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Charles Baudelaire:
A Brief Commentary and Two Poems from LES FLEURS du MAL.
Full four
decades and more ago, I was that most earnest of creatures, a Lance Corporal of
Marines, 19 years old, incredibly skinny, the leader of a Machine Gun Section
in the Landing Force of a gun boat called USS Little Rock. We’d just returned from the revolution in the
Caribbean that followed the assassination of the infamous Dominican despot,
Rafael Trujillo.
When we returned to US Naval Base,
He was born in 1821. In our times,
he would run a very good risk of being institutionalized—perhaps in prison for
his opium addiction, or in a mental institution and/or on heavy doses of antipsychotics because of the chaos of his emotional life.
Baudelaire had a mistress, Jean
Duvall, with whom he was
totally obsessed. You might
think of her as being that person you met as an undergraduate on
that lost weekend in
Tout Entière
The
Devil up my attic stair
Came
tiptoeing a while ago
And,
trying to catch me unaware,
Said
laughing, “I should like to know,
“Of
all her many charms, what springs
Most often to your mind? Of all
The
rose-colored and shadowy things
Whereby
her beauty may enthrall,
“Which
is the sweetest?” –O my soul,
I
answered the abhorrèd Guest:
Her
beauty is complete and whole.
No
single part is loveliest,
“When
she is near, I cannot say
What
gives me such intense delight,
She
dazzles like the break of day,
She
comforts like the fall of night,
”My
senses seem to merge in one,
The
harmony that rules her being
Is
all my knowledge – I have none
Of hearing, smelling, touching, seeing.
“No,
I cannot make a choice
In this sublime bewilderment.
Perhaps
the music of her scent!
Perhaps
the perfume of her voice!
I hope she was impressed by the
brilliance of his metaphor as was I.
The above poems are taken from a
1936 volume. Edna St. Vincent Millay and George
Dillon undertook the tricky business of translating Les Fleurs
du Mal so that it worked as well in English as it did
in French.
My favorite of Baudelaire’s poems,
though, is “The Albatross,” which gives insight into the tortured persona of
the author. Listen closely, and perhaps you can hear what so captivated the
unschooled, profane and cynical heart of that young machine gunner in the used
book store those years ago:
The
Albatross
Sometimes,
to entertain themselves, the men of the crew
Lure
upon the deck an unlucky albatross, one of those vast
Birds
of the sea that follow unwearied the voyage through,
Flying in slow and elegant circles above the mast.
No
sooner have they disentangled him from their nets
Than
this aerial colossus, shorn of his pride,
Goes
hobbling pitiably across the planks and lets
His
greet wings hang like heavy, useless oars at his side.
How
droll is the poor floundering creature, how limp and weak –
He,
but a moment past so lordly, flying in state!
They
tease him: One of them tries to stick a pipe in his beak;
Another
mimics with laughter his odd lurching gait.
The
Poet is like that wild inheritor of the cloud,
A
rider of storms, above the range of arrows and slings:
Til exiled on earth, at bay amid the jeering crowd,
He
cannot walk for his unmanageable wings.
So there you have him: Charles
Baudelaire. According to many of his contemporaries, he was not a moral person
-- his works were banned early on for their blasphemous and sexual content, and
he was certainly not a wise man in the conduct of his affairs. His personal
life was an ongoing tragedy. But for all that he was not, he was a Poet. And
what a Poet!
The above
is derived from a presentation for Toastmasters at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, 4.19.02. John R. Guthrie
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