Flowers of Evil

Welcome to Celebrate Poe - Episode 317 - Flowers of Evil

Today I want to look at some of Baudelaire’s masterpiece - Les Fleurs du Mal - or The Flowers of Evil. First published in 1857, the poems were extremely controversial upon publication, with six of its poems censored due to their immorality.  Now it is now considered a major work of French poetry. The poems in The Flowers of Evil frequently break with tradition, using suggestive images and unusual forms. They deal with themes relating to decadence and eroticism, particularly focusing on suffering and its relationship to original sin, disgust toward evil and oneself, obsession with death, and aspiration toward an ideal world. The poems had a powerful influence on future French poetry.  For the rest of this episode, I am going to read a portion of the poems - starting with a poem by Edgar Allan Poe that I am sure you are familiar with - Alone so you can compare it to Badelaire’s The Enemy.  By the way, note how both poems use vivid imagery to describe the poet's tumultuous youth and the challenges faced in his later years, employing metaphors of storms to convey the respective poet’s emotional and creative struggles.

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Transcript

Welcome to Celebrate Poe - Episode 317 - Flowers of Evil

Today I want to look at some of Baudelaire’s masterpiece - Les Fleurs du Mal - or The Flowers of Evil. First published in 1857, the poems were extremely controversial upon publication, with six of its poems censored due to their immorality.  Now it is now considered a major work of French poetry. The poems in The Flowers of Evil frequently break with tradition, using suggestive images and unusual forms. They deal with themes relating to decadence and eroticism, particularly focusing on its relationship to original sin, disgust toward evil and oneself, obsession with death, and aspiration toward an ideal world. The poems had a powerful influence on future French poetry.  For the rest of this episode, I am going to read a portion of the poems - starting with a poem by Edgar Allan Poe that I am sure you are familiar with - Alone so you can compare it to Badelaire’s The Enemy.  By the way, note how both poems use vivid imagery to describe the poet's tumultuous youth and the challenges faced in his later years, employing metaphors of storms to convey the respective poet’s emotional and creative struggles.

Alone
by Edgar Allan Poe
(published 1875)

From childhood's hour I have not been

As others were -- I have not seen

As others saw -- I could not bring

My passions from a common spring --

From the same source I have not taken

My sorrow -- I could not awaken

My heart to joy at the same tone --

And all I lov'd -- I lov'd alone --

Then -- in my childhood -- in the dawn

Of a most stormy life -- was drawn

From ev'ry depth of good and ill

The mystery which binds me still --

From the torrent, or the fountain --

From the red cliff of the mountain --

From the sun that 'round me roll'd

In its autumn tint of gold --

From the lightning in the sky

As it pass'd me flying by --

From the thunder, and the storm --

And the cloud that took the form

(When the rest of Heaven was blue)

Of a demon in my view —

The Enemy

My childhood was nought but a ravaging storm,

Enlivened at times by a brilliant sun;

The rain and the winds wrought such havoc and harm

That of buds on my plot there remains hardly one.

Behold now the Fall of ideas I have reached,

And the shovel and rake one must therefore resume,

In collecting the turf, inundated and breached,

Where the waters dug trenches as deep as a tomb.

And yet these new blossoms, for which I craved,

Will they find in this earth—like a shore that is laved—

The mystical fuel which vigour imparts?

Oh misery!—Time devours our lives,

And the enemy black, which consumeth our hearts

On the blood of our bodies, increases and thrives!

For the rest of the episode, I’d like to read some of the poems from Flowers of Evil. Though the collection was extremely controversial upon publication, with six of its poems censored due to their immorality, it is now considered a major work of French poetry. The poemsfrequently break with tradition, using suggestive images and unusual forms. They deal with themes relating to decadence and eroticism, particularly focusing on suffering and its relationship to original sin, disgust toward evil and on disgust toward evil and oneself, obsession with death, and aspiration toward an ideal world. 

And now from Flowers of Evil - 

Interior Life

A long while I dwelt beneath vast porticoes,

While the ocean-suns bathed with a thousand fires,

And which with their great and majestic spires,

At eventide looked like basaltic grottoes.

The billows, in rolling depictured the skies,

And mingled, in solemn and mystical strain,

The all-mighteous chords of their luscious refrain

With the sun-set's colours reflexed in mine eyes.

It is there that I lived in exalted calm,

In the midst of the azure, the splendour, the waves,

While pregnant with perfumes, naked slaves

Refreshed my forehead with branches of palm,

Whose gentle and only care was to know

The secret that caused me to languish so.

Man and the Sea

Free man! the sea is to thee ever dear!

