It is difficult to briefly summarize Flowers of Evil due to the sheer number of poems and their themes, symbols, and images. However, we can trace a few pertinent developments and themes throughout the first portion of the work, “Spleen and Ideal,” in order to attain a general understanding of what Baudelaire is doing.
To begin, Baudelaire addresses a poem to the reader, appropriately titled “To the Reader.” Here he lays out a phantasmagoria of sins and vices and monstrous creatures that beset modern man, then proclaims that the worst of them all is "Ennui" (boredom), who more than anything else quells man’s desires for virtue.
In several of the opening poems Baudelaire makes a case for the singularity of the poet and his vision. The poet is an outsider and is misunderstood (“Benediction,” “The Albatross,” The Gypsies”) but has the task of using language to convey deeper truths (“The Beacons,” Correspondences”). He wants to exist in a pure state (“Elevation”) but is constantly frustrated by his particular flaws and proclivities for vice. He sees himself as a hero, as in “Don Juan in Hell,” but knows that this means he may suffer.
One of the ways that Baudelaire suffers is by his obsession with women, particularly women who are dark, sensual, mysterious, and cruel (“Beside a monstrous Jewish whore,” “You’d entertain the universe,” “Sisina,” and many more). They torment him, filling him equally with lust and hatred (“Lethe”, “The Vampire”). He says he is enslaved, rendered insensate. He occasionally wishes to do them harm (“Poison”) and delights in frightening them (“The Ghost,” “The Carcass”).
The women Baudelaire lusts for enchant him with their bodies, and, perhaps most conspicuously, with their scents. For him their perfume, their hair, their oiled skin all conjure up sensations of desire and transcendence (“Exotic Perfume,” “Head of Hair”). Even his favorite animal, the cat, exudes a scent that Baudelaire connects with women.
Lust is not the same as Beauty, however; for Baudelaire, Ideal Beauty was a cold and stonily pure thing, more akin to a statue than a living woman (“Hymn to Beauty,” “Beauty,” “The Mask”). One has the sense that he may admire Beauty in this capacity but that the actual women he consorts with, with the exception of Madame Sabatier whom he saw as a blonde Venus/Mary, are beautiful in a very different way.
As the section continues Baudelaire begins to become more sorrowful. He laments the chasm separating him from spiritual purity (“The Spiritual Dawn”) and wishes he could get to a place of luxuriance and beauty (“Invitation toe the Voyage”). Time and memory seem to obsess him, and he frequently evokes the tomb and the graveyard (“The Flask,” “Autumn Song”). In regards to women he vacillates between longing for a quiet love (“Autumn Sonnet”) and bitterly railing that they are cruel and tear out his heart (“Conversation”).
Towards the latter part of “Spleen and Ideal” the imagery and tone tend more toward the contemplative, the morose and sorrowful (“Owls,” “The Pipe,” “Music”). Suicidal impulses begin to creep in, and the sense is that Baudelaire is wearied by his sins and the pressures of existence (“The Happy Corpse,” “Spleen (III),” “The Taste for Nothingness”). He writes that Nature reflects his despair (“Obsession”) and how he is fixated on images of absence (“The Taste for Nothingness”). The last poem of the section, “The Clock,” is Baudelaire’s realization that time is a “sinister, impassive god” and that one must take care not to waste every precious instant. He is mortally afraid of his mortality, knowing that at the last moment Repentance will come and say “Die old coward! It’s too late!” He is thus aware of his spiritual fall, and the poems in “Spleen and Ideal” are a testament to that awareness.
