Summary
“Cats”
Stuffy scholars and lovers, who both like to sit around the fire, admire the powerful cats. Cats are friends of science and love but are keen on the horror of the evening. They sleep in noble positions like “Great sphinxes in the desert solitudes” overcome by dreams. Within their loins are magic and sparks, and their eyes gleam like the stars.
“Owls”
Owls keep themselves apart in the black yew-trees; they are like “strange divinities” with their darting red eyes. They are stil,l like statues, until the melancholy darkness comes takes over. They can teach the wise that one ought to fear movement and uproar, but mankind has the ill-fortune of always yearning for something new.
“The Pipe”
The pipe states that he is a writer’s pipe and his master uses him well. It smokes when he is gloomy, and it enfolds his soul with the net from its mouth. It is a healing balm for his heavy spirit.
“Music”
The poet says music takes him like the sea; he thrusts his chest forward and puffs his lungs like sails and takes the waves. Within him the passions of a ship throb, and the mild breeze as well as the tempest sway him. Sometimes, though, it seems more like it is “dead calm” on a glassy surface of “hopelessness.”
“Burial”
Baudelaire paints a picture of a shadowy night in which a Christian unceremoniously drops a corpse in a hole behind the garbage heap. It is a night when the stars nod and droop to the earth, when the spider weaves and the viper gives birth, and when the bones will listen the whole year to howls, witches’ moans, old men’s games, and the plotting of racketeers.
“A Fantastical Engraving”
In a frenzied apocalyptic musing, Baudelaire describes a “freakish” corpse with only a cheap crown perched atop his bony head. He is a mere lackey of the apocalypse, driving his horse to panting and drooling. This duo blazes through the infinite. The horseman waves his sword and tramples the crows. He inspects the graveyard like it is his domain; there the dead from the past and the present lie underneath the pale sunshine.
“The Happy Corpse”
Dreaming of death, the poet would like to dig a capacious pit for his bones to lie leisurely within. He would sleep like a shark at sea. He would have no testimonies or epitaphs, but he would let the crows bleed his carcass for him. He is gleeful that the worms are his “dark playmates” though they lack ear and eye. He magnanimously invites them to come meet him, a free corpse! These sophisticated philosophers can travel along his ruin, his “soulless” remains.
“The Cask of Hate”
For the poet, Hate is bottomless like the cask of Danaides. Vengeance is distraught, and with her brawny arms throws her empty buckets of blood and dead men’s tears into the cask. Satan makes holes for pain to fly through, and Hate will resuscitate her victims only to squeeze them dry. Hate is like a drunkard in a tavern, multiplying like the heads of the hydra. However, Hate cannot even fall asleep under the table.
“The Cracked Bell”
On winter nights it is bittersweet to hear the old memories around the flickering fire and in the voices of the tolling bells. The clear bell is blessed, even while it is rusted. It repeats its religion’s “notes” like an old soldier keeping watch. Like the bell, the poet’s spirit is cracked, and when it chants its weak voice sounds like the rattle of a wounded and dying man next to a bloody pool.
“Spleen (I)”
Baudelaire depicts an urban hellscape, bleak and foreboding. Since Pluvius is annoyed with the whole city he pours rain on the graveyards, and mortality on the streets. A cat scratches to make a place for his litter and a phantom poet roams the gutters. A bell wails and a crone reads from her cards: the Jack of Hearts and the Queen of Spades “trade sinister accounts of wasted love.”
“Spleen (II)”
There are more memories here in the poet’s head, he groans, than if he had lived a thousand years. This dresser is full of love letters, lawsuits, verses, and locks of hair, but it has less secrets than the poet’s mind. It is a pyramid, a vault, full of more corpses than a graveyard. He is a graveyard shunned by the moon, a dusty boudoir with antiquated fashions and withered roses. Only the Boucher paintings breathe in the perfume. The days are long and limp as Ennui grows to the size of immortality. Living flesh, Baudelaire mourns, is gone. He is stone, an ancient Sphinx in the Sahara that is forgotten, revealing a haughty gaze only to the setting sun.
“Spleen (III)”
Baudelaire compares himself to a king in a rainy land who prefers the company of dogs and beasts, and cannot be cheered by hunting or even dying subjects. The court buffoon does not amuse this king, his bed is like a tomb. Courtesans cannot procure a smile from him; the alchemist cannot take the flaw from his soul, even though he made him gold. Those Roman baths, that scholar’s knowledge, cannot bring his corpse back to life if the water of Lethe flows in its veins.
“Spleen (IV)”
When the sky is low and heavy and the spirit moans in ennui, when earth is a “sweaty cell,” when Hope flutters about frantically like a trapped bat, when rain falls on the world like prison bars, when spiders weave webs in mankind’s brains, bells call out in a cacophony like wailing homeless people. Hope mourns, and Anguish fixes the black flag of victory in the poet’s skull.
