Charles Baudelaire

Born in capital of France in 1821, Charles Baudelaire has long been recognised as not nevertheless sensation of the vastest poets of the nineteenth one C besides in want manner a forefather of modern art. Baudelaire lived during a libertine time in French history and his work was concussioned by a number of political events. However, his personal sustenance was also blotto One of the most scarring episodes of his life was the finis of his father in 1827 and his mothers overhasty remarriage to a general in the French army. Baudelaire detested his stepfather some(prenominal) person on the whole in ally and as a symbol of the corrupt July monarchy established following the 1830 Revolution.He went to great lengths to upset his stepfather, squandering his inheritance and living a bohemian lifestyle. confused about his behavior, his family sent him on a hit across the Mediterranean, whose foreign dish left a lasting impression on the preadolescent poet. Shortly after Baudelaires return to genus Paris, the 1848 Revolution overthrew the July monarch and established a republic in France for the first time in to a greater extent than than 50 years. Baudelaire greeted the whirling with enthusiasm, fighting among the barricades and openly defying his stepfather in public.However, his joy soon dark to disenchantment when Louis Napoleon, the original Napoleons nephew, overthrew the jiffy Republic in 1851. Louis Napoleons coup detat instituted the Second Empire, ending the hopes for a republican haoma of government that men wish Baudelaire favored. His disenchantment and so turned to despair when Louis Napoleon began an intense reconstruct and public flora project aimed at modernizing Paris. Baudelaire was horrified with the destruction of the past and medieval sections of Paris that he had cal conduct his home. His longing for the old Paris would toy a major portion in his poesy.Baudelaires disgust with politics led to a rejection of cando r in favor of an obsessive fantasy creation excite by drugs, the alien beauty of the Mediterranean, and the search for heat. He was potently influenced in this regard not only by his experiences along the Mediterranean barely also by Edgar Allen Poe, whose papers he translated into French. Baudelaire was fascinated by Poes evocation of the dark side of the caprice, and he found a comparably sinister seductiveness in the paintings of Eugene Delacroix and Edouard Manet, as well as the music of Wagner. These themes and influences fulfil a redominant role in Baudelaires 1857 collection of verse, The Flowers of Evil, which juxtaposed the negative themes of exile, decay, and remnant with an holy man universe of happiness. Baudelaires exotic themes rapidly caught the attention of the government, which condemned The Flowers of Evil for immorality. contrasted his friend, Gustave Flaubert, whose Madame Bovary was also put on trial, Baudelaire lost his case, had to pay a fine, a nd was agonistic to remove some poems from the collection. Baudelaire was devastated by this rejection of his work, which he attributed to the hypocrisy of a bourgeoisie incapable of understanding delicate innovation. just at the like time, he proverb the condemnation of his work as the culmination of the disparate themes and events that had shaped his exquisite talent since his youth no achievement of beauty could be only by bitterness and disappointments. Indeed, with this philosophy, Baudelaire shifted the attention of the art k forthwithledge base to the darker side of life, invigorate contemporary and future artists to new levels of perception and provocation. Analysis A justification of hopes, dreams, failures, and sins, The Flowers of Evil tastes to extract beauty from the malignant. different tralatitious poetry that relied on the dispassionate beauty of the natural man to convey emotions, Baudelaire mat up that modern poetry must give the sack the artificial and paradoxical aspects of life. He thought that beauty could evolve on its own, irrespective of nature and even fueled by sin. The resultant role is a clear op patch amid deuce worlds, lien and the deification. short temper signifies boththing that is wrong with the world death, despair, solitude, murder, and disease. (The short temper, an pipe organ that removes disease-causing agents from the bloodstream, was handed-downly associated with malaise spleen is a synonym for ill-temper. ) In contrast, the standard re relegates a transcendence over the harsh substantiveity of spleen, where love is possible and the b falls are united in ecstasy. The ideal is primarily an escape of reality through with(predicate) wine, opium, travel, and passion. Dulling the harsh impact of ones failure and regrets, the ideal is an imagined state of