I. SUGGESTION IN BAUDELAIRE'S POETRY

A. Introduction

The reader of Baudelaire sees him as both a lyrical and a controversial, a "modern" poet. This is a paradoxical perception, since lyricism tends to avoid controversy by transforming the immediate world into one deceptively ordered by its even lines and rhymes. But Baudelaire, ardent student of the modern world, has wrenched that world into the forms of lyric poetry, cleaving without contorting it, and projects himself into it so that he achieves a startlingly vivid portrayal of the predicament of the modern artist. Reading Baudelaire's poetry, well trained as we have been for centuries in the reading of lyric verse, we allow his agony to escape the world, to become allegory and to take its distance in a parable of the soul. The inconsistency implied by this habit of reading is reprimanded by the struggle within the form of the poetry, in its images and in its language. Baudelaire's poetry asks to be read with a consciousness of its being as present, and not with an imagination that disconnects itself from the poem's reality. To retain its power, the poetry must create this reading for itself: it is by this form of address that it becomes an active vision, and is not dismissed as merely visionary.
Baudelaire's dedication of "Le Cygne to Victor Hugo indicates his indebtedness to the romantic school. He wrote,

Voici de vers faits pour vous et en pensant à vous.
Il ne faut pas les juger avec vos yeux sevères, mais avec
vos yeux paternels. . . .

The effort of the romantic school in France was towards the creation of an imaginative world which was a reflection of subjective being. Language was used freely as a tool of the imagination. It lost its power, at a moment of transcendence, to project a person outside of him/herself.

There is a distinct struggle against this linguistic non-reality in Baudelaire's poetry, one which reintroduces a temporal presence to the ideal which the romantic poets strive to attain. That strife in itself becomes the object of symbolic representation: it reintroduces consciousness to the process of desiring an ideal. Consciousness insists upon desire, but it is also the element which makes the object of desire unobtainable: it reintroduces the knowledge of temporality and of limitation which forms the dilemma not only of modern but of mortal men. What form of art allows the viewer to escape his consciousness? The poet replaces a strife for the "ideal" by a grasp of the moment — which captures the sensation of presence, the form of consciousness, the impulse of desire.

"Le Cygne" demonstrates the tension between symbol and allegory in Baudelaire's poetics. Baudelaire's language does not abandon allegory. It does not doubt the ideal. But its referential value is internal to its efficiency as a work of art. A symbol grounds figurative language in its literal meaning. It creates a center of reference within the work of art.

This section looks for the way that an image is created in the language of Baudelaire. His use of image demonstrates his underlying assumptions about the origin of language as a means of representation (ontology), and about the relation of language to its referent (epistemology). These observations may be extended to the relation between subject and object in the poem, between poet and poem, between poet and world.

In the first part (I) of "Le Cygne", the man is set against a context of mythology (Andromaque and the Simoïs) and of history (the poet's vision of Paris). The image is not phrased in personal or religious terms, which interpret the tension between mythology and history, but in terms which involve it in that tension. Part two (II), "Paris change!" introduces the duration of time and with it a non-mythological dimension of history. But history reintroduces allegory, which denies the specific tenacity of memory. The image of the swan (sign) stands against but not apart from change, containing change so that the image becomes a mediator between the levels of mythology/ religion and of personal/historical experience.

Image as mediator functions neither on the literal nor on the figurative level of allegory; the image itself sets loose its suggestions at the same time as it contains them. Baudelaire stated his intention for this poem in a letter to Victor Hugo:

"c'etait de dire vite tous ce qu'un accident peut contenir de suggestions, comment la vue d'un animal souffrant pousse l'esprit vers tous les êtres que nous aimons, qui sont absents et qui souffrent..."

In this passage Baudelaire suggests a process of synaesthesia, "...comment la vue ....pousse l' esprit ...": how sight acts upon the mind. The animal's suffering is translated into the fact of suffering which recalls all those who suffer. But the middle step, for the viewer, (reader) is left out — he never actually experiences the suffering. This step is not ignored by the poet, who, in writing his poem, suffers, as the animal is suffering. But suffering is already a human emotion— or at least a human name for an emotion— and language has already, then, made a leap, projecting itself onto the animal. Is this because the poet identifies himself with the subject of his poem, which then yields him back to his emotions? Or is his(hers) an actual reaction and translation of his response to the object? The form of the poem is caught up in its process.

"Le Cygne" and other poems

"Le Cygne" may be envisioned as a series of portraits. The first is of Andromaque, bending over the river Simoïs. The image is situated in the poet's mind although its origin is in mythology. One significant detail of this portrait is the fact that Andromaque is separate from the river. It mirrors her face ("pauvre et triste miroir...") and her grief over the death of her husband, and receives her tears. Like the poet before an object, the river is impressed with her image and with her emotional pathos. The situation, not unlike Narcissus, creates an image of both separation and connection.

