He is Ennui!—with tear-filled eye he dreams
Of scaffolds, as he puffs his water-pipe.
Reader, you know this dainty monster too;
—Hypocrite reader, —fellowman, —my twin!
Here is the first of many examples of Baudelaire's fantastical personification. Ennui is a monstrous figure, indolent and only casually, haphazardly malevolent. He is all dream, not action; he intoxicates and indulges himself. The evocation of Ennui here at the beginning of the volume hints at its important place in the volume as a whole; by the time Baudelaire nears the end he is conceding: "Ennui, the fruit of dulling lassitude, / Takes on the size of immortality" (Spleen II).
The last line of the poem is startling in that it convicts the reader as well. In a lofty, almost sneering and ironic tone, Baudelaire claims to speak for the reader as well, acknowledging the universality of vice and ennui before delving into his own particular struggles in much of the rest of the volume. That is a key component of the poet's role as conceived by Baudelaire—he is a unique creature with a singular insight and voice whose job it is to illuminate aspects of the deeper truth to the people, but he also has universal experiences and emotions that readers can relate to and/or learn from.
Man's sorrow is a nobleness, I trust,
Untouchable by either earth or hell;
I know to weave my mystic crown I must
Tax all the times, the universe as well.
But treasure lost from old Palmyra's wealth,
The unknown metals, pearls out of the sea,
Can't equal, though you mounted them yourself,
This diadem of dazzling clarity.
In this poem Baudelaire blends the spiritual and otherworldly with the material and mundane. He weaves his own "mystic crown" but does so with earthly treasures. This crown is a metaphor for "man's sorrow" which is "untouchable by either earth or hell." What he might mean by this is that his sorrows matter not to the indifferent God, but that they still transcend mere earthly woes. This makes a subtle claim about the poet's interstitial role between man and God; he is a translator, an oracle, a visionary.
As long echoes, shadowy, profound,
Heard from afar, blend in a unity,
Vast as the night, as sunlight's clarity,
So perfumes, colours, sounds may correspond.
Baudelaire is famous for his evocation of the senses and for his synesthetic melding of them. When he is able to achieve a moment of transcendence through, say, wandering through nature, staring into the eyes of a woman or a cat, or indulging in music or art, he is elevated above the earthly and begins to experience "perfumes, colors, and sounds" all fusing together. A scent reminds him of a place, a sound reminds him of a color, etc. It is reminiscent of William Blake's lines from "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell": "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."
Rare wines or opium are less a prize
Than your moist lips where love struts its pavane;
When my lusts move towards you in caravan
My ennuis drink from cisterns of your eyes.
Baudelaire speaks freely of his preferred intoxicants—opium, wine, and women. Here he claims a particular woman is capable of satiating him even beyond those "rare wines or opium." He uses words such as "struts," "move," and "drinks" to suggest how he is physically compelled to move towards her and indulge in the pleasures she offers. He personifies his lusts and his ennuis, suggesting that they are inexorably pulled toward her. There is little hint of autonomy or freedom; he seems unable to tear himself away. He seems to know that he will never be fully satisfied (hence the title of the poem) but moves toward her nonetheless.
Ah, then, o my beauty, explain to the worms
Who cherish your body so fine,
That I am the keeper for corpses of love
Of the form, and the essence divine!
Baudelaire infuses this poem with a great deal of irony. Even these few lines give a hint of that with worms who "cherish" his beloved's body and the idea of "corpses of love." However, he is making a serious enough claim by saying that poetry can preserve the "essence" or "form," long after the mortal body has expired. This is the same thing he says in "The Beacons," calling the art of Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and others the "best witness" of "human dignity."
If on some evening, with a simple tear,
O queen of cruelty! you had devised
To dim the brilliance of those soulless eyes.
In this poem Baudelaire lies beside a whore but dreams of another woman. His thoughts move to her hair and visage and then, unsurprisingly, to her eyes. Here he refers to them as "soulless," yet enthralling. Eyes for Baudelaire were often ways to look into the beyond, but here the woman of whom he dreams (most likely Jeanne Duval) has eyes that can only hurt him. He barely seems to mind, however; he is utterly enraptured by her and will remain enslaved to her ferocious yet soulless presence.
And the exquisite government
The harmony her grace affords,
Makes analytics impotent
To note its numerous accords.
Baudelaire is explaining to the devil how he cannot choose just one feature of his beloved as his favorite, and then ends with this statement regarding the beauty in her wholeness. He says "analytics" are "impotent," meaning taking her apart and examining each piece is impossible. Her grace is in her harmonious way of moving her entire body, and her "numerous accords" fuse into one. This may be a subtle commentary on poetry, or Fleurs as a whole. Individual pieces are not as important as the whole, contemplation of which can bring about transcendence and illumination.
And, sweetness that would dizzy me!