happiness, ecstasy, and voluptuousness where time and death rush no place. Baudelaire ofttimes uses titillating patternry to convey the imp assioned olfactory perception of the ideal. However, the loud talker system is consistently disappointed as spleen again takes up its reign.Read also Edgar Allan Poe DrugsHe is endlessly confronted with the fear of death, the failure of his pull up stakes, and the suffocation of his spirit. provided even as the poems loud loudspeaker system system system is thwarted by spleen, Baudelaire himself never desists in his attack to make the bizarre beautiful, an attempt perfectly carryed by the juxta panorama of his dickens worlds. As in the poem Carrion, the decomposing flesh has not only artistic value but inspires the poet to render it beauti richly. Women are Baudelaires pregnant ejaculate of symbolism, often serving as an intermediary between the ideal and spleen.Thus, fleck the speaker must run his hands through a womans hair in order to conjure up his ideal world, he later compares his lover to a decomposing animal, moveing her that one day she will be caressing wo rms instead of him. His lover is both his muse, providing ephemeral perfection, and a curse, excoriate him to unrequited love and an early death. Women, thus, embody both what Baudelaire inspected the elevation toward theology and what he referred to as the gradual logical argument toward the Tempter They are bright guides of his imagination but also abominable vampires that intensify his sense of spleen, or ill temper.The result is a moderate misogyny Baudelaire associates women with nature thus, his attempt to capture the poetry of the artificial necessarily denied women a positive role in his artistic vision. Baudelaires poetry also obsessively wakes the front of death. In To a Passerby, a possible love interest turns out to be a menacing death. Female demons, vampires, and monsters also consistently remind the speaker of his mortality. However, the passing of time, especially in the formula of a newly remodeled Paris, isolates the speaker and makes him feel alien from society.This theme of alienation leaves the speaker alone to the usurious contemplation of himself and the hopes of a consoling death. Baudelaire set ahead emphasizes the proximity of death through his reliance on religious mental take tory and fantasy. He earnestly believes that Satan controls his everyday actions, making sin a depressing reminder of his miss of pardon will and eventual(prenominal) death. Finally, elements of fantastical horrorfrom ghosts to bats to color cats thrive the destructive force of the spleen on the mind.Baudelaire was inspired by Edgar Allen Poes Tales of Mystery and Imagination, and he apothegm Poes use of fantasy as a way of emphasizing the mystery and tragedy of pitying existence. For example, Baudelaires terzetto different poems about black cats express what he saw as the quizzical ambiguity of women. Moreover, the battlefront of tortured demons and phantoms make the possibility of death more immediate to the speaker, prefiguring the fe ar and isolation death will bring. drumhead Baudelaire splendidly begins The Flowers of Evil by personally addressing his indorser as a quisling in the creation of his poetry Hypocrite readermy paritymy brother In To the Reader, the speaker evokes a world filled with decay, sin, and hypocrisy, and henpecked by Satan. He claims that it is the Devil and not God who controls our actions with puppet strings, vaporizing our free will. instinctively drawn toward hell, humans are nothing but instruments of death, more ugly, evil, and fouler than some(prenominal) monster or demon. The speaker claims that he and the reader double-dyed(a) this compute of humanity One side of humanity (the reader) r from each onees for fantasy and sham honesty, piece of music the other (the speaker) exposes the tediousness of modern life.The speaker continues to rely on contradictions between beauty and unsightliness in The Albatross. This poem relates how sailors enjoy trapping and pestiferous behemoth millstonees that are too weak to escape. Calling these birds captive kings, the speaker marvels at their ugly awkwardness on land compared to their graceful insure of the skies. retributive as in the introductory poem, the speaker compares himself to the fallen image of the albatross, detect that poets are desirewise exiled and ridiculed on earth. The beauty they have contactn in the chuck out makes no sense to the teasing crowd Their giant wings hold up them from locomote. Many other poems also address the role of the poet. In Benediction, he says I love that You hold a place for the Poet / In the ranks of the unholy and the saints legions, / That You invite him to an eternal festival / Of