Summary
“The Jewels”
The poet's love is nude, wearing only jewelry, as if she was in a moor’s harem. When she dances the gems ring out and enchant him to lovers’ ecstasy. She lies on a divan and smiles at the poet's love. She is as a tamed tiger as she poses in new and lovely ways. She is open and undulating like a swan, her arms and legs and shoulders slick with oil. She tempts the poet's eyes with her belly and breasts, breaking his soul’s peace. The difference between her waist and thighs is like that of a boy below and an Antiope below. Her brown skin is divine in the room where only the hearth gives out light, melding its blazing with the amber glow of her skin.
“Exotic Perfume”
The poet breathes his beloved's scent in, his eyes closed. He sees shorelines open and inviting before him. He sees an “idle isle” with lush trees and lean, strong men and women with bold eyes. His beloved's scent leads him to the shores where the waves weary the sails and masts. The fragrance of the tamarind blends with that of the sea, filling his nostrils and floating to his brain.
“Head of Hair”
The poet exults in his beloved's locks, which flow down her neck. He will shake them to fill the room with perfumed memories. In the scent live Africa and Asia and a whole distant world; he swims on her scent while others settle for symphonies. He will go where trees and men, full of sap, recline in the heat. The tresses will carry him away, by the dreamy and dazzling sea. It is as a harbor where his soul drinks harmonies and hues and vessels glide, opening their arms to the sky.
He will put his dizzy and intoxicated head in the black sea and his soul will roll with caresses. Indolence will return, leisure and lulling as well. In this blue head of hair he sees the sky, in the locks he smells cocoa-oil and musk.
He will always scatter jewels in her hair so she does not cool to his desire. She is his oasis, his drinking-gourd for sweet wine.
“I love you as I love…”
Baudelaire writes that he loves his beloved as he loves the night, and because she leaves him. She tempts him in the night and fills the space. He tries to attack her like worms attacking a corpse; he loves her cruelty and her beautiful iciness.
“You’d entertain the universe…”
The poet describes a foul woman with a cruel soul who would entertain the world in her bed. She chews hearts with her teeth and her eyes blaze out in their power; they are not aware of their beauty. She is blind and deaf in her fertile brutalities but she has no shame and does not see how her charms pale in the mirrors. Her evil has never made her heart afraid, for Nature uses her. She is woman, “queen of sins,” a sublime disgrace.
“Sed non satiate”
The poet calls his beloved a unique goddess, brown and wild and perfumed. She is the work of Faust, of a wizard; she is an “Ebony sorceress.” Her moist lips are more valuable than wine or opium and her eyes feed the poet's ennui. He wishes she would pour him a colder drink from those orbs, though, because he am not powerful enough to withstand that hellishness.
“The way her silky garments…”
When the poet's beloved walks, her silky garments make it look like she is dancing, or like she is a serpent controlled by a charmer. She cares nothing for the suffering of humanity, much like the desert, skies, and oceans. Her eyes gleam like stones and her essence is both angelic and Sphinx-like. She has a “frigid majesty,” and is hard like stones and metals.
“The Dancing Serpent”
Baudelaire adores his beloved's body when it is languorous, her skin like silk. Her hair is an ocean of perfume. His soul sets out on a course for her. Her eyes reveal nothing and are like “two cold stones.” Her walk makes him think of a serpent, her head lolls with idleness. Her body bends like a boat ebbing with the sea. He is drinking her as a “gypsy wine” because she is tart and bitter.
“A Carcass”
The poet addresses his beloved, asking if she remembers the object they saw one morning. It was a carcass reclining by the bend in the path and its legs were open like a whore’s, revealing its womb in an inviting way. The sun was warming the body and giving back to Nature what she’d combined in that rotten form. The sky lit up the “marvelous meat” like flowers and the scent was so overpowering that the poet's beloved almost fainted. Flies buzzed and maggots flowed over the clothes.
The carcass seemed to breathe and live on. It made musical noises like brooks and breezes. The shapes of the body faded like a sketch of an artist that an artist could only complete with memory.
A dog growled in the bush, angry that the poet and his lady interrupted her feast. One day the lady too will be like this, “horrible, filthy, undone." After her rites, she will moulder under the weeds as well, and she must tell the worms who love her body that he, the poet, will keep her essence alive in his poetry.
“De profundis clamavi”
The poet begs pity because his heart is in a deep abyss and terrors whirl above him. There is a bright sun for six months and then total night; there are no trees or streams. However, that is not as terrible as the sun’s “cold glad,” and the night followed by Chaos. He is jealous of the animals that can sleep. Time passes so slowly.
