Summary
Baudelaire now turns his attention directly to the city of Paris, evoking the
same themes as the previous section. In "Landscape," he evokes a living and
breathing city. The speaker hears buildings and birds singing, also comparing
window lamps to stars. He considers the city a timeless place, passing from
season to season with ease. It is also a space of dreams and fantasy, where the
speaker finds "gardens of bronze," "blue horizons," and "builds fairy castles"
during the night. Paris becomes an enchanted city, where even a beggar is a
beautiful princess. For example, the speaker admires the erotic beauty of a
homeless woman in "To a Red-headed Beggar Girl," especially her "two perfect
breasts." He does not see her rags but, rather, the gown of a queen complete
with pearls formed from drops of water.
The speaker then laments the destruction of the old Paris in "The Swan."
Evoking the grieving image of Andromache, he exclaims: "My memory teems with
pity / As I cross the new Carrousel / Old Paris is no more (the shape of a city
/Changes more quickly, alas! than the heart of a mortal)." All he sees now is
the chaos of the city's rebuilding, from scaffolding to broken columns.
Baudelaire then juxtaposes the pure but exiled image of a white swan with the
dark, broken image of the city. The swan begs the sky for rain but gets no
reply. The speaker forces himself to come to grips with the new city but cannot
forget the forlorn figure of the swan as well as the fate of Andromache, who was
kidnapped shortly after her husband's murder.
The presence of the grieving Andromache evokes the theme of love in the city
streets. But in the modern city, love is fleeting--and ultimately impossible--
since lovers do not know each other anymore and can only catch a glimpse of each
other in the streets. In "To a Passerby," the speaker conjures up a beautiful
woman and tries to express his love with one look: they make eye contact, but it
is quickly broken, as they must each head their separate ways. The encounter is
tragic because they both feel something ("O you who I had loved, O you who
knew!") and yet they know that their next meeting will be in the afterlife; a
foreboding presence of death looms over the poem's end.
Baudelaire continues to expose the dark underside, or spleen, of the city.
(The spleen, an organ that removes disease-causing agents from the bloodstream,
was traditionally associated with malaise; "spleen" is a synonym for
"ill-temper.") In "Evening Twilight," he evokes "cruel diseases," "demons,"
"thieves," "hospitals," and "gambling." The different aspects of the city are
compared to wild beasts and anthills, while "Prostitution ignites in the
streets." Paris becomes a threatening circus of danger and death where no one
is safe. By the end of the section, in "Morning Twilight," "gloomy Paris" rises
up to go back to work.
Form
It is important to note that most of the poems in this section are dedicated to
Victor Hugo, who composed long epic poems about Paris. In this context,
Baudelaire abandons the structure and rhythm of the previous section in order to
emulate Hugo's own style. However, in "To a Passerby," Baudelaire returns to
his original form, using a traditional sonnet structure (two quatrains and two
three-line stanzas). As in "Spleen and Ideal," he emphasizes the imperfection
of the speaker's spleen with imperfections in meter, isolating the words
"Raising" and "Me" at the beginning of their respective lines.
Commentary
Baudelaire was deeply affected by the rebuilding of Paris after the revolution
of 1848. Begun by Louis-Napoleon in the 1850s, this rebuilding program widened
streets into boulevards and leveled entire sections of the city. Baudelaire
responded to the changing face of his beloved Paris by taking refuge in
recollections of its mythic greatness but also with a sense of exile and
alienation. The swan symbolizes this feeling of isolation, similar to the
"Spleen" poems in which the speaker feels that the entire city is against him.
The Swan asks God for rain in order to clean the streets and perhaps return
Paris to its antique purity but receives no response. Suddenly, the city itself
has become a symbol of death as its rapid metamorphoses remind the speaker of
the ruthlessness of time's passage and his own mortality: "The shape of a city
/Changes more quickly, alas! than the heart of a mortal."