thrones, of virtues, of dominations. This presage federal agency is also a dominant theme in Elevation, in which the speakers godly ascendancy to the field is compared to the poets omniscient and paradoxical power to understand the silence of superlatives and mutes. His privileged position to savor the secrets of the world allows him to create and define beauty.In conveying the power of the poet, the speaker relies on the lecture of the mythicalally sublime and on spiritual exoticism. The godlike gentle wind of the speakers spirit in Elevation becomes the artistry of Apollo and the fertility of Sybille in I love the Naked Ages. He then travels back in time, rejecting reality and the material world, and conjuring up the spirits of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Hercules in The Beacons. The power of the poet allows the speaker to invoke sensations from the reader that correspond to the works of each artistic figure.Thus, he uses this powerhis imagination to create beacons that, like divine opium, illuminate a mythical world that mortals, lost in the grand woods, cannot usually see. After first evoking the accomplishments of great artists, the speaker proposes a transit to a mythical world of his own creation. He first send for up Languorous Asia and passionate Africa in the poem The Head of Hair. raceway his fingers through a womans hair allows the speaker to create and travel to an exotic land of freedom and happiness.In foreign Perfume, a womans scent allows the speaker to evoke A lazy island where nature produces / Singular tress and risque fruits. The image of the perfect woman is then an intermediary to an ideal world in Invitation to a Voyage, where scents of amber and oriental splendor capture the speakers imagination. Together with his effeminate companion, the speaker expresses the power of the poet to create an idyllic setting just for them There, all is nothing but beauty and elegance, / Luxury, calm and voluptuousness. FormBaudelaire was a classically learn poet and as a result, his poems follow traditional poetic social systems and hoarfrost schemes (ABAB or AABB). Yet Baudelaire also wanted to provoke his contemporary readers, good luck with traditional style when it would best suit his poetrys overall effect. For example, in Exotic Perfume, he contrasted traditional meter (which contains a break after every ordinal syllable in a ten-syllable line) with enjambment in the first quatrain. The result is an amplified image of light Baudelaire evokes the ecstasy of this image by juxtaposing it with he calm manner of the musical rhythm in the inauguration of the poem. Other departures from tradition include Baudelaires habiliments of conveying ecstasy with exclamation points, and of expressing the accessibility of happiness with the indicative precede and future verb tenses, both of which function to enhance his poetrys expressive tone. Moreover, none of his innovations came at the cost of formal beauty Baudelaires poetry has often been described as the most musical and melodious poetry in the French language. explanation The Flowers of Evil evokes a world of paradox already implicit in the contrast of the title.The word evil (the French word is mal, me aning both evil and sickness) comes to signify the pain and misery inflicted on the speaker, which he responds to with melancholy, anxiety, and a fear of death. moreover for Baudelaire, there is also something seductive about evil. Thus, while writing The Flowers of Evil, Baudelaire often said that his intent was to extract beauty from evil. Unlike traditional poets who had only tensenessed on the simplistically pretty, Baudelaire chose to fuel his language with horror, sin, and the macabre.The speaker describes this duality in the introductory poem, in which he explains that he and the reader form two sides of the same coin. Together, they mulct out what Baudelaire called the tragedy of mans twoness. He saw existence itself as paradoxical, each man feeling two coincident inclinations one toward the grace and elevation of God, the other an animalistic descent toward Satan. plainly like the physical beauty of flowers intertwined with the tweet threat of evil, Baudelaire felt that one extreme could not exist without the other.Baudelaire struggled with his Catholicism his whole life and, thus, make religion a prevalent theme in his poetry. His language is steeped in biblical imagery, from the wrath of Satan, to the crucifixion, to the Fall of Adam and Eve. He was haunt with Original Sin, keen the loss of his free will and projecting his sense of guilt onto images of women. Yet in the first part of the Spleen and beau ideal section, Baudelaire emphasizes the harmony and perfection of an ideal world through his special