“The Vampire”
The poet accuses his beloved of piercing his heart like a blade, bold as demons in a drunken procession. She made her bed and her kingdom in his soul. He damns her, he abhors her; he is bound like a drunkard to his jug. He prayed for deliverance and for courage but the vial and sword said he was not worthy. Even if he were released from slavery he could not help but reawaken his vampire lover with a kiss.
“Lethe”
The poet calls to his beloved, expressing both desire and hatred: she is his monster and his tiger. He wants to grasp her thick hair and hide his head in her perfumes and under her petticoats. He wants to sleep like death and dream of kissing her all over without shame. In her he could quell his sobs, forget his sorrows. Lethe is in her kiss. His destiny and delight are to obey like the martyr obeys. His lips will suck out the cure for his bitterness from her breasts, behind which there is no heart.
“Beside a monstrous Jewish whore…”
One night the poet lay beside a monstrous Jewish whore; they looked like two corpses. He saw her “native majesty” in her strong gaze and perfumed hair, her visage inspiring him to remember another woman. He would have kissed her body from her feet to her dark hair if, one night, she could dim the brilliant cruelty in her “soulless eyes.”
“Remorse after Death”
Baudelaire muses how his beloved, a gloomy beauty and a vain harlot, could not know how living the way she did would result in death coming for her. She will find her boudoir turned into a cave, a stone crushing her breast and loins, and all desire halted.
“The Cat”
The poet espies a cat and calls for it to come to him but to conceal its claws. He wants to stroke its body and look into its steel eyes, feeling the electricity beneath his hand. He then thinks of his woman and how her gaze is like the cat’s—deep and chill. Her fragrance swirls dangerously around her brown skin.
“Duellum”
Baudelaire in a gleeful but self-aware fashion tells the story of two warriors fighting and their blood flying as they quest for their childish love. Their swords break like their youthful life fractures, and tooth and nail replace the sword in the “bitter heat of love.” The warriors fall into a haunted ravine and their skin hangs on thorns. This is Hell, and they will roll about here for eternity.
“The Balcony”
The poet ardently implores his mistress, “mother of memories,” to remember their caresses and the hearth and the sky. He conjures those nights lit by coal and the balcony where her bosom was so sweet to him. They told each other things in those dimly lit evenings. The suns are warm and beautiful and the heart is good. He bends to her, his queen, and thinks he can smell the fragrance of her blood. He remembers how night would come and they would be covered. His eyes would seek hers in the dark and he would drink her breath like poison and hold her feet in his hands while she slept. He knows he is good at conjuring the happy times and seeing his past. Where, if not her beauty and body, should he find pleasure? Will their vows and kisses and perfumes be reborn?
“The Possessed”
The poet expresses his desire to fully possess his beloved. He sees her as a moon and wants her covered like the sun is covered by mist. He wants her fires dampened so she is quiet and dim. However, if she chooses to move to the light and strut in Folly, he admits that is okay too. She can light up, leap from her sheath. He loves all her moods and wants her to do as she pleases. Ultimately, he himself appears to be the one possessed, crying out that he worships his adored Beelzebub.
“A Phantom”
I. 'The Blackness': Destiny seems to have sentenced the poet to life in the blackness where there is no sun. He sees himself living with Night and beholden to an artist God who condemned him to paint the gloom. Like a cook with a horrible appetite he cooks and metaphorically eats his own heart. Sometimes he sees a ghost, a vision lounging like a dream—it is his beloved.
II. 'The Perfume': Baudelaire asks his reader if they have ever breathed a scent that made them dizzy—the incense in a church? The musk of a sachet? Through scent the past is restored by magic, as when the lover takes the flower from the body of his beloved. A scent rises from the beloved's “resilient locks” and her clothes, and he breathes in deeply.
III. 'The Frame': Just as a frame adds something mysterious and magnetic to the art even though the brush is that which is praised, the poet notes that jewels and furnishings add to his beloved’s display. She is arrogant, though, and at times has thought everyone loved her. She would swathe her nudity in luxurious silks and linens and her movements were graceful like a monkey’s.
IV. 'The Portrait': Disease and Death destroy the fire that blazed for the poet and his love. The tender eyes, the mouth that he drowned in, the healing kisses…what remains, he wonders? It is appalling that his love is only a pale sketch; like the poet, Time as a “maleficent old man” rubs her out. Time murders Life and Art, but they will never kill her in the poet's memory.
