My third attempt to translate a poem by a former friend:

Melancholia

That’s how it was once: The winters burst softer into human misery and became word. Deceased surrounded by sadness. Appeal of the night in the playing of lunatic strings. Madness lay on the cities gingerly, Behemoth death appeared against the light. Threatened by blackness in the dead of the night; a cold existence in churned beds. Now emptiness dwells in the barren brains. In the jungle of the trivial the void hunts for artifacts of creative light. Apathy drips from the obscene foreheads.

It Is a Skull, Crowned with Roses. It Dominates a Woman's Pearly-White Torso (C'est une tête de mort, avec une couronne des roses.
Elle domine un torse de femme d'une blancheur nacrée) from The Temptation of Saint Anthony (La Tentation de Saint-Antoine)

1888 - Odilon Redon