Baudelaire: A Selection from ‘Les Fleurs du Mal’

At first glance, these five poems may seem not to have much in common. Two quasi-epistolary poems addressed to the poet’s mother, a paean to cold, forbidding weather, a vision of a flowing, silent, lifeless, and above all luxurious city, and a montage of poor city people during the first hour of a workday. And yet these poems are meant to stand next to each other. (They even have numbers tied to them, something no less rare in books of poetry in nineteenth-century France than in those of twenty-first-century America.) Why these poems, in this order, in Les Fleurs du Mal? One has to look as Baudelaire looks—inward, then outward—for an answer.

In certain senses Baudelaire is a limited poet. He did not write enormous quantities of verse, and his core themes (crime, devotion, beauty, memory, pain, and poverty) are far from numerous. This sense of constraint finds a parallel, and to some degree an origin, in the circumstances of Baudelaire’s life. He had money, sometimes, but never enough of it to be comfortable, physically or mentally; he changed his residence in Paris constantly to evade the people to whom he was in debt. He was incapable of holding a regular job and found the prospect of a settled life repellent. The logic of such straitened circumstances dictated, to an extent, the dimensions of Baudelaire’s art: most of his poems were composed, if not in one day, then within the space of a few days’ free time, and all of his poems can be read in a single sitting—their length is always adequate to their inspiration. They are never longer than they have to be, and one significant reason for this was that their poet was living, frequently, on borrowed time.

The poems’ temporal confinement did not imply a lack of substance—quite the opposite. It contributed to their sharpness of vocal projection and to their crushing moral-psychological (almost physiological) density, which distinguishes Baudelaire’s poems from his contemporaries’: not an extension toward open space, but rather tension, texture, and complexity within a time frame. Temperament and circumstance could keep him from being a mass producer of poetry; contrarily, he strove to make himself a careful, apt refiner of those visions he did possess, and he succeeded. He advanced a peculiar type of poetic speech, an internal rhetoric based not so much on images as on the poet’s sustaining a dialogue with those images. Empowering himself with sympathetic magic (otherwise known as the theory of correspondences), he completes an orbit around the external world from which the images are borrowed. The dream, the orbit, and the poem are one—temporal, immaterial constructs marked by material traces.

All the poems in Les Fleurs du Mal are dreams, inner visions organized according to a veiled yet omnipresent logic. But the poems in “Parisian Scenes,” the section of the book of which these five poems are the last, are dreams in an especially pronounced sense: dreams that face up to the fantasies, exigencies, and absurdities of city life even as they retreat from its immediate presence. Not only the poet but the city itself dreams: “City swarming like ants, city swarming with dreams” (“The Seven Old Men”). From the childhood memory as vivid and obscurely symbolic as a dream, to the vision of an ancient babysitter and the cold sleep of the dead in “The servant you envied…” and the sleep-inducing aura of “Mists and Rains,” from the oneiric paradise of “Parisian Dream” to the fantasies that twist the forms of urban youth in “Morning Twilight,” the golden thread that runs through this quintet of poems is composed of images of sleep and of imagination, woven into images of radiance, darkness, cold, and squalor. There is no strong analogy between the break of dawn and the end of sleep: if anything, morning marks the beginning of sleep for the denizens of Paris (courtesans and writers) who inspire Baudelaire the most. Paris never sleeps, and always sleeps—sleeps even while it works. But, as the succeeding section of Les Fleurs du Mal states outright, the city rarely sleeps unaided. In Paris then, in New York now, great cities are fantastic engines, and the fuel that they love best is alcohol.

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101. Mists and Rains

Closing autumns, winters, springs mud-soaked to the core,

Sleep-inspiring seasons! I love and praise you for

Enveloping my heart and brain so deeply in

A vaporous shroud, a grave too vague for eyes to pin.

Within the sprawling plain where north winds leap and roar,

Where vanes through long nights shriek until they can no more,

My soul, gladder than on days when heat comes again,

Will cast its raven wings out in an arcing grin.

None sweeter to the heart of grave designs, who is

And has been mobbed by frosts that fell since early years,

O queens of our climates, seasons when nothing sears,

Than the permanent look of your pale darknesses,

—If not, through evenings no moon lights, in paired relief,

On an endangered bed, to put to sleep sharp grief.