mort (1838). He was a prolific author of novels and travel books; more poems, notably Émaux et camées (Enamels and Cameos) (1852); criticism of literature, art, theatre, and dance; and Histoire du romantisme (1872), a valuable memoir of French Romanticism’s heady early years.