Selected Poems (Penguin Classics) Read online

  BAUDELAIRE: SELECTED POEMS

  CHARLES-PIERRE BAUDELAIRE was born in Paris in 1821, the only son of an elderly father and young mother. His father died before he was six and his mother remarried a year later. Baudelaire was later to express violent hostility towards his stepfather, Colonel (subsequently General) Aupick.

  Wayward at school, he came second in the national Latin verse competition in 1837, but was still expelled from Lycée Louis-le-Grand in 1839. A nominal law student, he fell into bohemian company and his alarmed parents sent him on a long sea voyage to the Indian Ocean. He returned prematurely and was never to travel far from Paris again until his ill-fated journey to Belgium at the end of his life. On his majority in 1842 he moved to a flat on the Ile St-Louis and indulged his artistic tastes so extravagantly that his parents, trying to safeguard what was left of his capital, transferred control of it to the lawyer Ancelle, a well-meaning soul on whom Baudelaire would always vent his resentment at this humiliating situation.

  Baudelaire was never again to be free from debt, or from schemes to restore his fortune by writing, publishing or lecturing. He suffered a stroke in Belgium in 1866, lingered on semi-paralysed and, latterly, mute and was brought back to Paris, where he died the following year. His collection of verse, Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) was the subject of a prosecution for indecency; six poems were removed from it and not reinstated in France until 1942. Further editions, with more poems, appeared in 1861 and 1868. His prose poems and writings on art and literature were collected after his death; the literary criticism shows the influence of Edgar Allan Poe, whose short stories he also translated.

  Baudelaire is known to have had attachments to three women, the longest-lasting to the creole Jeanne Duval. So far as we know he died childless.

  Carol Clark is Fellow and Tutor in French at Balliol College, Oxford.

  CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

  Selected Poems

  With a Plain Prose Translation, Introduction and Notes by

  CAROL CLARK

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Translation, introduction and notes copyright © Carol Clark, 1995

  Chronology copyright © Carol Clark, 2004

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the editor has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 9781101493649

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Notes on the Text

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  Chronology

  LES FLEURS DU MAL

  Au Lecteur

  Spleen et Idéal

  Tableaux parisiens

  Le Vin

  Fleurs du Mal

  Révolte

  La Mort

  LES ÉPAVES

  Les Epaves

  Galanteries

  Pièces diverses

  Poems Added in 1868

  Other Verse Poems

  Petits Poèmes en prose

  Glossary

  Index of Titles and First Lines

  INTRODUCTION

  When the first volume of Baudelaire’s complete works was published the year after his death, a copy was sent to Prosper Mérimée, a man of taste, a power in the world of art and scholarship, and a considerable writer himself. He wrote to a friend, ‘They’ve sent me Baudelaire’s works, which have infuriated me. Baudelaire was mad! He died in the poorhouse after writing some verses that won praise from Victor Hugo, and which had nothing else to recommend them but their indecency. Now they’re calling him an unrecognized genius!’

  Victor Hugo’s name is mentioned in most of the judgements of Baudelaire made soon after his death, and this is to be expected, for Hugo was then, and for long afterwards, regarded as France’s greatest poet of the nineteenth century. He was a man of boundless physical and poetic energy: in his eighty-three years of life he published poems, plays, novels and political writings, which in the standard collected edition fill thirty quarto volumes. He also played a significant part in the political upheavals of the century, in turn as an ultra-Royalist, a supporter of constitutional monarchy and a Republican; he was created a pair de France in 1845 and, on his return to Paris in 1870, elected to the Assemblée Nationale. On his death he was voted a national funeral; after lying in state under the Arc de Triomphe his body, at his own wish, was borne across Paris in a pauper’s hearse amid grieving crowds estimated at two million, before being laid to rest among France’s greatest citizens in the Panthéon.

