Selected Poems (Penguin Classics) Read online

  It is easy for the modern, English-speaking reader to see how references to whores could shock, but harder for us to realize the impact of the simply prosaic. Baudelaire must surely be the first poet of modern times to lure his mistress away not to a sylvan glade (Alfred de Vigny uncomfortably proposed a caravan!), but to a room with well-polished furniture, coffered ceilings and hothouse flowers (38). In general, his poems make remarkably little reference to what the Romantics meant by Nature; he prefers indoor settings or wholly invented landscapes like those of 60. Invited to contribute to a volume of verses on the theme of Nature, he replied that ‘je suis incapable de m’attendrir sur les végétaux’ (I cannot get emotional about the vegetable world), and sent poems 57 and 61, which he said represented his own twilight thoughts.

  Conventional poetic style also required decorum in vocabulary. An elevated noun could not be coupled with a homely adjective, or vice versa. Metaphors were to be used sparingly and should not prompt any unedifying thoughts; it was better to confine oneself to those hallowed by time and long use.

  Resistance to metaphor in the average reader was so strong that on the appearance of Les Fleurs du Mal the reviewer on the Gazette de Paris pronounced its title ‘not French’ and maintained that no one would understand it. Baudelaire deliberately and constantly breaks the rules of decorum and achieves some of his strongest poetic effects through studied mismatches. In an unpublished draft preface to Les Fleurs du Mal he said that poetry had the ability

  d’exprimer toute sensation de suavité ou d’amertume, de béatitude ou d’horreur par l’accouplement de tel substantif avec tel adjectif, analogue ou contraire.

  [to express any sensation of sweetness or bitterness, of bliss or horror, by the coupling of a given noun with a given adjective, analogous or opposed.]

  He attached the greatest importance to metaphor in poetry, writing some forceful pages on the topic in his essay on Victor Hugo (in L’Art romantique) and saying of himself:

  Je me suis toujours plu à chercher dans la nature extérieure et visible, des exemples et des métaphores qui me servissent à caractériser les jouissances et les impressions d’un ordre spirituel.

  [I have always liked to find in outward and visible nature examples and metaphors that would allow me to characterize pleasures and impressions of a spiritual order.]

  But the examples he chose (2, 19, 34), and still more the metaphors and comparisons, were often not those that poetic decorum would prescribe.

  He is famous for his unexpectedly prosaic comparisons, which use the traditional form of the simile but astonish the reader by the introduction of some everyday object. Laforgue said they ‘mettent le pied dans le plat’, put their foot in the dish, a proverbial expression of clumsiness and ill-manners, and described them as ‘disconcertingly and invigoratingly tacky’. He singles out ‘La nuit s’épaississait ainsi qu’une cloison’ (‘night thickened like a wall’). One might add, for instance, ‘Quand le ciel bas et lourd pèse comme un couvercle’ (When the low, heavy sky weighs like a lid) or

  … les vagues terreurs de ces affreuses nuits

  Qui compriment le cœur comme un papier qu’on froisse

  [the vague terrors of those dreadful nights that grip the heart as one crumples a piece of paper]

  or the unlikely metaphor in a poem of praise for his mistress’s beauty,

  Ta gorge triomphante est une belle armoire

  Dont les panneaux bombés et clairs

  Comme les boucliers accrochent des éclairs.

  [Your triumphant bosom is a fine cupboard whose panels, convex and bright, are like shields catching shafts of light.]

  What would have upset conventionally minded readers in these lines is not so much the mention of depression, night terrors or a woman’s breasts, but the use of everyday words like cloison, couvercle, armoire or panneau, particularly in the context of a poetic comparison.

  But what of Laforgue’s ‘façon noble, lointaine, supérieure’? This phrase seems to point to a tone far removed from deliberate shock tactics. And indeed a kind of seductive remoteness is one of the most distinctive characteristics of Baudelaire’s poetic voice.

