Charles Baudelaire- Le Fleurs du Mal, Le Spleen de Paris

Baudelaire`s preoccupation with the principal themes of sex and death were considered macabre and scandalous, ideas surrounding love, melancholy, lost innocence, and the oppressiveness of living. The use of imagery within his works,sets a strong tone, the sense of smell and of fragrances, used to evoke feelings of nostalgia.

Le Spleen, initiated a sense of stream of consciousness narratives, focusing not only on self reflection but reflecting the city and society as modernity manifests itself, melancholic with no apparent cause.

Le Cygne, where the memory of a swan stranded near the Louvre becomes a symbol of an existential condition of loss and exile transcending time and space. Having gone through the city forever meeting himself, the traveler turns, successively to drink "Le Vin", sexual depravity "Fleurs du mal", and satanism "Rèvolte" in a quest for the ideal.



A Hemisphere in Her Hair - Le Spleen de Paris

Let me breathe in for a long, long time the scent of your hair, let me plunge my entire face into it, like a thirsty man into the water of a spring, and let me wave it in my hand like a scented handkerchief, to shake memories into the air.

If you could only know all that I see! All that I feel! All that I hear in your hair! My soul voyages upon perfume just as the souls of other men voyage upon music.

Your hair contains a dream in its entirety, filled with sails and masts; it contains great seas whose monsoons carry me toward charming climes, where space is bluer and deeper, where the atmosphere is perfumed by leaves and by human skin.

In the ocean of your hair, I glimpse a port swarming with melancholy songs, with vigorous men of all nations, and with ships of all shapes silhouetting their refined and complicated architecture against an immense sky in which eternal warmth saunters.

In the caresses of your hair, I find again the languors of long hours passed upon a divan, in the cabin of a beautiful ship, rocked by the imperceptible rolling of the port, between pots of flowers and refreshing jugs.

In the ardent hearth of your hair, I breathe the odor of tobacco mixed with opium and sugar; in the night of your hair, I see the infinity of tropical azur resplendent; on the downy shores of your hair I get drunk on the combined odors of tar, of musk, and of coconut oil.

Let me bite into your heavy black tresses for a long time. When I nibble at your elastic hair, it seems to me that I am eating memories


Le Cygne- Le Fleurs Due Mal

I Andromache, I think of you! — That little stream, That mirror, poor and sad, which glittered long ago ,With the vast majesty of your widow's grieving, That false Simois swollen by your tears,

Suddenly made fruitful my teeming memory, As I walked across the new Carrousel. — Old Paris is no more (the form of a city Changes more quickly, alas! than the human heart);

I see only in memory that camp of stalls, Those piles of shafts, of rough hewn cornices, the grass, The huge stone blocks stained green in puddles of water, And in the windows shine the jumbled bric-a-brac.

Once a menagerie was set up there; There, one morning, at the hour when Labor awakens, Beneath the clear, cold sky when the dismal hubbub Of street-cleaners and scavengers breaks the silence,

I saw a swan that had escaped from his cage, That stroked the dry pavement with his webbed feet And dragged his white plumage over the uneven ground. Beside a dry gutter the bird opened his beak,

Restlessly bathed his wings in the dust And cried, homesick for his fair native lake: "Rain, when will you fall? Thunder, when will you roll?" I see that hapless bird, that strange and fatal myth,

Toward the sky at times, like the man in Ovid, Toward the ironic, cruelly blue sky, Stretch his avid head upon his quivering neck, As if he were reproaching God!

Paris changes! but naught in my melancholy Has stirred! New palaces, scaffolding, blocks of stone, Old quarters, all become for me an allegory, And my dear memories are heavier than rocks.

So, before the Louvre, an image oppresses me: I think of my great swan with his crazy motions, Ridiculous, sublime, like a man in exile,
Relentlessly gnawed by longing! and then of you,

Andromache, base chattel, fallen from the embrace Of a mighty husband into the hands of proud Pyrrhus, Standing bowed in rapture before an empty tomb, Widow of Hector, alas! and wife of Helenus!

I think of the negress, wasted and consumptive, Trudging through muddy streets, seeking with a fixed gaze The absent coco-palms of splendid Africa Behind the immense wall of mist;

Of whoever has lost that which is never found Again! Never! Of those who deeply drink of tears And suckle Pain as they would suck the good she-wolf! Of the puny orphans withering like flowers!

Thus in the dim forest to which my soul withdraws, An ancient memory sounds loud the hunting horn! I think of the sailors forgotten on some isle, — Of the captives, of the vanquished!...of many others too!