"The Punishment of Pride" - Charles Baudelaire

Once in that marvelous and unremembered time
When theologic thought was flowering at its prime,
A pious metaphysician, the pundit of his day,
He who could move the hearts of murderers, so they say,
Having attained to a most fearful pitch of grace
By curious pathways he himself could scarcely trace,
For all his subtlety of logic — this austere
And venerable person (like one who climbs a sheer
Peak unperturbed, but at the top grows dizzy) cried,
Suddenly overtaken with satanic pride:
'Jesus, my little Jesus! I have exalted you
Into a very Titan — yet wielding as I do
The wand of dialectic, I could have made you shrink
To fetus-like proportions and fade away, I think!'

He thought no more, for instantly his reason cracked.
The noontide of this great intelligence was blacked
Out. Elemental chaos rolled through this serene
Temple, where so much order and opulence had been.
From its gold floor to its groined ceiling it grew dim:
Silence and utter night installed themselves in him,
As in an antique dungeon whereof the key is lost.
And from that day, through rain and snow, through sleet and frost,
Not knowing spring from winter and too mad to care,
He roamed about gesticulating, with the air
Of an old suit of underclothes hung out to dry,
And made the children laugh whenever he went by.