  It is partly a question of mode of address. Romantic poetry still, in general, employed the ample periods and declamatory tone of traditional rhetorical discourse. The reader is firmly cast in the role of listener at a performance which (despite the frequent imparting of personal confidences) is essentially public. Baudelaire’s poetic voice is usually quieter, more private. As Laforgue went on to say, ‘Il se tient bien… Jamais il ne se bat les flancs, jamais il n’insiste, ne charge’ (He shows good manners… He never works himself into a passion, never insists nor exaggerates). (The modern reader may find this last point difficult to accept, but he or she has probably never been exposed to a French Romantic poet in full cry.)

  Baudelaire certainly did not despise rhetoric; indeed in one poem (84) he tells the reader that unless he has completed the year of rhetoric in Satan’s school he had better not meddle with Les Fleurs du Mal at all. (No apology is needed for calling the reader of the poem ‘he’, for no mid-nineteenth-century girl would have had the opportunity to faire sa rhétorique, that is, of completing the penultimate year in a lycée.) But the rhetoric that Baudelaire admires and deploys is a far subtler affair, made of figures and often of ironies. He addresses his reader in the opening poem (‘Au lecteur’), only to turn on him at the end and call him a hypocrite. The later prefatory poem ‘Epigraphe pour un livre condamné’ addresses a ‘peaceful and bucolic’ reader (a type of person very unlikely to be reading Les Fleurs du Mal in the first place), and ends on a note of imperious self-absorption which reads suspiciously like a parody of the conventional Romantic stance.

  The paradoxical combination of distance and intimacy that we find in Baudelaire also has a great deal to do with the way his poems unfold. Their organizing principle is often not the logic of prose discourse but a free association of ideas and memories which seemed baffling to many of those who first tried to read him. There is little overt attempt to convince the reader or explain points to him using carefully marshalled metaphors. (The famous concluding stanza of ‘L’Albatros’ is in fact very unusual in this respect.) The persuasive voice, when it is present, is more usually directed at some other imagined listener, a being absent at the moment of reading (a mistress, God, a cat, the poet’s own heart or soul), and the flesh-and-blood reader seems not so much to hear as to overhear the poems. We bring to them our own memories and feelings, and construct a response which is no doubt peculiar to each reader.

  Remarks in his correspondence and theoretical writing make it clear that Baudelaire wished to be read in this way: the words suggérer and suggestion recur in his accounts of how good poetry works. (Painting and music, he thought, worked in similar ways.) To take one example, in his letter to Victor Hugo accompanying the dedication of ‘Le Cygne’ (53) he said that his chief concern in the poem had been to set down quickly ‘tout ce qu’un accident, une image, peut contenir de suggestions’ (all that an accidental occurrence, an image, can give rise to by way of suggestions). This phrase is no doubt too self-disparaging – the poem in fact gives clear signs of slow and careful composition – but it is nevertheless a clue to how the poem functions.

  If we believe the story as unfolded in the poem, the experience of crossing the new Place du Carrousel (a piece of triumphalist town planning built on the ruins of a picturesque old neighbourhood where poet friends of Baudelaire had lived in happier times) triggered off in his mind the memory of having seen there, one morning when the work was half completed, a swan lost among the dust and rubble, and this memory is deeply intertwined with poetic memories of Andromache, the widow of Hector, as she is described in Virgil (Aeneid, III, 294–348). This twin, involuntary memory gives rise to other associations of ideas which spread in wider ripples as the poem moves to its deliberately inconclusive ending. But we would be naïve to think that the poem is a kind of stenographic record of the me
mories in the order in which they occurred to Baudelaire. It has an artful structure, moving from Andromache slowly to the swan, quickly back to Andromache, abruptly to the negress (a new figure in the poem), and then outwards in circles to the unspecified ‘bien d’autres encor’. It is not simply a record of one set of suggestions, but is designed to prompt new ones, perhaps in the poet himself and those close to him (his mother, after a second marriage he regarded as unworthy, had recently been widowed for the second time; his mistress of fourteen years, the person whom after his mother he probably loved most, was a woman of mixed race from the French West Indies) or in Victor Hugo, himself living in exile at the time he received the poem, or, most importantly for us, in future readers whom Baudelaire knew he would never see.