compactness to God He first compares himself to a divine and martyred creature in TheAlbatross and then gives himself divine powers in Elevation, combining words like infinity, immensity, divine, and hover. The speaker also has an extraordinary power to create, weaving together abstract nirvanas with coercive human experiences to form an ideal world. For example, in Correspondences, the speaker evokes amber, musk, benzoin and odourise / That sing, transporting the thought and sense. He not only has the power to give office to things that are silent but also relies on images of warmth, luxury, and pleasure to call upon and induct the readers senses.In Exotic Perfume, the theme of the voyage is made possible by closing ones eyes and breathing in the warm scent of a womans breasts. In effect, reading Baudelaire means feeling Baudelaire The profusion of pleasure-inducing representations of heat, sound, and scent extract that happiness involves a joining of the senses. This first section is devoted only if to the ideal, and Baudelaire relies on the abstraction of myth to convey the escape from reality and suck into nostalgia that the ideal represents. This theme recalls the poets own flight from the corruption of Paris with his trip out along the Mediterranean.In The Head of Hair, the speaker indeterminately refers to Languorous Africa and passionate Asia, whose abstract presence further stimulates the reade rs imagination with the mythical symbolism of sea, ocean, turn over, and oasis. The figure of women further contributes to this ideal world as an intermediary to happiness. The speaker must each remain in a womans scent, caress her hair, or otherwise fill with her presence in order to conjure up the paradise he seeks. His importunate ecstasy in this poem derives from the sensual presence of his lover The world o my love wims on your fragrance. Spleen and paragon, Part I Summary Baudelaire famously begins The Flowers of Evil by personally addressing his reader as a partner in the creation of his poetry Hypocrite readermy likenessmy brother In To the Reader, the speaker evokes a world filled with decay, sin, and hypocrisy, and dominated by Satan. He claims that it is the Devil and not God who controls our actions with puppet strings, vaporizing our free will. Instinctively drawn toward hell, humans are nothing but instruments of death, more ugly, evil, and fouler than any mon ster or demon.The speaker claims that he and the reader complete this image of humanity One side of humanity (the reader) reaches for fantasy and false honesty, while the other (the speaker) exposes the boredom of modern life. The speaker continues to rely on contradictions between beauty and unsightliness in The Albatross. This poem relates how sailors enjoy trapping and mocking giant albatrosses that are too weak to escape. Calling these birds captive kings, the speaker marvels at their ugly awkwardness on land compared to their graceful command of the skies.Just as in the introductory poem, the speaker compares himself to the fallen image of the albatross, observing that poets are likewise exiled and ridiculed on earth. The beauty they have seen in the sky makes no sense to the teasing crowd Their giant wings honor them from walking. Many other poems also address the role of the poet. In Benediction, he says I know that You hold a place for the Poet / In the ranks of the feli citous and the saints legions, / That You invite him to an eternal festival / Of thrones, of virtues, of dominations. This divine power is also a dominant theme in Elevation, in which the speakers godlike ascendancy to the celestial sphere is compared to the poets omniscient and paradoxical power to understand the silence of flowers and mutes. His privileged position to savor the secrets of the world allows him to create and define beauty. In conveying the power of the poet, the speaker relies on the language of the mythically sublime and on spiritual exoticism. The godlike aviation of the speakers spirit in Elevation becomes the artistry of Apollo and the fertility of Sybille in I love the Naked Ages. He then travels back in time, rejecting reality and the material world, and conjuring up the spirits of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Hercules in The Beacons. The power of the poet allows the speaker to invoke sensations from the reader that correspond to the works of each artistic figure. Thus, he uses this powerhis imagination to create beacons that, like divine opium, illuminate a mythical world that mortals, lost in the wide woods, cannot usually see. After first evoking the accomplishments of great artists, the speaker proposes a voyage to a mythical world of his own creation.He first cognitive operation up Languorous Asia and