Summary
“Benediction”
When God brings the poet into the bored world, his mother rages that she would rather have a nest of snakes than this mockery of her night of lust. She was chosen to be a shame to her spouse and cannot kill herself, but she can turn that hate toward the child because it is an “agent of [God's] spiteful doom.” She does not grasp the larger divine plan and builds a pyre to her crimes.
An angel guards the child, though, and he grows up healthy and happy; he is free as a bird and sings of the Passion. People see his tranquility and try out their cruelty on him. They spit into his food and wine, and throw out the things he touches. His woman proclaims that she will let the heathen idols guide her and will decorate herself and consume spices and wines and try to get the young man to worship her as he would the Lord. When she is bored she will use her talons to claw into his heart, dig it out, and throw it to her favorite dog.
The poet looks to Heaven and prays, and is unable to see the cruelty of the people around him. He praises God’s gift of suffering for humanity’s impurities and says he knows there is a place for him in Heaven. Sorrow is noble, he says, and he must toil as he constructs his crown. The jewels he uses, even though they are set perfectly, can never match the rays from the “holy hearth;” man’s eyes are only sad, dark mirrors of those rays.
“The Albatross”
When they are bored, sailors trap albatrosses, the placid travelers over the sea. When the “kings of all outdoors” are brought on deck they drag their large white wings and appear sad and humorous. Once handsome, they are now powerless. Sailors mock them.
The Poet is their kinsman; he hates archers and loves the storms. On the ground, crows hoot him at and his wings are hindered.
“Elevation”
The poet's spirit soars over the clouds, valleys, sun, stars. It is as agile as a swimmer on the sea, moving through the immensity with delight. It is high above the morbid place, cleansing itself in fine air and drinking up bright fire. It is beyond ennui, trouble, and mortal toil. Happy is the man who leaps upward to these peaceful fields, whose thoughts freely glide through the air and soar above this life.
“Correspondences”
Nature is like a temple, and her columns breathe “confusing speech.” Man traverses these “groves of symbols” and is kin to them. The faraway echoes blend together; the “perfumes, colors, sounds” are vast and clear. There are odors fresh like the skin of an infant, mellow likes oboes, green like grass, others bold and full with capacious dimensions. Frankincense and musk and amber sing of the rapture of the senses and the soul.
“I love the thought…”
I love the thought of the ancient days, when Phoebus (the sun) shone on statues and men and women played without fear or anxiety. The sky warmed their skin as they worked to perfect their bodily machines. Cybele did not see humans as a burden but, like the tender she-wolf, fed the universe. Men reveled in the beauties who proclaimed him king, their flesh lovely and unsullied.
Today the poet sees men and women and despairs of the “terrible and bleak tableau” they present. They are naked and need to be clothed, their bodies grotesque, twisted, and scrawny. Their god is Utility, and he clothes them in brazen garb. Women are corrupt and their virgin daughters will inherit their vices.
Indeed, while we are corrupted we do have pleasures the ancients would not know—such as faces marred by syphilis. We worship holy and smooth youth, admiring his innocence while he pours out his perfumes and “sweet vitality.”
“The Beacons”
Rubens has his garden of idleness and oblivion, flesh that does not allow for sex, but gives play to life's spirit as it flows and contorts.
Leonardo is a mirror where angels with mysterious smiles hide in the shadows of glaciers and pines.
Rembrandt is a “sad hospital” with murmuring; the only adornment is a large crucifix. There is tearful prayer and a sunbeam rising from the filth.
Michelangelo is a place where Hercules and Christ can comingle, and ghosts rise and stretch their fingers out in dusky light.
Puget is mournful, a “convicts’ emperor” with a prideful heart and boxing rings.
Watteau is a dance and a carnival, lit with bright lights and perambulating revelers.
Goya is an unspeakable nightmare of old women, beguiling naked children, and fetuses prepared for cannibals.
Delacroix has his lake of blood and a dark wood. Under the gloomy sky fanfares pass through.
Here are cries, curses, groans, echoing tears and calls of “Te Deum.” This call is shouted out everywhere, a beacon “on a thousand citadels.” We give you, Lord, human dignity and the sob that finally brings us to meeting you in eternity.