  This wonderful poem is a perfect example of Laforgue’s ‘façon noble, lointaine, supérieure’ – some of its lines have the stately plangency of Racine himself – but it is also a striking instance of Baudelaire’s creative breaking of decorum in its mixtures of décor, objects and language. We find Andromache’s palace cheek by jowl with a building site, a cold Paris morning with a sudden view of the coconut palms of Africa. The human sympathy so clearly displayed in the poem is, to prejudiced nineteenth-century eyes, extended to an unlikely and perhaps even distasteful assortment of beings: a swan, but not a stately swan gliding over a lake – that traditional symbol of the poet – instead a lost creature waddling over city paving-stones; exiles (perhaps political exiles after 1848 and 1851); orphans, shipwrecked sailors, a negress! What could Virgil’s Andromache have to do in such company?

  Another thing that gives Baudelaire’s verse its distant, noble sound is the survival, or revival, in it of some dated features of poetic language. We have seen how he abhorred the euphemistic, circumlocutory approach of much eighteenth-century diction, but he had a nostalgic fondness for other aspects of eighteenth-century style. He had lived as a small child in a flat filled with eighteenth-century furniture, pictures and ornaments, and notes in his journal the emotional resonances such objects still have for him. In 46 he compares the interior of his mind to ‘un vieux boudoir plein de roses fanées’, an old boudoir full of withered roses, where once-fashionable dresses lie in heaps, watched over only by pastel portraits and faded Boucher prints. Some of this nostalgia perhaps underlies his use of strikingly artificial, dated figures like personification, complete with capital letters, and allegory. These are particularly arresting when combined with gratingly modern elements, as in ‘La Prostitution s’allume dans les rues’ (57). Less showy and more moving is ‘Recueillement’ (89). In this sonnet Sorrow, the Evening, Pleasure and Regret, the Sun and Night are all capitalized, but represented in attitudes which eighteenth-century personification would hardly recognize: Regret rising from the waters like a smiling ghost, the Sun settling down to sleep under the arch of a bridge like a Parisian clochard and the dead Years leaning out from the balconies of heaven, dressed once more ‘en robes surannées’. Certain mannered inversions, excessively précieux compliments and the occasional reappearance of style noble words may also betray a wish to give, perhaps ironically, an eighteenth-century colouring to his style. Those who know French well will also detect in it some echoes of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry which was just beginning to be read again after having been dismissed as barbarous in the classical period. Baudelaire was particularly attracted to the poetic form of the emblem; poems 68 and 90 are based on engraved emblems by Goltzius (1558–1617), deliberately misinterpreted.

  No ironic intention is apparent, however, in ‘Le Cygne’, where some lines attain a genuine grandeur, in turn made more poignant by juxtaposition with other phrases in a much plainer style (‘… ce petit fleuve/ Pauvre et triste miroir où jadis resplendit/ L’immense majesté de vos douleurs de veuve’). What is at work here is not simply contrasts of vocabulary (petit, pauvre, triste/ resplendit, immense, majesté) but a mastery of all the resources of French verse. It is at these technical resources that we must now briefly look.