passionate Africa in the poem The Head of Hair. running game his fingers through a womans hair allows the speaker to create and travel to an exotic land of freedom and happiness. In Exotic Perfume, a womans scent allows the speaker to evoke A lazy island where nature produces / Singular tress and savory fruits. The image of the perfect woman is then an intermediary to an ideal world in Invitation to a Voyage, where scents of amber and oriental splendor capture the speakers imagination.Together with his egg-producing(prenominal) companion, the speaker expresses the power of the poet to create an idyllic setting just for them There, all is nothing but beauty and elegance, / Luxury, calm and voluptuousness. Form Baudelaire was a classically trained poet and as a result, his poems follow traditional poetic structures and rhyme schemes (ABAB or AABB). Yet Baudelaire also wanted to provoke his contemporary readers, breaking with traditional style when it would best suit his poetrys overall effect.For example, in Exotic Perfume, he contrasted traditional meter (which contains a break after every fifth syllable in a ten-syllable line) with enjambment in the first quatrain. The result is an amplified image of light Baudelaire evokes the ecstasy of this image by juxtaposing it with the calm geometrical regularity of the rhythm in the beginning of the poem. Other departures from tradition include Baudelaires habit of conveying ecstasy with exclamation points, and of expressing the accessibility of happiness with the indicative present and future verb tenses, both of which function to enhance his po etrys expressive tone.Moreover, none of his innovations came at the cost of formal beauty Baudelaires poetry has often been described as the most musical and melodious poetry in the French language. explanation The Flowers of Evil evokes a world of paradox already implicit in the contrast of the title. The word evil (the French word is mal, meaning both evil and sickness) comes to signify the pain and misery inflicted on the speaker, which he responds to with melancholy, anxiety, and a fear of death.But for Baudelaire, there is also something seductive about evil. Thus, while writing The Flowers of Evil, Baudelaire often said that his intent was to extract beauty from evil. Unlike traditional poets who had only focused on the simplistically pretty, Baudelaire chose to fuel his language with horror, sin, and the macabre. The speaker describes this duality in the introductory poem, in which he explains that he and the reader form two sides of the same coin. Together, they play out wh at Baudelaire called the tragedy of mans twoness. He saw existence itself as paradoxical, each man feeling two simultaneous inclinations one toward the grace and elevation of God, the other an animalistic descent toward Satan. Just like the physical beauty of flowers intertwined with the abstract threat of evil, Baudelaire felt that one extreme could not exist without the other. Baudelaire struggled with his Catholicism his whole life and, thus, made religion a prevalent theme in his poetry. His language is steeped in biblical imagery, from the wrath of Satan, to the crucifixion, to the Fall of Adam and Eve.He was obsessed with Original Sin, lamenting the loss of his free will and projecting his sense of guilt onto images of women. Yet in the first part of the Spleen and Ideal section, Baudelaire emphasizes the harmony and perfection of an ideal world through his special closeness to God He first compares himself to a divine and martyred creature in The Albatross and then gives hims elf divine powers in Elevation, combining words like infinity, immensity, divine, and hover. The speaker also has an extraordinary power to create, weaving together abstract paradises with powerful human experiences to form an ideal world.For example, in Correspondences, the speaker evokes amber, musk, benzoin and incense / That sing, transporting the soul and sense. He not only has the power to give voice to things that are silent but also relies on images of warmth, luxury, and pleasure to call upon and empower the readers senses. In Exotic Perfume, the theme of the voyage is made possible by closing ones eyes and breathing in the warm scent of a womans breasts. In effect, reading Baudelaire means feeling Baudelaire The profusion of pleasure-inducing representations of heat, sound, and scent extract that happiness involves a joining of the senses.This first section is devoted only to the ideal, and Baudelaire relies on the abstraction of myth to convey the escape from reality and vagabond into nostalgia that the ideal represents. This theme recalls the poets own flight from the corruption of Paris with his trip along the Mediterranean. In The Head of Hair, the