The sea is thy mirror, thou regardest thy soul

In its mighteous waves that unendingly roll,

And thy spirit is yet not a chasm less drear.

Thou delight'st to plunge deep in thine image down;

Thou tak'st it with eyes and with arms in embrace,

And at times thine own inward voice would'st efface

With the sound of its savage ungovernable moan.

You are both of you, sombre, secretive and deep:

Oh mortal, thy depths are foraye unexplored,

Oh sea—no one knoweth thy dazzling hoard,

You both are so jealous your secrets to keep!

And endless ages have wandered by,

Yet still without pity or mercy you fight,

So mighty in plunder and death your delight:

Oh wrestlers! so constant in enmity!

Beauty

I am lovely, O mortals, like a dream of stone,

And my bosom, where each one gets bruised in turn,

To inspire the love of a poet is prone,

Like matter eternally silent and stern.

As an unfathomed sphinx, enthroned by the Nile,

My heart a swan's whiteness with granite combines,

And I hate every movement, displacing the lines,

And never I weep and never I smile.

The poets in front of mine attitudes fine

(Which the proudest of monuments seem to implant),

To studies profound all their moments assign,

For I have all these docile swains to enchant—

Two mirrors, which Beauty in all things ignite:

Mine eyes, my large eyes, of eternal Light!

The Giantess

I should have loved—erewhile when Heaven conceived

Each day, some child abnormal and obscene,

Beside a maiden giantess to have lived,

Like a luxurious cat at the feet of a queen;

To see her body flowering with her soul,

And grow, unchained, in awe-inspiring art,

Within the mists across her eyes that stole

To divine the fires entombed within her heart.

And oft to scramble o'er her mighty limbs,

And climb the slopes of her enormous knees,

Or in summer when the scorching sunlight streams

Across the country, to recline at ease,

And slumber in the shadow of her breast

Like an hamlet 'neath the mountain-crest.

Hymn to Beauty

O Beauty! dost thou generate from Heaven or from Hell?

Within thy glance, so diabolic and divine,

Confusedly both wickedness and goodness dwell,

And hence one might compare thee unto sparkling wine.

Thy look containeth both the dawn and sunset stars,

Thy perfumes, as upon a sultry night exhale,

Thy kiss a philter, and thy mouth a Grecian vase,

That renders heroes cowardly and infants hale.

Yea, art thou from the planets, or the fiery womb?

The demon follows in thy train, with magic fraught,

Thou scatter'st seeds haphazardly of joy and doom,

Thou govern'st everything, but answer'st unto nought.

O Loveliness! thou spurnest corpses with delight,

Among thy jewels, Horror hath such charms for thee,

And Murder 'mid thy mostly cherished trinklets bright,

Upon thy massive bosom dances amorously.

The blinded, fluttering moth towards the candle flies,

Then frizzles, falls, and falters—"Blessings unto thee"—

The panting swain that o'er his beauteous mistress sighs,

Seems like the Sick, that stroke their gravestones lovingly.

What matter, if thou comest from the Heavens or Hell,

O Beauty, frightful ghoul, ingenuous and obscure!

So long thine eyes, thy smile, to me the way can tell

Towards that Infinite I love, but never saw.

From God or Satan? Angel, Mermaid, Proserpine?

What matter if thou makest—blithe, voluptuous sprite—

With rhythms, perfumes, visions—O mine only queen!—

The universe less hideous and the hours less trite.

Sonnet XXVIII

With pearly robes that wave within the wind,

Even when she walks, she seems to dance,

Like swaying serpents round those wands entwined

Which fakirs ware in rhythmic elegance.

So like the desert's Blue, and the sands remote,

Both, deaf to mortal suffering and to strife,

Or like the sea-weeds 'neath the waves that float,

Indifferently she moulds her budding life.

Her polished eyes are made of minerals bright,

And in her mien, symbolical and cold,

Wherein an angel mingles with a sphinx of old,

Where all is gold, and steel, and gems, and light,

There shines, just like a useless star eternally,

The sterile woman's frigid majesty.

Posthumous Remorse

Ah, when thou shalt slumber, my darkling love,

Beneath a black marble-made statuette,

And when thou'lt have nought for thy house or alcove,

But a cavernous den and a damp oubliette.

When the tomb-stone, oppressing thy timorous breast,

And thy hips drooping sweetly with listless decay,

The pulse and desires of mine heart shall arrest,

And thy feet from pursuing their adventurous way,

Then the grave, that dark friend of my limitless dreams

(For the grave ever readeth the poet aright),

Amid those long nights, which no slumber redeems

'Twill query—"What use to thee, incomplete spright

That thou ne'er hast unfathomed the tears of the dead"?—

Then the worms will gnaw deep at thy body, like Dread.