“The Sick Muse”
What dream visions are in your eyes and the color of your skin when you wake in the morning? Have the succubus and imp given you their fear and love? Has Nightmare dropped you into the Minturnes? I wish you were healthy, thought great thoughts, had your Christian blood flow with the sounds of Apollo, the ancient father of song, and Pan.
“The Venal Muse”
Muse, when winter and snow come, will you find logs to warm your feet? Will your shoulders become warm when the moonbeams fill the window’s glass? Will you get the gold from the sky, as your “purse and palate are both dry”? To earn your pittance you must say your “Te Deums” over and over again. Or, like a clown, you must entertain the cruel crowd with your charms, your laughter filled with tears.
“The Wretched Monk”
In the old monasteries the “tableaux of holy Verity” warms the austere and cold men. In the time of spiritual growth, some monks, now obscure, see the graveyard as their “studio” and ennoble Death.
The poet's soul is a tomb with nothing on its walls; he travels in it for eternity. He asks the slothful monk when he can give his misery to his hands and the delight of his eyes?
The poet's youth was a constant storm filled with a few bright beams of sunlight. Some red fruits were born in the garden, but now he is in his “autumn days.” He uses his rake and spade to work the eroded land, washed out by water. He does not know if the flowers in his mind will find a way to bloom in this sand. He cries. Life feeds the mouth of the Seasons and the Enemy drinks the blood of our hearts.
“Ill Fortune”
One must have courage like Sisyphus to lift this weight. Time is fleeting; Art is long. The poet's heart beats its funeral march in a churchyard far away from those where brave men are buried. It is like a gemstone in a dark cave far from searching men, or a fragrant flower emitting its scent in a lonely desert.
“A Former Life”
Once, the poet lived in a vast, columned vault that was like a grotto in the evening light. The sea melded its harmonies and sunset colors. He lived there in the calm, surrounded by the placid sea, and his slaves cooled his brow. There, he had one care—to discern and deepen my “secret grief.”
"Gypsies Traveling”
The “tribe of prophets” with babies on their back walk the road. The men carry their weapons beside the carts. The people look to the skies for their vanished chimeras. The cricket watches them pass and sings more shrilly, Cybele makes the world before them green. They will see their future darkness in “that familiar land.”
“Man and Sea”
You, free man, will love the sea because it is a mirror, and in it you will see your soul and spirit’s depths. You will dive into joy, but your heart will sometimes neglect its song because the ocean’s roar distracts it. Both man and sea have profound depths and secrets, and since they both love strife they always fight each other without remorse. They are brothers and enemies forever.
“Don Juan in Hell”
Don Juan descends into Hell, pays Charon, and with his proud gaze takes up the oars. Women with the breasts hanging out of their gowns follow him sadly. Sganarelle demands pay, Don Luis shows the dead his “shameless son.” The thin and virtuous Elvira tries to get one more smile out of her faithless husband. Don Juan is stern, though, and looks at no one.
“Punishment for Pride”
In the old days Theology was filled with energy and force-fed some “indifferent heads”; he then vaulted to ecstasy and barely knew how. Only pure souls were able to join him there.
Filled with “Satanic pride,” he crowed that he had raised Jesus high, but if he had taken the other side he could have ruined his glory and made Christ an “outlandish embryo.”
Now Reason begins its sentencing of Theology. Chaos ensues, Theology’s temple is darkness. He crosses the fields, ugly and useless, akin to a beast. The children jeer at him.
“Beauty”
The speaker is lovely, like a dream made of stone. Her breast inspires eternal love in the poet. She rule the air, her heart is pure. She hates “impulse, the breaking of line” and she do not cry or smile. The poets study her intently because she enchants them. Her wide eyes are clear as air, time, mirrors.
“The Ideal”
The speaker is not interested in the pale roses of Gavarni—the half-boots, the vignettes, the sickly women. He want a deep, dark heart like Lady Macbeth or Aeschylus’s dream, or the Night of Michelangelo with her exotic pose and charms made for a Titan’s mouth.