  Baudelaire’s life and death could hardly have been more different. Apart from a handful of juvenilia and late pieces, his whole output of verse is contained in one volume, Les Fleurs du Mal, which, though it gained a certain notoriety in his lifetime and was admired by the most advanced writers of the day, had little public success. (He was known to the wider public, if at all, as the translator of Poe’s tales.) He also wrote a slim volume of prose poems, a long-short story (La Fanfarlo), a set of essays on the effects of various drugs (Les Paradis artificiels), part of which was a free translation of De Quincey, and a body of art, music and literary criticism which was never collected in his lifetime but now appears as the Curiosités esthétiques and L’Art romantique. His attempts to win fame and fortune by his writings were always perfectly unsuccessful; his candidature for the French Academy was regarded as absurd, and in 1865 he estimated that twenty-odd years of writing and publishing had brought him little more than fifteen thousand francs – about £600 in the money of the day. Unlike, say, Flaubert, he did not have a reliable private income and spent most of his adult life in the peculiarly painful poverty of the déclassé. After a brief flirtation with revolutionary action in 1848 he avoided political involvement of any kind. His health declined sharply from 1864 until his death in 1867, at forty-six (not in the poorhouse but in a private clinic paid for by his friends). He was never mad, in the sense of psychotic, but his behaviour and reasoning were often regarded as strange even by those who loved him, and have given rise to a copious interpretative literature after his death, ranging from the Freudian to the existentialist. For the last year of his life, after several strokes and probably affected by tertiary syphilis, he could not speak, though his friends maintained that his mind was not affected.

  He had the final misfortune, for a Parisian, of dying in August, and the most distinguished guests invited to his funeral did not attend. He was hurried to his grave in a summer downpour, attended only by a small group of friends which included Manet and Verlaine. When his fellow poet Théodore de Banville, speaking his funeral oration, said that in th
e near future Baudelaire would be recognized as a poet not only of talent but of genius, and that he would haunt the minds of modern men and move them when other artists left them cold, many hearers must have dismissed these words as fanciful, an understandable emotional response to the loss of a beloved friend.

  However, Banville’s prediction has come true. French readers now have a choice of half a dozen paperback editions of Les Fleurs du Mal, and learned libraries contain hundreds of books and probably thousands of articles on his life and writings. Originally condemned for offence against public morals, his poems have found their place on university syllabuses and, final consecration, have recently been set for the baccalauréat. The ‘poète sinistre, ennemi des familles’ now figures in a series of student guides called ‘Les Ecrivains du bac’. But more importantly, his poems are read by many thousands of readers in many countries, not as set texts but for their beauty, their power to move and their continuing modernity. Few now would question Baudelaire’s pre-eminence among nineteenth-century poets, indeed among poets generally. While André Gide (b. 1869), asked who was the greatest French poet, still felt obliged to reply ‘Victor Hugo, hélas!’, Pierre-Jean Jouve (b. 1887) was firm that

  Baudelaire est une origine. Il crée une Poésie française après des siècles de fadeurs et de discours…

  [Baudelaire is an origin. He creates a French Poetry after centuries of insipidity and holding forth…]

  Valéry recognized in Baudelaire ‘the one modern French poet to be widely read abroad’, and by 1930 T. S. Eliot could describe him as ‘the greatest exemplar of modern poetry in any language’, adding that ‘his verse and language is the nearest thing to a complete renovation that we have experienced’.

  What, we must wonder, gave Baudelaire’s verse this power, after his death, to force a revaluation of what poetry can be and do?

