HAUBERT
Quand la pluie etalant ses immenses trainees
D'une vaste prison imite les barreaux,
Et qu'un peuple muet d'infames araignees
Vient tendre ses filets au fond de nos cerveaux,
Des cloches tout
a
coup sautent avec furie
Et lancent vers le ciel un affreux hurlement,
Ainsi que des esprits errants et sans patrie
Qui se mettent
a
geindre opiniatrement.
-Et de longs corbillards, sans tambours ni musique,
Defilent lentement dans mon ame; l'Espoir,
V aincu, pleure, et l'A ngoisse atroce, despotique,
Sur mon crane incline plante son drapeau noir.
56
The anguished terror Baudelaire describes is, in the poem, less
interesting psychologically than rhetorically, although it may be just
the inflated rhetoric which at first puts us off. There
is
nothing more
to "understand" about the depression than the ways in which it
lends itself to exaggeration, to the outrageously theatrical. To
explain
this type of anxiety, we would have to explain Baudelaire, who, in
a sense, is not the subject of the poem. He
is
the subject of the life
Sartre analyzes or of the dream Michel Butor studies (which of
course doesn't mean that they, or any biographer, describe their sub–
ject accurately), but in the poem the only autobiographical element
is a day of bad weather. And, inasmuch as we can speak of "realistic"
poetry, Hugo's
"Tristesse d'Olympio"
and Lamartine's
"Isolement"
are much more realistic than the
((Spleen"
piece in that they make
melancholy intelligible in plausibly biographical terms (and it wouldn't
matter if the biography were invented.) The artificiality of Baude–
laire's poetry, on the other hand, has less to do with his interest in
the drugs evoked in the
Paradis artificiels
than with the deliberate
severance of the poetic state from any plausible history. Indeed, the
fabulous past conjured up in so many poems of
Les Fleurs du mal
simply emphasizes this break with the past, since it redefines memory
as the sport rather than the source of imagination.
The tone of
"Quand le ciel bas et lourd
. . ."
is
melodramatic
but somehow not serious. While we could hardly call the poem comi–
cal, its solemnity seems to me implicitly mocked by the poet's over–
indulgence in devices used to create an atmosphere excessively solemn.
Allegory in Baudelaire, curiously enough, serves the same function as
