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 mystérieux
De tes traîtres yeux,
Brillant à travers leurs larmes.

Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.

Des meubles luisants,
Polis par les ans,
Décoreraient notre chambre;
Les plus rares fleurs
Mêlant leurs odeurs
Aux vagues senteurs de l’ambre,
Les riches plafonds,
Les miroirs profonds,
La splendeur orientale,
Tout y parlerait
À l’âme en secret
Sa douce langue natale.

Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.

Vois sur ces canaux
Dormir ces vaisseaux
Dont l’humeur est vagabonde;
C’est pour assouvir
Ton moindre désir
Qu’ils viennent du bout du monde.
— Les soleils couchants
Revêtent les champs,
Les canaux, la ville entière,
D’hyacinthe et d’or;
Le monde s’endort
Dans une chaude lumière.

Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.

There’s no point in commenting on the images in detail. Anyone reading the poem aloud or sounding it in his inner ear will both see them and feel how caressingly the poet evokes them in his imagination. The poem unfolds like a song, an incantation that weaves a self-hypnotising spell so that the speaker seems almost to sink into the world he’s imagining. Only almost, though. The refrain both yearns towards this world and accepts its distance. Depending on the emphasis one gives “Là” in reading the poem, this acceptance can seem like something quietly in the background or a sharp reminder of how far the speaker’s actual world is from the order, beauty and pleasure of the imagined one. However, even at its sharpest this reminder doesn’t undermine the power of the evocation, which reaches an almost miraculous point of fulfilled repose in

— Les soleils couchants
Revêtent les champs,
Les canaux, la ville entière,
D’hyacinthe et d’or;
Le monde s’endort
Dans une chaude lumière.

There is just one small point of detail I’ll linger over in the same stanza, though. In

C’est pour assouvir
Ton moindre désir
Qu’ils viennent du bout du monde.

it seems to my Anglophone ear that “assouvir” has a lingeringly voluptuous quality that contrasts with the sharp vocables of “désir”. The tension between the states of satisfaction and desire is beautifully resolved in “Qu’ils viennent du bout du monde”. The line end pauses tease us by making us wait for this resolution (at least to my Anglophone ear, the length of the French /r/ phoneme heightens this effect) and the tension is beautifully released by the easy unfolding of fantasy in this longer line. I think it’s worth pausing on the implications of “désir”, or on the way the shaping of the lines make us feel them. Of course in its main sense “moindre désir” simply means “slightest wish”. However, pressing within that sense, giving such emphasis to “assouvir” and “désir” charges them with erotic yearning and fulfilment. For a moment we’re in the territory of, say, the lines in “La chevelure”,

Longtemps! toujours! ma main dans ta crinière lourde
Sèmera le rubis, la perle et le saphir,
Afin qu’à mon désir tu ne sois jamais sourde!

(again pressingly erotic lines, although in a context of fantasy and dream). I think there’s something delightfully delicate about the way “Qu’ils viennent du bout du monde” releases us from this moment of sensuous urgency, playing with the same sort of trope as Bassanio uses to describe Portia in The Merchant of Venice:

Her name is Portia; nothing undervalued
To Cato’s daughter, Brutus’ Portia.
Nor is the wide world ignorant of her worth
For the four winds blow in from every coast
Renowned suitors: and her sunny locks
Hang on her temples like a golden fleece
Which makes her seat of Belmont Colchos strond,
And many Jasons come in quest of her.