  Critical attention paid to Baudelaire in the past has generally focused on the events of his life and their reflection (this process is taken for granted) in his poems. The verse and prose poems are often used as biographical sources in a way a historian might consider dubious. Certainly there is much to tempt the biographer in Baudelaire’s life, and still more in what, even in his own day, was called the ‘Baudelaire legend’, a legend to which the poet himself was at some stages of his life an enthusiastic contributor. Child of an exhausted stock, his father an elderly priest unfrocked under the Revolution, orphaned at six and then wrenched from a life of blissful intimacy by his mother’s remarriage to a stern army officer and consoled only by the love of an old nurse; launched on a life of dissipation, and then sent on a long sea voyage to the tropics in the hope of breaking his bad habits and, on return, placed under a strict regime of financial control which meant that he had to beg every penny from the family lawyer; the lover first of a black bit-player, then of a glittering demi-mondaine, and finally of a successful but heartless green-eyed actress; haunted by debt, yet a lover of art and collector of pictures and objects which he could not afford, living in sordid lodgings yet always dressed with meticulous care and cleanliness, driven from one expedient to another, writing journalistic pieces against the clock and finally travelling to Belgium, which he loathed, in the quixotic hope of making money by lecturing; seeking escape through drugs and sinking into opium addiction, syphilis, paralysis, aphasia and death. It is easy to see the attraction here for readers of a late Romantic sensibility. Critics of the older school invited the reader’s awe at the intensity of the poet’s sufferings, while later, more cynical observers have remarked the extent to which they were self-inflicted or, as Sartre would have it, consciously chosen as a vocation.

  This latter view would not in the least have surprised the poet himself, who after all entitled one of his cruellest pieces ‘Héautontimorouménos’, the self-torturer, and described himself as early as 1844, when he was twenty-two, in these terms:

  … devant le miroir j’ai perfectionné

  L’art cruel qu’un Démon en naissant m’a donné

  – De la Douleur pour faire une volupté vraie –

  D’ensanglanter son mal et de gratter sa plaie.

  [before the mirror I have perfected the cruel art which a Demon endowed me with at my birth, of turning Pain into a real pleasure by making one’s wound bleed and scratching one’s sore.]

  Baudelaire’s is studied suffering, studied pleasure and even, perhaps, studied joy, relived in a studied language which was unique at the time of writing and still appears remarkably original today. It is this novel and penetrating poetic language which truly earned him the admiration first of other poets and then of attentive readers until the present day.

  One should not pass over in silence the more lurid aspects of Baudelaire’s verse, the rather obvious eroticism of some of the pieces and his evident interest in sexual and religious variations like sado-masochism, lesbianism and satanism. Such dangerous delights obviously held an appeal for, say, Swinburne, who was one of the first English writers to express admiration for him, or Aleister Crowley, who translated the prose poems, in fact rather well. But such topics fascinated many artists of the Romantic period (Mario Praz documented them to great effect in The Romantic Agony), and the poems they gave rise to are, in general, those which seem to our present taste the most dated. They are not, therefore, represented heavily in this selection.

  When he leaves behind the over-scented boudoir-cum-charnel-house, the imagery of Baudelaire’s poems is often consciously modern and consequently unsettling in a less obvious way. In the ‘Tableaux parisiens’ he creates a décor of factory chimneys, omnibuses and dustcarts, and sets one of his most moving poems amid the debris of Baron Haussmann’s schemes of urban redevelopment. This attempt to make poetry in and of the modern city was to have been taken further in the collection of prose poems he was working on at the time of his fatal stroke, the planned title of which was Le Spleen de Paris. But poetic use of the prosaic is not confined to these two places. It is frequent, for example, in the love poetry of ‘Spleen et Idéal’, where the mistresses invoked are not semi-divinities but recognizable women who smoke, dance, sit by charcoal fires, walk with the poet in dark Parisian streets and, with him, listen to the passage of the seasons marked not by the song of the nightingale or the flight of the swallow but by the dull thud on the courtyard paving-stones of logs being delivered for the winter. These women wear not vaguely classical drapery but modern clothes: brightly coloured dresses (77), skirts with flounces (37), make-up and jewellery (78), and even corsets (‘Les Metamorphoses du Vampire’, not translated here). (It is notable that most of these poems were among those suppressed for indecency when Les Fleurs du Mal was first published; in a similar way, what gave particular offence about Manet’s Olympia when it was first exhibited in 1865 was not the figure’s nudity but her residual clothing, and the setting which indicated clearly that she was not a classical goddess or nymph but a modern high-class prostitute.)