The Ghost

Just like an angel with evil eye,

I shall return to thee silently,

Upon thy bower I'll alight,

With falling shadows of the night.

With thee, my brownie, I'll commune,

And give thee kisses cold as the moon,

And with a serpent's moist embrace,

I'll crawl around thy resting-place.

And when the livid morning falls,

Thou'lt find alone the empty walls,

And till the evening, cold 'twill be.

As others with their tenderness,

Upon thy life and youthfulness,

I'll reign alone with dread o'er thee.

The Joyous Defunct

Where snails abound—in a juicy soil,

I will dig for myself a fathomless grave,

Where at leisure mine ancient bones I can coil,

And sleep—quite forgotten—like a shark 'neath the wave.

I hate every tomb—I abominate wills,

And rather than tears from the world to implore,

I would ask of the crows with their vampire bills

To devour every bit of my carcass impure.

Oh worms, without eyes, without ears, black friends!

To you a defunct-one, rejoicing, descends,

Enlivened Philosophers—offspring of Dung!

Without any qualms, o'er my wreckage spread,

And tell if some torment there still can be wrung

For this soul-less old frame that is dead 'midst the dead!

The Broken Bell

How sweet and bitter, on a winter night,

Beside the palpitating fire to list,

As, slowly, distant memories alight,

To sounds of chimes that sing across the mist.

Oh, happy is that bell with hearty throat,

Which neither age nor time can e'er defeat,

Which faithfully uplifts its pious note,

Like an agèd soldier on his beat.

For me, my soul is cracked, and 'mid her cares,

Would often fill with her songs the midnight airs

And oft it chances that her feeble moan

Is like the wounded warrior's fainting groan,

Who by a lake of blood, 'neath bodies slain,

In anguish falls, and never moves again.

To a Passer-by

Around me thundered the deafening noise of the street,

In mourning apparel, portraying majestic distress,

With queenly fingers, just lifting the hem of her dress,

A stately woman passed by with hurrying feet.

Agile and noble, with limbs of perfect poise,

Ah, how I drank, thrilled through like a Being insane,

In her look, a dark sky, from whence springs forth the hurricane,

There lay but the sweetness that charms, and the joy that destroys.

A flash—then the night.... O loveliness fugitive!

Whose glance has so suddenly caused me again to live,

Shall I not see you again till this life is o'er!

Elsewhere, far away ... too late, perhaps never more,

For I know not whither you fly, nor you, where I go,

O soul that I would have loved, and that you know!

The Death of the Lovers

We will have beds which exhale odours soft,

We will have divans profound as the tomb,

And delicate plants on the ledges aloft,

Which under the bluest of skies for us bloom.

Exhausting our hearts to their last desires,

They both shall be like unto two glowing coals,

Reflecting the twofold light of their fires

Across the twin mirrors of our two souls.

One evening of mystical azure skies,

We'll exchange but one single lightning flash,

Just like a long sob—replete with good byes.

And later an angel shall joyously pass

Through the half-open doors, to replenish and wash

The torches expired, and the tarnished glass.

The Death of the Poor

It is Death that consoles—yea, and causes our lives;

'Tis the goal of this Life—and of Hope the sole ray,

Which like a strong potion enlivens and gives

Us the strength to plod on to the end of the day.

And all through the tempest, the frost and the snows,

'Tis the shimmering light on our black sky-line;

'Tis the famous inn which the guide-book shows,

Whereat one can eat, and sleep, and recline;

'Tis an angel that holds in his magic hands

The sleep, which ecstatic dream commands,

Who remakes up the beds of the naked and poor;

'Tis the fame of the gods, 'tis the granary blest,

'Tis the purse of the poor, and his birth-place of rest,

To the unknown Heavens, 'tis the wide-open door.

In conclusion, Flowers of Evil explores themes such as beauty in ugliness, the conflict between spiritual aspirations and earthly desires, and the search for transcendence amidst despair. His ability to extract beauty from evil and suffering made him a pioneer of modernist poetry.

In summary, Baudelaire's life—and by the way - the last syllable of Baudelaire is pronounced LAIR like a Lion’s lair - was marked by constant personal turmoil, urban alienation, and rebellion against societal norms that deeply influenced his poetic vision. His work not only captured the complexities of modern existence but also redefined the possibilities of poetry itself.

Join Celebrate Poe for Episode 318 - DeQuincy, Baudelaire, and Poe - Part One

Sources include The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire

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