“Obsession”
Forests, Baudelaire says, scares him like cathedrals with their organ howls and death echoes. He hates the ocean as well, because he sees the waves in his soul and hears its roaring in laughter, insults, and sobs. But night pleases him, especially when it is black and blank of stars. The darkness is a screen on which vanished beings he knows are projected.
“The Taste for Nothingness”
Hope, which spurred the poet on to fame, will not ride his dull soul anymore. Lie down and give up, he proclaims; go to sleep. His spirit is spent, love is not fair and neither is fighting. Say goodbye to brass alarums and the flute; pleasures, give up the impotent heart. Spring loses its scent and Time takes over. Blizzards cover corpses and he watches from above, no longer looking for a place to hide. Avalanche, take me, he pleads.
“Alchemy of Suffering”
Baudelaire is a dismayed mess of contradictions—he feels both bright and full of grief, hearing of tombs and hearing of life. He imagines how Hermes interferes with Midas, forcing Baudelaire to turn things into iron, not gold. His paradise turns to hell. In the clouds is a cadaver in shrouds, in the heavens he raises a tomb.
“Congenial Horror”
The poet calls himself a libertine and probes his thoughts. He wants the unknown, but does not want paradise, as Ovid did when he was expelled from Rome. The poet looks up and sees the skies rent asunder; they are the mirrors of his pride. He sees the clouds as hearses; in the flashes are reflections of Hell.
“Heautontimoroumenos”
The poet says he will hit his beloved without hate like Moses and the rock, or a butcher and his block. Her tears will flow and irrigate his desert, and desire will swim along like ships set out for their voyage. Her sobs will ring like drums in his heart. But he wonders if Irony is a false note in this symphony, for Irony is in his voice, and her poison in his veins. The poet is her looking-glass. He is her wound and she the sword, he is the cheek and she is the slap, he is the limbs and the rack and she is the torturer. He is one of the “great abandoned men” who is condemned to laugh but cannot smile.
“The Irremediable”
Baudelaire descends into his anguish. He imagines a “Being, a Form, an Idea” falling from the sky into the “Stygian slough.” It is an Angel, lured by love into a nightmarish dream, pirouetting and pulled along in a whirlpool. It is a confused man trying to escape the snakes, a damned soul tripping down an infinite staircase without railing into a pit of monsters with glowing eyes. It is a ship trapped in the polar ice looking for a way out. These are the “perfect tableau / Of an irremediable evil,” and the Devil clearly knows what he is doing. It is a face seeing its own image back in the well of Truth. Within, a star from Hell trembles; the consolation is that it is evil aware of itself.
“The Clock”
The clock is like a stoic god who threatens mankind that they must remember, the poet muses. In hearts there will be shafts of Grief. Delight is eaten up by the instants. The second hand ticks; with an "insect voice" it proclaims that it is the Past and has sucked life up. With it's "metal throat," time proclaims not to waste the moments; mine them for gold! Time is greedy and will win every roll. The day winds down, the night comes. Remember! The hour will come when Chance, Virtue, Repentance all say that one will die, and it is too late.
Analysis
In this last set of poems, which includes the four “Spleen” works, Baudelaire has descended almost completely into melancholy. He yearns and dreams (“Owls,” “The Pipe,” “Music”), and obsesses and glories in corpses and other emblems of death and decay (“Burial,” ‘The Happy Corpse,’ “A Fantastical Engraving”). His despair leads him to suicidal ideations (“The Taste for Nothingness”). His images are startling in their gleeful grotesqueness, such as “Engraving’s” bony horseman with his “cheap crown he picked up at a fair” and his invitation to the worms to devour his corpse in “The Happy Corpse”—“O worms! dark playmates minus ear or eye, / Prepare to meet a free and happy corpse.” His personifications are also remarkable, such as Hope “captured, like a frantic bat” (“Spleen [IV]”), Hate using her victims and “Resuscitating them to squeeze them dry” (The Cask of Hate), and Time which “engulfs me in its steady tide” (“The Taste for Nothingness”) and “is greedy at the game / And wins on every roll! Perfectly legal.”
Before moving into the “Spleen” poems and the final three poems of the section, we will look at “Cats,” a mesmerizing poem about the power of feline creatures. The poem begins by noting that scholars and lovers alike favor the cat because, for one, they all enjoy lounging by the fire. The tone becomes more ominous in the second stanza, though, when Baudelaire writes that cats are drawn to the “silent horror of the night” and are like “Great sphinxes in the desert solitudes” who have “endless dreams.” Like the eyes of the women after whom Baudelaire has lusted, cats’ eyes, “gleaming like stars,” are windows to their mysterious and strange souls. Baudelaire evokes alchemy, the pseudoscience of trying to turn base metals into valuable ones like gold, through his line “Within their potent loins are magic sparks.” This dovetails nicely with the form of the poem, a sonnet with each line an Alexandrine (twelve syllables with six iambics), which expresses subtle magic with a foundation of rationality, perfect rhythm and style, and grace and elegance.