speaker indeterminately refers to Languorous Africa and passionate Asia, whose abstract presence further stimulates the readers imagination with the mythical symbolism of sea, ocean, sky, and oasis. The figure of women further contributes to this ideal world as an intermediary to happiness.The speaker must either breathe in a womans scent, caress her hair, or otherwise engage with her presence in order to conjure up the paradise he seeks. His fervent ecstasy in this poem derives from the sensual presence of his lover The world o my love swims on your fragrance. Spleen and Ideal, Part II Summary Despite the speakers preliminary evocation of an ideal world, The Flowers of Evils inevitable focus is the speakers spleen, a symbol of fear, agony, melancholy, moral degradation, destruction of the spiri teverything that is wrong with the world. The spleen, an organ that removes disease-causing agents from the bloodstream, was traditionally associated with malaise spleen is a synonym for ill-temper. ) Although the console ideal world in the first section does remain a world-shattering presence for the speaker, it will now serve primarily as a reminder of his need to escape from a torturous reality. Even The Ideal begins with They never will do, these beautiful vignettes. Baudelaires juxtaposition of the poems title (The Ideal) with its field suggests that the ideal is an imagined impossibility.He insists that he cannot gamble the ideal rose for which he has been looking, declaring that his sum total is an empty hole. The comforting, pure, and soothing presence of a woman has also abandoned way to Lady Macbeth, mighty soul of crime. As the speaker acknowledges in Earlier Life, the beautiful majesty of blue waves and voluptuous odors that fill his dreams cannot fully obscure t he painful secret that lets me languish. Baudelaire uses the theme of love and passion to play out this interaction between the ideal and the spleen.In Hymn to Beauty, he asks a woman Do you come from the deep sky or from the abyss, / O Beauty? Your look, infernal and divine, / Confuses good deeds and crimes. The speaker projects his anxiety at a queer reality onto a womans body Her beauty is real but it tempts him to sin. Both angel and siren, this woman brings him close to God but closer to Satan. He then refers to his lover as a enthrall and demon in Sed non Satiata (Still not Satisfied). The reality of her winding presence awakens him from his opium-induced dream, his desire pulling him toward hell.This ambivalence between the ideal and the spleen is also played out with the juxtaposition of the speakers lover to a decaying body in Carrion. While out walking with his lover, the speaker discovers rotting carrion infested with worms and maggots, but which releases pleasing music. He compares the carrion (a word for dead and decaying flesh) to a flower, realizing that his lover will also one day be carrion, eaten by worms. Just like the corpse, nothing will be left of their decomposed love. The theme of death inspired by the sight of the carrion plunges the speaker into the anxiety of his spleen.The nostalgic timelessness and soothing heat of the sun are replaced by the fear of death and a sun of ice in De Profundis Clamavi (From Profoundest Depths I Cry to You). The mythical and erotic voyage with a woman in the ideal section is now phantasmagoric pursuit by cats, snakes, owls, vampires, and ghosts, all of whom closely resemble the speakers lover. In two separate poems both entitled The Cat, the speaker is horrified to see the eyes of his lover in a black cat whose get down stare, profound and cold, cuts and cracks like a sword. In The Poison, the speaker further associates the image of his lover with death. Unlike opium and wine, which help the spe aker evade reality, the evasion of his lovers intercommunicate is the kiss of death But all this doesnt equal the poison kiss / Arising in your green eyes. The section culminates with four poems entitled Spleen. Depressed and irritated at the entire town, the speaker laments the coming of death and his defunct love, as a ghost and the meager, mangy body of a cat evoke the haunting specter of his lover. In the next Spleen, the speaker watches the world about him decompose.He is swallowed up by death, comparing himself to a cemetery, a tomb, and a container for dried-up roses. Empty physically and spiritually, only the miasma of decay is left for him to smell. In the fourth and final Spleen, the speaker is suffocated by the traditionally calming presence of the sky. Devoid of light, the earth becomes a damp dungeon, / When hope, like a bat, / beat generation the walls with its timid wings / And bumps its head against the rotted beams. Drenched by rain and sorrow, the bells of a nearby