  Despite the modernity of his subject-matter and approach, Baudelaire never departed from the rules of French versification first laid down in the seventeenth century. In the same article in which he damned him with patronizing praise, likening Les Fleurs du Mal to an architectural folly, a ‘singulier kiosque’ built at the ‘pointe extrême du Kamtschatka romantique’, the influential critic Sainte-Beuve had to recognize that he remained ‘tout à fait classique dans les formes’. This scrupulous formalism may have been related to Baudelaire’s well-documented fastidiousness about dress and self-presentation; certainly Laforgue makes this analogy: ‘Il peut être cynique, fou, etc.… jamais il n’a un pli canaille, un faux pli aux expressions dont il se vêt’ (He can be shameless, mad, etc.… there is never a vulgar fold, a wrong crease in the expressions in which he clothes himself). But Baudelaire seems also to have believed in the inherent suggestive power of correctly made verses. As a boy of sixteen he had come second in the Latin verse competition open to all lycée students, and in one of the projected prefaces to Les Fleurs du Mal he wrote that poetry resembled music by virtue of prosody, which sank its roots deeper into the human soul than any classical theory had yet explained. He went on to say that French verse, like Latin and English, had ‘une prosodie mystérieuse et méconnue’ (a mysterious and unrecognized prosody) which, correctly used, could make the poetic phrase soar, glide, plunge, sway or zigzag. He does not say how this is to be done, but one guesses that the secret lies in rhythmical variation and careful phonetic patterning within the lines. We know that he devoted great attention to these aspects of verse-making in his many revisions of his poems.

  The surface rules of French poetry, though strict, are simple, and certainly do not account for all the metrical effects that can be achieved in the language. French lines are not counted in feet, like Latin or English, but in syllables. The commonest metre, the alexandrine, must have twelve syllables in every line, no more and no less; the so-called mute e which most often occurs at the end of a word, and is not pronounced in modern speech in Paris and northern France, must be counted when it appears before a following consonant, and should be lightly sounded when reading verse aloud. It is not sounded before a following vowel, or when it appears at the end of a line. The first two words of Les Fleurs du Mal, therefore, la sottise, are to be counted as four syllables and not, as they would be in modern Parisian speech, three. There are numerous minor rules about syllable counting which the interested reader will find summarized in the appendix to C. Scott’s A Question of Syllables. But the point to be remembered is that lines of French poetry unfold in the ear of the practised listener as a succession of fixed numbers of syllables, any departure from which will be perceived as a solecism. Baudelaire’s was certainly such an ear; we find him in March 1866, when already paralysed and incapable of writing, dictating a letter to his friend Prarond thanking him for a new volume of verses, praising it but calling his attention to a fault of prosody in one line.

  The textbook rules, though extremely detailed about syllable counting, have remarkably little to say about rhythm, which may therefore be Baudelaire’s prosodie méconnue. Each line of ten syllables or more is supposed to have a slight break, the caesura, which in theory occurs at the mid-point, that is, after the sixth syllable of an alexandrine. But even the classical dramatists of the seventeenth century break this rule, for a long succession of alexandrines all split in the middle produces a very tedious effect. The caesura can therefore be displaced and occur, say, after the fourth or eighth syllable, for variety or emphasis. A line split into three groups of four syllables, like the opening line of ‘Le Cygne’, is sometimes called a Romantic trimeter.

  An English-speaking reader is surprised to find that there are no explicit rules about the distribution of stresses within the line. This is no doubt because there is less tonic stress in spoken French than in English: the stressed (that is, louder) syllables in French speech are not pronounced very much louder than the unstresse
d. But variations in stress are there, and stress patterns (something like musical beats) can be heard by anyone listening to French verse read aloud. Baudelaire is a master of the rhythmical effects introduced by varying the position of the caesura and ordering the pattern of stresses in the line.

  The reader can become aware of the musical aspect of Baudelaire’s poetry by listening to recordings of his verse; some of those available at present are listed in the suggestions for further reading. A problem, though, is that such recordings tend to be made by actors, who are apt to perform the poems in dramatic style rather than use the more neutral delivery which would allow Baudelaire’s sonorities to speak for themselves. A contemporary describes the young Baudelaire reciting his own verses in this way: ‘il nous disait, ou plutôt nous psalmodiait ses vers d’une voix monotone, mais impérieuse…’ (he spoke, or rather intoned his verses to us in a monotonous but compelling voice…). The many musical settings which exist of poems by Baudelaire of course substitute their own melodies and rhythms for those of the verse, but sometimes succeed very well in capturing the mood of the originals.