From the French

 There are reports of a poetry revival in France, with book sales even of new poetry surging. This is being interpreted as a response to troubled and uncertain times, poetry offering a kind of solace or escape – which sounds plausible enough, though it's hard to see a poetry revival happening in this country any time soon. If it does, those in quest of solace will more likely be looking for it in the poetry of the past than of the present. 
  Anyway, I reckon it's time for a poem, so let's go for a French one – in translation, of course.
Richard Wilbur was a great translator from the French. His Molière translations are regarded as the gold standard – but here is something on a smaller scale, a sonnet translated from Stephane Mallarmé (who, like many French littérateurs, took Edgar Allan Poe very seriously)... 

The Tomb of Edgar Poe

Changed by eternity to Himself at last,
The Poet, with the bare blade of his mind,
Thrusts at a century which had not divined
Death's victory in his voice, and is aghast.

Aroused like some vile hydra of the past
When an angel proffered pure words to mankind,
Men swore that drunken squalor lay behind
His magic potions and the spells he cast.

The wars of earth and heaven — O endless grief!
If we cannot sculpt from them a bas-relief
To ornament the dazzling tomb of Poe,

Calm block here fallen from some far disaster,
Then let this boundary stone at least say no
To the dark flights of Blasphemy hereafter.