Cats were popular animals for many modernists (Dali and Matisse loved theirs; T.S. Eliot wrote an entire whimsical volume on them, Theophile Gautier to whom Baudelaire dedicated Fleurs saw the cat as a type of flaneur) and Baudelaire, as critic Julian Brigstocke notes, “[uses] the cat as a way of grasping a distinctly modern form of experience, one that is contradictory, ungraspable, and unrepresentable—beyond human reason and human experience.” The eyes of cats, again like the eyes of women in the earlier love poems in Fleurs, offer a window onto a “time that transcends clock time” and “a fleeting glimpse of an other-worldly mode of temporal existence—a fragment of the ideal, an eternal; truth beyond everyday appearance.” The cat, then, allows Baudelaire to transcend the everyday, to experience that alchemy that he was also engaged in through his turning words into the “gold” of poetry.
The four “Spleen” poems and those that follow them are unrelentingly bleak, however. The word “spleen” as Baudelaire and other intellectuals refer to it means a metaphysical sickness, emotional paralysis, a desire for erasure, lack of desire, spiritual emptiness, crushing ennui, etc. Walter Benjamin, the renowned 20th century intellectual and critic, wrote copiously on Baudelaire, and in his collection of observations on the poet entitled “Central Park” he calls the spleen, “the feeling that corresponds to a catastrophe in permanence.” He admires Baudelaire’s recognition that this form of suffering was an ancient one, and thus “he was able to make the signature of his own experience stand out in bold relief against it. One suspects that few things could have given him a greater sense of his own originality than a reading of Roman satirists.” In the essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” Benjamin observes that while the ideal is all about “the power of recollection” the spleen “rallies the multitude of the seconds against it. It is their commander, just as the devil is the lord of the flies.” Time is “reified” and the “minutes cover a man like snowflakes. The perception of time is supernaturally keen. Every second finds consciousness ready to intercept its shock.” Benjamin says that in these poems man realizes how isolated he is; to man’s horror he “sees the earth revert to a mere state of nature. No breath of prehistory surrounds it—no aura.” This is what Baudelaire writes of in “The Taste for Nothingness,” describing how “poised on high I watch the world below, / No longer looking for a place to hide.” And in perhaps his most frequently cited work on the poet, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” Benjamin explains that the modern element in Baudelaire is represented by the city and “as spleen, it fractures the ideal.”
Let us begin with “Spleen (I)” with its opening word of “Pluvius,” the new calendar established by the French Republic in 1792 and abolished by Napoleon in 1806. The word also means “rainy,” which informs the lines that depict Pluvius pouring out “chilling rain” from his urn in “great waves.” The city is a gloomy place inhabited by almost dreamlike beings—cats, fortune-telling crones, the Jack of Hearts and the Queen of Spades—and filled with ominous sounds and sights. The first stanza of “Spleen (II)” finds Baudelaire comparing himself to an overstuffed armoire in order to suggest how filled with secrets he is. He paints a picture of a room that commemorates faded glory, à la Miss Havisham. One can almost smell the brittle roses and old perfume and see the dust floating in the air. Ennui returns as a character, expanding infinitely. Time is referenced in several instances –the days are “limping,” the years are heavy like piling “snowflakes.” The mortal body fades and all that is left is a lonely sphinx in the desert. This is the poet’s fate as well; Baudelaire articulates the fear of being “Forgotten on the map.” In “Spleen (III)” he rues the toll the passage of time takes on his body, depicting himself as a “king of rainy lands,” “impotent and old.” The Roman baths of blood cannot restore vigor, alchemy is useless, and the water of Lethe, the river of forgetfulness of the classical Underworld, flows on in his veins. Death has thus infused his whole form, which is something that carries over into the poetic form itself. In “Spleen (IV)” the alexandrine lines are slow and stately, creating a hushed moment of expectation that is stretched further and further (Benjamin said “the special beauty of so many of the openings of Baudelaire’s poems lies in this: a rising up from the abyss”). Again the sky pours down more than just rain; it pours down sadness and “Descends on us like heavy prison bars”, and is heavy like a lid. Ennui fills the spirit. Hope is personified as a trapped bat, frantically fluttering against its cage; it is then “conquered” by Anguish, who “fixed his black flag” in Baudelaire’s skull. This metaphor of a battle for ascendance between Hope and Anguish is a potent way to convey Baudelaire’s vacillating emotions. Overall, Baudelaire depicts himself as smothered, trapped, vanquished. In all of the “Spleen” poems, Baudelaire uses literal and metaphorical spaces—the city, an armoire, desert and skies, a bed-as-tomb, a “sweaty cell”—to evoke his tortured consciousness.
