The extreme musicality of Baudelaire’s “L’invitation au voyage”, emphasised by its very short lines, immediately make me think of Verlaine, but it combines musicality with a robust sensuousness quite unlike Verlaine’s delicate, ethereally elusive  effects. In fact it’s above all the sound of the words and the way they make the mouth feel as you say them that makes their images glow so voluptuously in the imagination:

L’Invitation au voyage

Mon enfant, ma soeur,
Songe à la douceur
D’aller là-bas vivre ensemble!
Aimer à loisir,
Aimer et mourir
Au pays qui te ressemble!
Les soleils mouillés
De ces ciels brouillés
Pour mon esprit ont les charmes
Si … Continue Reading

I’ve just re-immersed myself in the radiant beauty of the Dawn Treader’s voyage through the Silver Sea. Goodness knows how many times I’ve read it, with unfailing awe and joy, as a boy, as a privately reading adult and as a parent and grandparent reading to children. It’s vivid proof of Lewis’s point that for someone who enjoys rereading books, knowing what’s to come doesn’t diminish the pleasure of narrative surprise but sharpens it: you feel the future turn actively swelling within the present moment rather than merely succeeding it. As Lewis says, “children understand this well when they ask … Continue Reading