In these two lips so red and new
My sister, I have made for you,
To slip my venom, lovingly!
In this poem Baudelaire glories in the pleasures of the woman he lusts for (Madame Sabatier), while hinting at darker thoughts: first with his anger at Nature, which results in his having "pulled a flower apart / To punish Nature's insolence," and then with these lines in which the poet imagines himself "lovingly" pouring a "venom" into her lips. It is a disturbing image, suggesting poison or semen (some critics thought he meant syphilis).
The violin is trembling like a grieving heart,
A tender heart, that hates non-being, vast and black!
The sad and lovely sky spreads like an altar-cloth;
The sun is drowning in its dark, congealing blood.
The lines featured here incorporate many of Baudelaire's most common images and themes. He uses similes that might seem dissonant but work incredibly well. The violin "trembles" like a heart and the sky is spread like an altar-cloth; in the first simile one can sense the fervid emotion and in the second one feels the serious, mournful mood in which the poet languishes. Baudelaire also favors using nature as a way to articulate his emotions. The sky is "sad and lovely" and the sun is "drowning in its dark, congealing blood"; these statements reflect his despair. The sky and the sun, of course, are indifferent to Baudelaire and his suffering, and certainly the sun is not actually drowning in blood; however, when Baudelaire sees the bright red setting sun his imagination leads him to a hyperbolic statement that expresses his own misery.
There, all is order and leisure,
Luxury, beauty, and pleasure.
This is a refrain repeated three times in the poem. Each time the lines are independent, acting as their own small stanza that follows a longer one. This placement and repetition, coupled with the slow, stately cadence of the lines deriving from the frequent commas, helps create the mood and meaning of the poem. Baudelaire intends to paint a dreamy picture for his beloved, to have her imagine a lovely land characterized by harmony and idyll. The structure of these lines and their rhythm help him in his endeavor.
The Irreparable with cursed tooth
Gnaws souls, weak monuments,
And often, like the termite, he invades
The structures at their base.
The Irreparable gnaws with sharp tooth!
Baudelaire personifies "The Irreparable" in order to explain why we are incapable of surmounting the things that plague us. "The Irreparable" is animalistic and indefatigable. It gnaws on the poet unceasingly and is akin to a termite, in that it attacks the very foundation. This foundation is the poet's soul and it is compromised, never to be made whole again. A sense of fatality, futility, and anguished resignation infuse this poem. The punctuation helps convey this, with period and exclamation point solidly bringing an end to the lines without any sense of hope for change.
Full of a dark, remorseful joy, I'll take
The seven deadly sins, and of them make
Seven bright Daggers; with a juggler's lore
Target your love within its deepest core,
And plant them all within your panting Heart,
Within your sobbing Heart, your streaming Heart!
Baudelaire takes a religious icon and theme and makes it unashamedly, perversely sexual. He is describing turning the Immaculate Virgin into the Virgin of Sorrows by plunging the daggers representing the seven deadly sins into her heart. This is rendered in erotic terms, the words "panting," "sobbing," and "streaming" describing the image of the phallic daggers penetrating her "deepest core." The "dark, remorseful joy" described and the gleeful tone that infuses the poet's language suggest that there is something more here than a traditional depiction of the devotional in art; rather, it comes across more as a punishment, as a fusion of sex and religion and violence, as a way perhaps to corrupt the Virgin rather than depict her assumption of the world's vices.
Throbbing within me are the passions of
A suffering ship;
The mild breeze, or the tempest and its throes
On the abyss
Rock me. At other times, dead calm, the glass
Of hopelessness.
For most of this poem Baudelaire extols the beauty of music and how it fills him with happiness and energy. He accomplishes this by using the metaphor of the sea, suggesting the ebbing waves and "tight" sails. Then, all of a sudden in the last stanza he startles the reader, completely shifting gears by providing an image not of a roiling or ebullient sea but of "dead calm," of "glass" and "hopelessness." His poetic structure and word choice help create this mood of despair. The fact that the last stanza actually begins with "On the abyss," an ominous phrase, even though it is part of the prior stanza's last sentence, is a subtle, important move. And while the first three stanzas feature relatively long lines uninterrupted by punctuation, giving a sense of movement and vitality, the last lines feature short staccato lines broken up by commas. Baudelaire slows himself down to create a somber mood, abruptly deviating from the lusty mood of the first three stanzas.
O worms! dark playmates minus ear or eye,
Prepare to meet a free and happy corpse;
Droll philosophes, children of rottenness,
These lines are practically dripping with Baudelaire's trademark irony. He invites worms to devour his corpse the way one might invite people to a party. He calls them his "playmates" and "philosophes" rather than wriggly creatures that roam the dirt and detritus. He refers to his own corpse as "free and happy," which is not a way most people would feel contemplating their dead body or a body of their loved one. Another interesting element of this is Baudelaire's description of the worms as "minus ear or eye." Since the poet has lauded the power of eyes and ears and all the other senses throughout this work, the image of him giving over his fully-sensory-perceiving body to creatures that can sense practically nothing renders the poem even more macabre and depressing.
