Charles Baudelaire: Poems
Can someone please analyze the poem " A Carcass" from the Baudelaire's poems
check out Baudelaires poems
check out Baudelaires poems
n “A Carcass,” Baudelaire first introduces us to his particular views of death, beginning the poem with an account of a lovely stroll down a sunlit path in the summertime:
“Remember, my love, the object we saw
That beautiful morning in June:
By a bend in the path a carcass reclined
On a bed sown with pebbles and stones;
Her legs were spread out like a lecherous whore
Sweating out poisonous fumes,
Who opened in slick invitational style
Her stinking and festering womb” (Oxford 59).
Baudelaire goes on to describe the carcass in grotesquely detailed form while interspersing bright, lively images, blurring the lines between life and death:
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“And this whole teeming world made a musical sound
Like a babbling brook and the breeze,
Or the grain that a man with a winnowing-fan
Turns with a rhythmical ease” (Oxford 61).
It is clear that, with the first corpse poem in The Flowers of Evil, Baudelaire is pointing out the fact that life and death are one: where there is death, there is also life, but where there is life, so too must there be death. The poet even goes on to explain to his female companion that even she, the “angel” of the poem, will eventually die and decay just like the poem’s nauseating namesake...
This is an except from a pretty detailed article on this poem and the rest of his collection. Check it out below!
http://bookstove.com/poetry/contrasting-views-of-death-baudelaire’s-corpse-poems/