“The Giantess”
In the time when Nature devised a new bunch of “monstrous spawn,” the poet would have lived next to a giantess. He would have watched her body and soul grow and let her play with him. The poet would wonder about the passion in her eyes. He would take time to wander about her body, to climb her knees, and drowse comfortably below her breast when she naps in the summer sun.
“The Mask (Allegorical Statue in the Style of the Renaissance)” For Ernest Christophe, sculptor
Let us admire the holy sisters Grace and Strength in the muscles of this body. This divine, slim woman ought to be reclining on sumptuous beds for popes and princes. See her “long, sly, languorous and mocking gaze” and her delicate face with all of its features calling out that she is genteel.
But this is blasphemy and a surprise! She is supposed to be bliss but is at the top a monster with two heads! Wait, it is just a mask, a trick. See, though, the true head, seeking shelter in the lying face. The poet feel sorry for beauty; he soaks up her lie and the seas of Sorrow coming from your eyes.
Why does she cry, though, if she could conquer all mankind? It is because she has lived and lives, and will be living tomorrow and every day after that. We will too.
“Hymn to Beauty”
Beauty, are you from the heavens or the abyss? Your gaze gives kindness and crimes, your eyes have the evening and the morning. Your kiss is potion that freezes heroes and warms children. Destiny is your pet and walks with you as you scatter joy and sorrow. You govern all and heed no man. You walk on the corpses and charm with horror. Murder is a trinket on your belly. You are a candle in which a mayfly perishes; a man bending to you looks like a dying man touching his tomb. But does it even matter if you are from heaven or hell if your eye or smile can help me find “unknown, sublime infinity?” I care not if you are angel or siren, as long as your eyes and perfume and movements make the world and my time in it less terrible.
Analysis
This first set of twenty or so poems features some of Baudelaire’s most memorable and critically significant creations; they also introduce several themes and motifs that play out over the entirety of Fleurs, such as the role of the poet, beauty, nature, and earthly and spiritual woes. These woes indicate the contradictions and complexities of Baudelaire’s work. Baudelaire welcomes his poetic and aesthetic vision, but it torments him. He is caught between “Spleen and Ideal,” just as apt to venture into Hell (“Don Juan in Hell”) and he is to let his spirit soar (“Elevation”). He laments the vices and grotesquerie of men and women in his age (“I love the thought…”) but is drawn to the women whose charms are such that he wonders if they are angel or siren (“Hymn to Beauty”). He speaks of God as much as he revels in the chthonic. He experiences ecstasy (“Hymn to Beauty”) and the anguish of exile (“The Gypsies”). Overall, Baudelaire is a poet of manifold impulses and passions, his work knit together by his desire to convey, sometimes ironically, sometimes histrionically, what those passions do to him spiritually and emotionally.
The first poem of Fleurs, “Benediction,” may use the third person, and it certainly resonates universally in terms of the struggle of poets, but it is also a markedly autobiographical poem, clearly evoking the anguish Baudelaire felt when his mother married a man he hated. The title is ironic, for the “Benediction” is short-lived when Baudelaire depicts how the mother despised her son and plotted his ruin. The child is raised by angels, however, and has a singular ability to ignore the persecutions and plottings of those around him.
At the end of the poem he “lifts his arms in piety” and praises God for his suffering, because he knows he will “feast throughout eternity.” He will wear a “mystic crown” as a reminder of his blessing and salvation. However, as critic Dorothy M. Betz notes, “the poet’s need to express celestial light in worldly terms prefigures the loss of this vision that will become evident in subsequent poems of Les Fleurs du Mal.” This is the tension between “spleen” and the “ideal” that “Benediction” embodies: “the poet’s tragic fate lies in his consciousness that he is simultaneously drawn to each of these extremes.” It is important to remember while we are at the beginning of Fleurs that Baudelaire intended the entire thing to be read as one work, so it is not a stretch, as Betz writes, to see the eyes and the mirrors at the end of the poem as foreshadowing the eyes of the women described in later poems who will, in Baudelaire’s mind, separate him from his ideal. The language and images of the poem help emphasize that Baudelaire will eventually be separated from paradise. The angel admires the poet for being “free as a bird” but the seductress mocks him as a “pitiful and trembling baby bird”; she also leads him to pagan worship of her rather than piety towards God. ” The “mystic crown” has earthly gems. The bread and wine, symbols of Communion, are sullied with spit. The Fall is imminent.