That first portrait, isolated and framed by the apostrophe, "Andromaque, je pense à vous!" becomes complicated by a transferral which takes place in the language of the poem. The river, breaking its "frame" — that isolated portrait of Andromaque — overflows with her tears and floods the memory of the poet. Two degrees of memory are brought into the poem — memory as objective portrait, and as subjective link to the poet. The process of recollection in the poem, properly unravelled, is that the swan has inspired the image of Andromaque (of a fellow creature suffering) in the poet,who has projected his own emotional sympathy into that image. But the sequence of causal relationships is not so simple. The overflowing Simoïs irrigates the memory of the poet; and is it then the physical image of the swan which produces the poetic one? Are these two images identical in their action and their power? Does the actual swan necessarily exist? And what is the nature of the poetic swan? What is the correspondence between them? And what is the separation? Of which relation — correspondence or separation — is the poet more aware?

Questioning the relationships which exist within the poem leads to the question of what the poet meant by Simois "menteur": how can the Simoïs lie? The visual answer to that question is "by creating two images, a true and a false; by hiding the true and revealing the false." Is there a reading of the poem which offers a conflict of image in this scene?

The Simoïs does present two images, one to the poet of the "immense majesty" of the woman's emotion, of the brimming tears which irrigate his fertile field; another (this same image) to the woman, which is a lie next to the sorrow of widowhood that she suffers. The Simoïs as mirror reflects "L'immense majesté de vos douleurs de veuve. . . . " an image inconsistent with the river's nature which has been described as "pauvre et triste." The inconsistency is created by the inconsistency in the language. Language is all that we are given to trust by the poet, but both language and image can lie if they misrepresent the thing (Douleur) to itself (Andromaque) or to another (Simoïs). The contrast, of image and mirror, forms the only possible basis for the lie in the visual dimension of the poem; in the linguistic one, that same possible ambiguity exists between object and word if language both mirrors and lies. Lying can therefore be read as the description of this poem and of the nature of its language.

The poet seems to issue a warning: beware of poetic language; I often forget to remind you — behind the image lies the tears of widowhood. Does this situation offer a paradigm for reading the images that crop up in the rest of the poem? Can the poet's relation to Paris be interpreted in the same ambivalent fashion?

The reader's second portrait, which follows fast upon the first, is of the poet, Baudelaire, crossing the "nouveau Carrousel" -- a bridge over the river Seine -- in the modern city of Paris. It defines a course of transferral of imagery, as Andromaque beside the Simoïs is replaced by the poet in the city of Paris. Despite its sorrow, that first image was fertile; the second is stagnant, an adversary to poetic sensibility. Like the image of Andromaque, which exists only beside his stream of memory, the poet sees Paris in his mind only. His description is minute, and confused: it is a wasteland landscape, scatted with ruin, decay and disorder. The description has an element of surreality, an unlooked-for vividness in its range of detail.

The stanza beginning ". . . Je ne vois qu'en esprit . . ." is problematic because, thereafter, Baudelaire refers to the locus of his description as "Là . . ." — "there." Is "there" in his mind or in Paris? Does he distinguish between the two localities? Is there an unchanging landscape of his inner eye which exists in a temporal and external dimension as well? And what is the rapport between these two (identical?) landscapes, inner and outer, as compared with the relation between the two images: the physical image of the swan and the poetical one?

The questions which the text of the poetry seems to precipitate are all concerned with the possibility of lying through poetic imagery, a question which arises from the dichotomy that exists in poetry between language and image, in prose between syntax and semantics, and in language between word and object. The poem, for the poet, attempts to express this dichotomy, to bridge this gap to which the poet is subject between internal and external modes of reality. The problem is the fundamental and familiar one of representation in art. The poet's solution, in terms of form and of his use of language, is a response to the way in which he perceives linguistic representation as both problematic and effective.

The third portrait is of the swan. He is placed in the landscape, not in its space alone, but also in time:

Là je vis, un matin, à l'heure où sous les cieux
Froids et clairs le Travail s'éveille, où la voirie
Pousse un sombre ouragan dans l'air silencieux. . .

A swan (a sign?). Set apart syntactically, he seems to create his own entrance into the poem. The swan parallels the image of Andromaque in his position ". . . près d'un ruisseau sans eau." There is no fertility in the image; it is oppressive and dry, and recalls the landscape in which it finds itself, that of the modern city of Paris. The swan recalls also the separation present in the image of Andromaque: he speaks, "le coeur plein de son beau lac natal..."

The swan bathes his wings in powder, and speaks — a curious gift for a swan, that of speech. The poem does not have its source in the simple physical image of an actual swan, nor in the descriptive poetic image of a perceived swan, but instead the poet has created another swan, who speaks. A swan who, in his alienation to his surroundings, gains the sympathy of the poet, and therefore his voice. A swan who, like Andromaque, laments the force of change.

