Spleen

Pluviôse, irrité contre la ville entière,
De son urne à grands flots verse un froid ténébreux
Aux pâles habitants du voisin cimetière
Et la mortalité sur les faubourgs brumeux.

Mon chat sur le carreau cherchant une litière
Agite sans repos son corps maigre et galeux;
L’âme d’un vieux poète erre dans la gouttière
Avec la triste voix d’un fantôme frileux.

Le bourdon se lamente, et la bûche enfumée
Accompagne en fausset la pendule enrhumée
Cependant qu’en un jeu plein de sales parfums,

Héritage fatal d’une vieille hydropique,
Le beau valet de coeur et la dame de pique
Causent sinistrement de leurs amours défunts.

How this little poem swarms with wretched lives that seem to start up almost one to a line! Baudelaire’s genius for metaphor takes a striking turn here, seeming to pile presence on presence, pressure on pressure, in a way that reflects the crowded claustrophobia of nineteenth century metropolitan life. “Pluviôse” – name of the rainy fifth month in the French Republican Calendar, straddling January and February – becomes an irritable god pouring water in floods from an urn. Personified like this, he’s not only seen as causing the conditions the city struggles under, but himself seems oppressed by a discontent that makes him lash out at everything and everyone around him. The poem in fact develops as a series of brilliantly self-contained images like tiny video clips, each inviting the reader to dwell on it and expand it in his own collaborative imagination. Most brilliant, to my mind, is the final one with its ripples of teasing suggestion. There’s an animating friction between squalid and glamorous connotations – squalor in the “sales parfums”, a flicker of discordant glamour in “le beau valet de coeur”. There’s an arresting element of surprise at the way these court cards suddenly start into speaking, three-dimensional life. Readers will imagine different scenarios. For myself, though I don’t know if this is a result of letting the English meaning of “sinister” weigh too heavily, I picture the knave of hearts (the valet de coeur) and the queen of spades (the dame de pique)  putting their heads together, whispering like a pair of conspirators from Goya’s black paintings. As they look back on their dead loves, “sinistrement” makes us feel they’re doing so sadly, gloomily and (to the unsympathetic spectator) boringly, but also that their doing so is disquietening, sinister in the English sense, and perhaps somehow ill-intentioned. All the tiny vignettes quiver with varying suggestions, though. In “Aux pâles habitants du voisin Cimetière”, for example, “habitants” seems to treat the cemetery as just another district of Paris, blurring the line between the living and the dead. And why are they pale? Because they’re ghosts, yes, but they also seem to be shivering with cold, hunger, disease, dread, like the living poor.

Although I’ve focused on picture rather than sound in this little piece, sound makes a vital contribution to the embodying of all these images in words. For example, the two lines describing the cat break up into little bursts of utterance that make you feel the cat’s restlessness as a sensation in your own body.

Another remarkable Spleen poem, “Je suis comme le roi d’un pays pluvieux”, works very differently. From an imagistic point of view it seems much flatter than “Pluviôse, irrité contre la ville entire” or “La Cloche fêlée”. Its ideas don’t, for me, become internally animated, vividly self-sufficient scenarios as images in those poems do; striking as they are, they remain apt concepts unfolding thought in an essentially linear way. Such a flattening of individual images seems a necessary condition of this  poem’s distinct power, which lies is in the beautifully shaped and modulated centripetal thrust of its argument:

Spleen

Je suis comme le roi d’un pays pluvieux,
Riche, mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant très vieux,
Qui, de ses précepteursS méprisant les courbettes,
S’ennuie avec ses chiens comme avec d’autres bêtes.
Rien ne peut l’égayer, ni gibier, ni faucon,
Ni son peuple mourant en face du balcon.
Du bouffon favori la grotesque ballade
Ne distrait plus le front de ce cruel malade;
Son lit fleurdelisé se transforme en tombeau,
Et les dames d’atour, pour qui tout prince est beau,
Ne savent plus trouver d’impudique toilette
Pour tirer un souris de ce jeune squelette.
Le savant qui lui fait de l’or n’a jamais pu
De son être extirper l’élément corrompu,
Et dans ces bains de sang qui des Romains nous viennent,
Et dont sur leurs vieux jours les puissants se souviennent,
II n’a su réchauffer ce cadavre hébété
Où coule au lieu de sang l’eau verte du Léthé