clock cry out, filling the air with phantoms.Horrified and express feelings with misery, the speaker surrenders as, Anguish, atrocious, despotic, / On my curved skull plants its black flag. Form Baudelaire uses the structure of his poems to amplify the atmosphere of the speakers spleen. In Spleen (I) each stanza accumulates different levels of anguish, first beginning with the metropolis, then creatures of nature and nightmare, and finally, other objects. This layered expression of pain represents Baudelaires attempt to apply stylistic beauty to evil. Moreover, his sentences lose the first-person tense, becoming grammatically fallible just as the speaker is morally errant.By beginning the first three stanzas of Spleen (IV) all with the word When, Baudelaire formally mirrors his theme of monotonous boredom and the speakers surrender to the inexorable regularity and longevity of his spleen. Another aspect of Baudelaires form is his ironic juxtaposition of opposites within v erses and stanzas, such as in Carrion, with flower and stink. comment Baudelaire is a poet of contrasts, amplifying the hostility of the speakers spleen with the failure of his ideal world. resembling the abused albatross in the first section, the poet becomes an anxious and suffering soul.It is classic to remember that the speakers spleen is inevitable It occurs despite his attempts to escape reality. The flowers he hopes to find on a lazy island in Exotic Perfume do not exist It is the stinking carrion that is the real flower of the world. The failure of his imagination leaves him empty and weak having searched for petals, he finds their withered versions within himself. The poetry itself suggests a resurgence of the ideal through its soothing images only to encounter the disappointing impossibility of calming the speakers anxiety.In this sense, the speakers spleen is also the poets. Indeed, the gradual climax and disquietude of the speakers spleen in Spleen (IV) has often b een associated with Baudelaires own nervous breakdown. The aggressive and claustrophobic atmosphere of the speakers world is most eloquently expressed in the failure of his ability to love. The poet originally intends his love to be a source of escape but is soon reminded of the cruel impossibility of love that characterizes his reality. For him, love is nothing but a decomposing carrion. Instead of life, love reminds him of death A womans kiss becomes poisonous.Baudelaire often spoke of love as the traditionally artistic attempt to escape boredom. Yet he never had a prospered relationship and as a result, the speaker attributes much of his spleen to images of women, such as Lady Macbeth and Persephone. Cruel and murderous women, such as the monstrous female vampire in The Vampire, are compared to a dagger that slices the speakers tinder. But Baudelaire also finds something perversely seductive in his demoniacal images of women, such as the Femme Fatale in Discordant Sky and the bizarre deity in Sed non Satiata. Baudelaire often described his disgust at images of nature and found fault in women for what he saw as their closeness to nature. However, what comes through in the poetry is not so much Baudelaires misogyny as his avowed impuissance and insatiable desire for women. The speakers spleen involves thoughts of death, either in the form of an eventual suicide or the gradual decay of ones body. Sickness, decomposition, and claustrophobia reduce the expansive paradise of the speakers ideal to a single urban center pitted against him.Baudelaire felt alienated from the new Parisian society that emerged after the metropoliss rebuilding period, often walking along the city streets just to look at people and comply their movements. This self-imposed exile perfectly describes the sense of isolation that pervades the four Spleen poems. Yet while the city alienates and isolates, it does not allow for real autonomy of any kind The speakers imagination is haunted by images of prison, spiders, ghosts, and bats crashing into walls.Unlike the albatross of the ideal, the bat of the spleen cannot fly. This labour of length is also a restriction of time, as the speaker feels his death quickly approaching. Baudelaire saw the reality of death as fundamentally opposed to the imagined voyage to paradise rather, it is a journey toward an unknown and terrible fate. The frightful groan of bells and the stubborn moans of ghosts are exorbitant warning signs of the impending victory of the speakers spleen. According to the poet, there are no other sounds. Parisian Landscapes SummaryBaudelaire now turns his attention directly to the city of Paris, evoking the same themes as the previous section. In Landscape, he evokes a living and breathing city. The speaker hears buildings and