Hate is a drunkard in a tavern's depths
Who feels a constant thirst, from drinking born,
That thrives and multiplies like Hydra's heads.
But happy drinkers know their conqueror,
And Hate is dealt a bitter fate, unable
Ever to fall asleep under the table.
In these line Baudelaire displays two of his greatest poetic talents: personification and simile. He personifies Hate as a creature that will never be satiated. It is in a tavern and thus has access to everything it desires but it does not know how to stop itself from being destroyed by the very thing it covets. Abruptly beginning the last line with the word "Ever" is a sharp way to impress upon the reader just how futile it is for Hate to escape its own self-made trap. The simile is also well-chosen, with Baudelaire evoking the Hydra from the Herculean labors to suggest just how impossible it is for the drunkard to escape the thirst, and, by extension, the poet to escape from the Hate that fills him.
Slumbering in some Sahara's hazy sands,
An ancient sphinx lost to a careless world,
Forgotten on the map, whose haughty mood
Sings only in the glow of setting sun.
As Baudelaire moves further down his path of despair and disillusionment, his images begin to darken as well. Here we imagine a lonely Sphinx in the desert, glowing for no one and whose pride seems irrelevant and pathetic. The image also makes reference to the Statue of Memnon in Egypt, which was supposed to sing when hit by the rays of the rising sun. Instead, this sphinx is hit by the rays of the setting sun. This is a metaphor for Baudelaire himself: adrift and isolated, singing his verses for no one as time marches inexorably onward.
You scare me, forests, as cathedrals do!
In "Correspondences," one of the first poems in Flowers of Evil, Baudelaire marvels at the forest filled with its symbols, and gives the reader peaceful images of grass and oboes and pleasing scents. Here, though, near the end of the work, Baudelaire is scared by the forests. He finds them as imposing, as awesome and foreboding, and as foreign as a cathedral. This comparison works because readers think of the high vaulted ceiling of the cathedral and of the forest trees, as well as both places being dark, hushed, and perhaps unwelcoming. As a sinner, Baudelaire would no doubt feel unwelcome in a holy place like a cathedral, and he also now feels ill-equipped to be the confidante to whom Nature reveals her secrets.
A Being, a Form, an Idea
Having fallen from out of the blue
Into the Stygian slough
Where no eye of the sky ever sees
These lines reveal Baudelaire's despair. He imagines "A Being, a Form, an Idea" falling into the darkness of the river Styx, never to be seen again. This is possibly how he sees his own verses being treated—as he ages and gives himself over to vice, his inspirations and art may vanish into the ether (and not just the ether but a dark, sludgy river of death). His evocation of the sky as not having an eye is also significant, as eyes for Baudelaire were windows, mirrors, veritable portals into the beyond and transcendence. "No eye" is an intensely mournful image for this poet.
And like the sun in polar underground
My heart will be a red and frozen block.
...
I love the greenish light in your long eyes
My sweet! but all is bitterness to me
...
Brief task! The Tomb is waiting in its greed!
Kneeling before you, let me taste and hold,
While I lament the summer, fierce and white,
A ray of the late fall, mellow and gold.
Baudelaire uses colors frequently in this poem to emphasize his emotions. His heart is red, the light in the woman's eyes is green, summer in its ferocious whiteness has given way to autumn's mellow gold. Those colors are more than just descriptive, however. The red of the heart is mitigated by the fact that it is frozen like a piece of meat. The green eyes become more sinister with the "bitterness" that Baudelaire feels looking into them. And that white and hot summer, which Baudelaire depicts as a time of energy and vitality, has vanished and only the mellow and golden autumn and its tomb await him.
Exotic cat, seraphic cat,
In whom all is, angelically,
As subtle as harmonious.
Cats have long been associated with divinity, with the occult, with the exotic. Here Baudelaire calls the cat "seraphic," referring to the Seraphim, the highest among the order of the angels, in order to emphasize that divinity. The words "subtle" and "harmonious" also bear this out and create a sense that the cat is ethereal and elevated above mere terrestrial life (even though, ironically, Baudelaire at other points lauds the cat's sinuous traversing of the urban environment and his love of the dark places). These lines get to the heart of what fascinates Baudelaire about this particular animal. Coupled with lines from one of his other cat poems, "Cats," in which he says "Within their potent loins are magic sparks, / And flakes of gold, fine sand, are vaguely seen / Behind their mystic eyes, gleaming like stars," Baudelaire reveals that he believes he can get a hint of the mysteries of the universe by communing with cats. Cats are in some sense oracles for him, imparting messages from the beyond.