In “Obsession” Baudelaire no longer sees the forest as rife with symbols for him to revel in interpreting, as he stated in “Correspondences;” rather, the forest scares him. It and other landscapes are blank. He is fixated on “the black, the blank, the bare,” a phrase uncannily similar to his contemporary Herman Melville’s explication of the power of whiteness with its “silent, superstitious dread” that “by its indefiniteness…shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation” (Moby Dick, 1851).
In “The Taste for Nothingness” Hope is enfeebled and “Will no more ride you!” Baudelaire is giving up. He uses words like “lie down,” “sleep,” “give up;” he writes that Time “engulfs me in its steady tide” like a blizzard covering a corpse, and he longs for utter oblivion in the avalanche. Scent, that powerful sense that Baudelaire so loved and lauded in earlier works in Fleurs, is now rendered impotent: “Spring, once wonderful, has lost its scent!” Critic Ulrich Baer observes, “Without nature’s seasonal scents and a sheltering atmosphere, experience cannot be meaningfully related to or integrated into a continuum that includes past and others’ experiences.”
“Alchemy of Suffering” and “Congenial Horror” return to alchemy, which cannot accomplish its aim of turning something base into something rare (and indeed does the opposite by turning gold into iron), and to nature, which is terrifying and mournful. In “Alchemy,” Nature has “within you mourning, grief!” and in “Congenial” Baudelaire stares into a “bizarre and livid sky” and “skies torn apart like wind-swept sands.”
“Heautonimoroumenos,” which is Greek for “that which punishes itself” and is often translated as “The Self-Tormenter,” is an oft-overlooked but key poem in Baudelaire’s spleen section. Usually it is seen as a “piece of sadistic eroticism with a dash of self-flagellation at the end,” as critic Robert Wilcocks writes. It is a complicated melding of metaphors carried out in regular, octosyllabic lines and caesuras and exclamations. The poem becomes with “I,” then turns to “you,” then uses “she.” The poetic subject, as Debarti Sanyal writes, “will wound the surface of the other to create an ontological location and depth.” It is a sacrificial scenario in which the boundaries between self and other, victim and executioner dissolve. The poem initially has the poet trying to regain his selfhood through the “fragmentation and reappropriation of its victim” but eventually realizes that the “subject, agent, and executioner is revealed as constituted by its object, other, and victim (figured here as irony)."
Wilcocks also sees the poem as a statement of the poetic principle of the divided self, in which Baudelaire writes of how poetry will be produced, then asks why poetry must be created, and then analyzes the implicit responses to those questions. For Wilcocks, Baudelaire questions the “fundamental dichotomy between the man who is conscious and self-reflecting and the universe which is neither of these things.” He starts by telling the reader he does not have “rage or hate,” and he strikes the way Moses strikes the rock and brings forth water in the wilderness. This does not smack of the sadistically sexual, especially when that water may be seen as the poetic inspiration.
In the fourth stanza, though, the poet rues that he is a “false accord / Within the holy symphony.” If he wants to transcend this condition, he must look within himself and consider what is both good and evil, consider when he reaches the ideal and when the spleen encumbers him. Unfortunately, this is where personified Irony comes in, which asserts that once man knows himself he becomes aware of the infinite abyss between himself and his Creator. Spiritual anguish covers him like a low cloud, engulfs him like an avalanche, pours on him like rain. After this horrid epiphany Baudelaire ruminates on what to do. Wilcocks suggests that the line “I am my own blood’s epicure” may even refer to the ink from his pen that is used to create art from the anguish (the written poem is metaphorically the lifeblood of the poet). He writes, “In Baudelaire’s poem the creative mind recognizes its distress and from it produces a vital spiritual entity, the poem itself. If the poet sees himself as condemned and abandoned, it is nonetheless from within this state and because of this state that he will create.”
As the volume comes to a close, with the ominous ticking of “The Clock” calling on us to “Remember!” that life is short, Baudelaire’s achievement does not resolve simply into doom and gloom. As critic Jonathan Culler writes, even though Baudelaire depicts himself as a grumpy sphinx singing to itself in a desert forgotten by maps, “there are ways of surviving the disintegration and depersonalization of the self…a certain poetic consciousness can salvage at least itself from the collapse of signification and value.” Baudelaire offers “poetic consciousness as a solution” to the modern world, even though it is a “desperate one, requiring a passage through negativity.”