“I give to you these verses…”
The poet devotes these verses to his beloved so that some day if his name brings humanity pleasure, her memory will be suspended in time. From pit to sky, only he can bear her after death. She is shadow and steps lightly on mortal men who have judged her because she lives on through his poetry.
“Semper eadem”
Baudelaire’s beloved complains that a sorrow grows inside her like a sea rising on a rock. Why, he asks her? He muses that it is because life is an evil, which all men know. It is not mysterious; it sparkles (as she does) for everyone. He encourages her not to be curious about this but to be quiet. Death holds more subtlety than Life does. The poet simply wants to be lost in the lie he has constructed of who she is—quiet, subtle.
“Completely One”
The Devil came to the poet one morning and asked him which of his beloved’s charming body parts is the sweetest. The poet foiled the Devil by replying that he found solace in the whole of her form. All is ravishing; not just one thing seduces. She is “Daybreak’s dazzling” and “Night’s consoling sympathy.” It is impossible to analyze her numerous pieces. She creates in the poet a metamorphosis and a confusion of senses, making music when she breathes and sounding like perfume.
“What will you say tonight…”
The poet sees himself as a lonely soul with an old dried-up heart, and wonders what he will say to the beautiful and dear one who brings back the bloom. His pride will sing her praises, her will, her angelic body, her bright eyes. Her ghost dances in front of crowds at night and boldly proclaims that all must love the Beautiful, that she is their “Guardian, Madonna, Muse!”
Analysis
This section of poems is almost entirely concerned with women: whores, sex, seduction, beauty, perfume and jewels, desire. Baudelaire's emotion ranges from depression to lust to rage to disdain to worship, chronicling his obsession with a few women in particular. The poems that include “The Jewels,” “Exotic Perfume,” “Head of Hair,” “The Vampire,” and “Lethe” are about Jeanne Duval, the beautiful mulatto woman to whom Baudelaire was fiercely attracted, though he claimed she undermined and failed to understand his work. Another is dedicated to Madame Sabatier, a witty and fashionable independent woman for whom Baudelaire felt a mostly platonic and lofty love (when she responded to his admiration by offering herself, he abruptly dropped her). Her poems are supposed to be more about the cycle of idealized love, whereas the poems about the third woman, Marie Dabraun, an actress, possess a mixture of attitudes. In his introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics volume of Fleurs, Jonathan Culler deems the love poems "extraordinary," writing, "by turn tender, reverent, vicious, sententious, suppliant, declamatory, mocking, and insinuating, these poems often shift abruptly from one to another, enacting the instabilities of fantasy so central to passion."
The Duval poems together provide a fascinating look at Baudelaire’s conception of beauty and love. Both of those are indeed responsible for Man’s original sin and can be simultaneously terrible and alluring. In “Beauty” and “Hymn to Beauty” from the prior section, Baudelaire equates beauty with coldness, aloofness. The woman in “Beauty” is as mysterious as the Sphinx, cold as snow, and unyielding. In “Hymn to Beauty” the woman is both “infernal and divine,” a multitude of contradictions; her “Horror is charming as your other gems.”
For Baudelaire, as Kathryn Oliver Mills notes, the descriptions of women are multidimensional. In some he “alchemizes the physical elements of the woman into an ethereal substance…When Baudelaire idolizes the woman as a form of art…by the end of most poems the woman’s body is conspicuous by its removal.” Similarly, “the human struggle starts with the flesh but ultimately takes place on the metaphysical plane. Woman, on this level, represents good or evil.” In “Sed non satiate” the woman is a “heartless demon” and in “The Vampire” the woman enslaved him in his lust and “invaded [his] sorrowful heart.” Perfume, hair, dancing, undulating garments, clear eyes, and expanses of amber skin all spark Baudelaire’s lust.
We now turn to individual poems, beginning with “Exotic Perfume.” As in many of the poems, the senses play an important role. Baudelaire smells the woman’s skin and is transported to a shoreline with savory fruit and bright sunlight. The fragrance leads him to “these charming shores” and fills his nostrils with scent at the same time as his spirit blends with “the boatmen’s chant.” The olfactory sensation becomes the predominant subject of the poem, overshadowing the woman and even Baudelaire himself. Critic Karen A. Harrington explains that the real and imaginary are linked in this poem through the scent, for “the woman’s fragrance is an indicator of the poem’s real world, but its subsequent dispersal and consumption find expression in the realm of the imaginary.” That imaginary world may be slightly dangerous, but Baudelaire prefers not to dwell on particulars like the women’s “frank” eyes, the idleness, the “onslaughts of the waves.” He is content with his passion and nothing else. Two poems later, though, in “I love you as I love…” he rues how the woman separates him from “heaven’s blue,” and three poems later in “You'd entertain the universe…” he cries out “Why are you not ashamed, how have you not / In mirrors seen your charms turn pale?”