“Correspondences” is renowned for its assertion that Nature is imbued with symbols that can point one to morality and spiritual epiphany. Baudelaire suggests that Nature is as a temple with a message of revelation for the poet to discern, though the words are confused and the poet must traverse the “groves of symbols.” Baudelaire fuses the similarly-shaped trees and church pillars to suggest a living cathedral; he also melds scents and sounds to suggest the poet’s transcendent aesthetic and spiritual moment. Not all is sweet and pure, though, for the heavier, “corrupted” spicy scents at the end connote exotic and sensual religious ritual and celebration, as well as allude to the gifts brought by the Three Kings to the Christ child. Odors (perfumes, spices, hair, etc.) are extremely important for Baudelaire and manifest themselves frequently in his oeuvre; he sees them as stimulants to emotion, memory, and sentiment.
The poem also recalls the Platonic theory of forms, according to which only non-physical forms or pure ideas are truly real. According to Baudelaire and many of his contemporaries, the poet can gain a kind of access to these forms through his uncommon insight and perceptiveness. The poem also, as critic Doris Earnshaw writes, asserts the prominence of language, because “nature’s ‘messages’ are presented in words by the poet…[and] this rich poem speaks of communication and reception of truth.” Art provides an avenue toward transcendence, and Baudelaire hopes his readers will let him, the poet, lead them. Earnshaw does clarify that Baudelaire was not much of a “nature-lover” in the classical sense, preferring the artificial nature of cities, but that “the law and order of abstract nature was indeed his ideal…and the senses could introduce one to that world.”
In “The Albatross” Baudelaire returns to the singular role of the poet, comparing him to a noble albatross with whom ignorant men sport. It alludes to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798) in which the albatross, an emblem of good luck, is brought down by a mariner in an act that seems to be responsible for the subsequent calamities; the mariner then has to wear the dead bird around his neck, which becomes a metaphor for carrying a burden, suffering, and penance. As the albatross is the poet in Baudelaire’s work, we can see it as a version of that classic Romantic trope—the noble poet isolated and misunderstood by the masses, both blessed and burdened by his vision. This is also a potent comparison to Christ, who suffered at the hands of the Philistines and was paraded before the “hooting crowds.”
“Beacons” initially seems like a rather straightforward paean to some of the greatest painters in Western art—Rubens, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Goya, Delacroix, Puget, Leonardo, and Watteau. Baudelaire distinguished himself as an art critic throughout his career, so he knew the work of these men well. Each painter is considered for his singular achievement, but—here is the interesting part—rarely does Baudelaire laud the visual beauty of their canvases. Instead, he focuses on what is evoked by their work, what the sensations caused by their work are. Where Watteau’s work feels like floating through a twinkling carnival, Goya’s feels like a “nightmare full of things unspeakable.” Delacroix is like a Dantean journey through a forest under a “gloomy sky,” and Leonardo a hazy landscape peopled with mysterious and smiling angels, conveying a sense of the somber and the profound. Rembrandt is a “sad hospital full of strange whispering,” a powerful image to anyone familiar with the mute and hollow-eyed self portraits of his later years. Scent, sight, sound, and smell are predominant. Ruben’s figures feel like a “pillow,” Michelangelo’s are wreathed in a “dusky light,” Delacroix’s canvases sound with “strange fanfares” and Goya’s have “fetuses one cooks for midnight revelers.” The ninth and tenth stanzas, as critic Anne W. Sienkewicz writes, “unite all these evocations of visual images with scent and sound, including Puget’s emotions, in a blend of impressions. They are finally transmuted into vocal expressions, both curses and Te Deums. The poet’s accomplishment, to transform the visual arts into words, is made explicit in these stanzas.” Overall, Baudelaire depicts the art in both religious and profane terms; he calls it “opium divine.” Art lights up the darkness (hence the title of the poem), touches our soul, and mitigates Ennui.