  A young poet of the next generation, Laforgue, making notes in 1885 for an essay on Baudelaire which, sadly, he did not live long enough to publish, expresses very well the novelty with which Baudelaire’s writing still struck his near contemporaries:

  Le premier, [il] parla de Paris en damné quotidien de la capitale (les becs de gaz, les restaurants et leurs soupiraux, les hôpitaux, le jeu, le bois qu’on scie en bûches qui retentissent sur le pavé des cours, et le coin du feu, et les chats, des lits, des bas, des ivrognes et des parfums de fabrication moderne), mais cela de façon noble, lointaine, supérieure.

  [He was the first to speak of Paris as one damned to the daily life of the capital (the gas-lamps, the restaurants and their air-vents, the poor-hospitals, gambling, wood being sawn into logs which echo on the paving-stones of the courtyards, and the fireside, and cats, beds, stockings, drunkards and modern, factory-made perfumes), but all in a noble, distant, lofty manner.]

  As Laforgue goes on to say, however, it is not only the mention of dustcarts and omnibuses, of stockings and cheap scent, that
makes Baudelaire memorably modern. What was even more important was his renewal of the language of poetry; in the notes that survive Laforgue chooses to concentrate on simile and metaphor but also makes some extremely penetrating remarks on vocabulary and metre.

  Baudelaire’s modernity was all the more striking, and indeed shocking, to his contemporary readers because the conventions of French poetry in his time were so strict. They had, it is true, been loosened to some degree by the previous, Romantic generation of poets, but verse, in both its subject-matter and language, was still supposed to be highly remote from the language and preoccupations of every day. Subjects were to be choice, exalted above the prosaic and if possible morally improving, and language elevated in proportion. Eighteenth-century versifiers and theorists, by refining upon and rendering even stricter the rules first established in the seventeenth century, had evolved what was called le style noble, of which eighteenth-century English ‘poetic diction’ gives some faint idea. The key concept in both is decorum, or appropriateness. Certain things (in French a great many) might not be appropriately mentioned in verse at all, unless in the low genre of burlesque or ‘satirical’ verse. (In French, this word has connotations of indecency rather than of political incisiveness, because of the famous seventeenth-century collection of obscene poems called the Parnasse satyrique; Baudelaire’s publisher Poulet-Malassis published a Nouveau Parnasse satyrique in Belgium in 1864 which included six poems by Baudelaire, among them numbers 77 and 78 in this edition.) Unfit for verse were not only indecent things, but anything down-to-earth, for example objects in everyday use, or parts of the body apart from the stylized main, bras, front (forehead, but regularly used as a metonymy for ‘face’), prunelle (pupil, but used for ‘eye’ or ‘eyes’) or narine (nostril, for ‘nose’: nez was taboo). It was relatively easy, though constricting, to avoid ‘low’ words in lyric poetry or on the stage, but the didactic poetry so popular in the eighteenth century posed serious problems. It was not easy to write a poem on gardening, like Delille’s ‘Jardins’, when one literally could not call a spade a spade. The result was that eighteenth-century poets, particularly in the didactic mode, tied themselves into contortions of circumlocution to avoid naming the most harmless objects. When Alfred de Vigny’s translation of Othello was performed in Paris in 1829, the speaking of the word mouchoir (handkerchief) on the stage caused consternation in the theatre. As late as 1836, when Alfred de Musset, a man notorious for the freedom of his own sexual life, wished to refer to prostitutes in a description of the great city in his Lettre à M. de Lamartine, he felt obliged to call them ‘de la nuit les prêtresses infâmes’ (‘the infamous priestesses of the night’, with a poetic inversion for good measure). Baudelaire’s catins (57) would have been unthinkable then, and must still have seemed shocking in 1852 when it first appeared. The ‘Epilogue’ in which Baudelaire sings the praises of Paris, calling her, among other things, an ‘énorme catin’ was not published in his lifetime.