In “Head of Hair” Baudelaire continues to link scent with memory, writing “O locks! O perfume charged with nonchalance! / What ecstasy! To people our dark room / With memories that sleep within this mane.” He imagines the distant worlds of Asia and Africa, places he’d never been, and a sea filled with ships and sails. He uses a metaphor of diving into the sea to depict his indulgence in the woman’s scent, giving the sense that he is utterly enclosed, confined, and lost to his sensations. He lets himself go into a meditative, almost intoxicated state, as if he were experiencing a religious vision. He is moved to hyperbolic assertions of his desire to keep the woman within him forever, suggesting that he is no longer moored to rationality or the intellect.
Finally, we turn to one of the most grotesque and provocative poems in Baudelaire’s oeuvre: “A Carcass.” It exemplifies Baudelaire’s flouting of aesthetic and moral conventions, taking for its subject something outrageous and using that to attain spiritual and poetic insight. That subject, as it has been for a long time in poetry and art, is Woman; but ironically that woman is now a decaying corpse. Poet Rainer Maria Rilke lauded this quality of Baudelaire’s, and, in a text on Baudelaire’s influence on modern artist Paul Cezanne, stated “I could not help thinking that without [“A Carcass”] the whole development toward objective expression, which we now think we recognize in Cezanne, could not have started; it had to be there first in its inexorability. Artistic observation had first to have prevailed upon itself far enough to see even in the horrible and apparently merely repulsive that which is and which, with everything else that is, is valid.” What makes this poem so memorable is, as critic Camille Paglia writes, “Nature’s dichotomy of sunniness and cannibalism is mirrored in the poem’s polished classical form and gross content, beauty and repulsiveness joined.” Baudelaire’s companion, whom he describes as “my angel,” “my love,” “my beauty,” “regent of grace,” is forced to confront her monstrous double (as Paglia says Baudelaire does in “Voyage to Cythera").
This poem is also the one that critics focus on most when looking at the assertion that Baudelaire melded sex and death and invented “la litterature-charogne” (carcass literature). Indeed, Baudelaire’s language practically oozes with sex. The carcass “reclined / On a bed,” with her legs “spread out like a lecherous whore” and open “in slick invitational style.” It is hot due to the rays of the sun, and fetid and intense like “flowers in bloom.” The maggots make the body seem to breathe, and its form rises and falls and “[pulses] like a wave;” the image is nearly orgasmic. And, rather than evince the reaction most people would have upon viewing a rotting corpse—disgust and horror—Baudelaire seems to relish the sight. He delights in the “whole teeming world” that is filled with music “like babbling brooks and the breeze.” Instead of comforting his shocked companion he laughs that she too will someday be like this corpse, “Horrible, filthy, undone.” His smile—and the irony and black humor—are almost palpable. After all, is there anything more macabrely humorous than maggots making a body move rather than the life force/spirit traditionally seen to be bestowed by God?
Critic Annette McLees looks at Baudelaire’s fantastic linked images relating to movement that show the interrelationship between spirit and nature. There is movement in the carcass’s spread legs and the spreading of blooming flowers. There is movement in the buzzing flies, the teeming maggots, both of which make the corpse seem animated. Baudelaire is particularly obsessed with the maggots on the carcass, and “the carcass loses its integrity as a body as the insects absorb the observer’s attention.” Instead, the movement of the body and how it seems creepily alive sparks Baudelaire’s imagination and makes him consider the carcass as a “microcosm: life begins, is lived, and ends in a cycle of procreation and death. What one would expect to symbolize death and decay is instead a symbol of life and immortality.” In terms of life, that is also evinced through the metaphor of the artistic creation, the incomplete and eroded-by-time sketch that the artist has to step back into using the power of memory. In terms of immortality, Baudelaire abruptly ends his poem not with a memento mori, as he’d been doing for the entirety of the poem, but instead with an assertion that while the worms devour his beloved he will nobly secure her immortality in poetry. This is ironic, of course, as McLees writes: “[Baudelaire] devalues [immortality] and makes it quite unconvincing by relegating it to just two lines in a poem forty-eight lines long. The ironic tone conveys the poet’s self-mockery. He has, after all, chosen a decaying carcass to symbolize Poetry and woman.”