birds singing, also comparing window lamps to stars. He considers the city a timeless place, passing from season to season with ease. It is also a space of dreams and fantasy, wh ere the speaker finds gardens of bronze, blue horizons, and builds fairy castles during the night. Paris becomes an enchanted city, where even a beggar is a beautiful princess.For example, the speaker admires the erotic beauty of a homeless woman in To a Red-headed Beggar Girl, especially her two perfect breasts. He does not see her rags but, rather, the gown of a poove complete with pearls formed from drops of water. The speaker then laments the destruction of the old Paris in The Swan. Evoking the grieving image of Andromache, he exclaims My memory teems with pity / As I cross the new Carrousel / Old Paris is no more (the shape of a city /Changes more quickly, alas than the heart of a mortal). All he sees now is the chaos of the citys rebuilding, from scaffolding to low-pitched columns. Baudelaire then juxtaposes the pure but exiled image of a white redact with the dark, broken image of the city. The slog begs the sky for rain but gets no reply. The speaker forces himself to come to grips with the new city but cannot forget the hopeless figure of the swan as well as the fate of Andromache, who was kidnapped currently after her husbands murder. The presence of the grieving Andromache evokes the theme of love in the city streets.But in the modern city, love is fleetingand ultimately impossible since lovers do not know each other anymore and can only catch a glimpse of each other in the streets. In To a Passerby, the speaker conjures up a beautiful woman and tries to express his love with one look they make eye contact, but it is quickly broken, as they must each head their separate ways. The encounter is tragic because they both feel something (O you who I had loved, O you who knew ) and yet they know that their next meeting will be in the afterlife a foreboding presence of death looms over the poems end.Baudelaire continues to expose the dark underside, or spleen, of the city. (The spleen, an organ that removes disease-causing agents from the bloodstr eam, was traditionally associated with malaise spleen is a synonym for ill-temper. ) In Evening Twilight, he evokes cruel diseases, demons, thieves, hospitals, and gambling. The different aspects of the city are compared to savage beasts and anthills, while Prostitution ignites in the streets. Paris becomes a threatening genus Circus of danger and death where no one is safe.By the end of the section, in morn Twilight, gloomy Paris rises up to go back to work. Form It is important to note that most of the poems in this section are dedicated to maestro Hugo, who composed long epic poems about Paris. In this context, Baudelaire abandons the structure and rhythm of the previous section in order to emulate Hugos own style. However, in To a Passerby, Baudelaire returns to his original form, using a traditional sonnet structure (two quatrains and two three-line stanzas).As in Spleen and Ideal, he emphasizes the imperfection of the speakers spleen with imperfections in meter, isolatin g the words Raising and Me at the beginning of their respective lines. Commentary Baudelaire was deeply affected by the rebuilding of Paris after the revolution of 1848. Begun by Louis-Napoleon in the 1850s, this rebuilding program widened streets into boulevards and leveled entire sections of the city. Baudelaire responded to the changing position of his beloved Paris by taking refuge in recollections of its mythic greatness but also with a sense of exile and alienation.The swan symbolizes this feeling of isolation, similar to the Spleen poems in which the speaker feels that the entire city is against him. The Swan asks God for rain in order to clean the streets and by chance return Paris to its antique purity but receives no response. Suddenly, the city itself has become a symbol of death as its rapid metamorphoses remind the speaker of the ruthlessness of times passage and his own mortality The shape of a city /Changes more quickly, alas than the heart of a mortal. The speaker sees Paris as a modern myth in progress, evoking such fab figures as Andromache and Hector.Even the negative aspects of city life, ranging from prostitution to gambling, are described as animals, giving Baudelaires poetry an allegorical quality. For example, in Evening Twilight, the poet evokes Dark Night, which casts its swarthiness over the ants, worms, and demons, symbolizing Parisian prostitution, theater, and gambling. Together, the city, its vices, and its people form a mythical, insalubrious atmosphere, instructing the reader to learn his or her lesson. Yet Paris is primarily a cemetery of failed love, as described in