Change has been represented most consistently relative to the presence or absence of water in the poem. Water — tears — are the product of sorrow (separation) and contribute to the poet's inspiration through the image of Andromaque. Water enters the description of modern Paris ("les gros blocs verdis par l'eau des flaques. . ."), but this time it is old water, stagnant water which cannot irrigate its surroundings. The swan, in a dry landscape, calls for water, for inspiration, which is also recollection of his origin ("son beau lac natal") and union with a God who is not there ("le ciel ironique et cruellement bleu . . . .") Water continues to be lacking through the second half ("Aux maigres orphelins sechant comme des fleurs. . ."); its absence symbolized the separation of an object from its source, an alienation which the poet, in language, seeks to overcome.

But the process of change in these first two stanzas seems to have accumulated into an image of the architecture of a chambered nautilus (or onion): reading backwards, in Paris, in Charles Baudelaire, next to his memory, by the Simoïs, is Andromaque. What is the nature and validity of the links between the first and the last terms of this sequence?

The most invalid of the links is between the water of the river and the memory of the poet. Mediated by language, language "lies" in crossing over from myth to poetic presence. The "links" must form a bridge from an external and contemporary reality to a myth by way of the subjective figure of the poet. The poem does not truly fuse the real and the mythical modes of being except in the image of the swan, recreated in memory but projected outside the poet's thought. The swan then becomes a symbol for process, not simply standing for or representing another level of "meaning" (reference). It collapses the sequence of links into itself, so that it attains a mode of being as present through the containing of contradiction, and is therefore the recreation of the poet's desire.

The poet reintroduces his eye — for the poem is largely seen ("je pense," "je traversais," "je ne vois . . .," "la je vis," and "je vois") --and reintroduces his voice in the language it gives to the scene (". . . comme l'homme d'Ovide," ". . . ironique et cruellement bleu," and finally, "Comme s'il adressait des reproches a Dieu!") This last concept is so far removed from any possible action of the swan that, unless he is a victim of metamorphosis (as Baudelaire might suggest by reference to Ovid), the identification of self with image must be attributed to the poet. So the swan, contained within the eye of the poet, yet speaks — embodies — his voice. The swan is the projection of the poet into the landscape.

But what is the voice of the poet if not his poem? And so, the swan gains a further identification not only with the poet but also with his poem; not only with Paris but also with its seer; not only with Andromaque but also with the river. In each case he is allied with the expression of separation and sorrow.

Before continuing to trace the "portraits" in the poem or to define the nature of their imagery, I would like to return to a closer reading of the language to see what it yields. The distinction between language and image is suggested in the poem by the recurrence of vision in the description of images and the playing of language as it relates image to image within the poem. Language and image are opposed in effect, and recognize the opposition for the poet of expression and perception. The separation of language from image is not, therefore, artificial, but central to the creation of the poem. This may provide a stubborn way to read a graceful poem, but grace will always dissolve into a series of awkward movements upon a closer look.

In the first stanza, ce "petit fleuve" balances and substitutes for "Andromaque." The syntax that follows is startling because, although the invocation is addressed to Andromaque, the stanza concerns itself with the river Simoïs. Baudelaire seems to think of Andromaque by means of the river, where formerly her great sorrow was mirrored and which overflows with her tears to fertilize the poet's memory. Mirror and memory are linked in the sonority of the poem, and linked too in the possibility of their lying. "Le nouveau Carrousel" brings the poet to the present, and the poet writes of the river (Seine) as if it were the Simoïs which floods his memory.

The four lines of the second stanza contain four substantive elements: the poet (je) walking through the modern city of Paris; the poet's memory ("ma memoire fertile") which confronts the new Paris with its old forms; that changing form of the city; and the unchanging heart of a mortal man. The relationships between these elements, across different orders of reality, are both complicated syntactically and central to the poem. The comment which differentiates between the external world of change and the internal world of sorrow, here relegated to parentheses (". . . la forme d'une ville/change. . ."), is a problematic element of the stanza because the reader does not know where to place it. It is not even clear who speaks it; why must be inferred from the lapse in continuity and direction, in syntax as well as in context. It seems to be the memory, which is allied with the human heart, that comments parenthetically on the rapidity of the change in urban form. The tension, in both situation and syntax of the poem at this moment, lies in the continuity of the poet's mind (heart and memory) behind the changing external forms. The object of the poem is to seek a form or image which underlines that continuity without becoming (abandoned) unexpressed in the course of change of form.

The separation in thought between Andromaque and the poet is reflected in fact by the imaging of his memory in the river. The lie lives at the literal level of the poetry: how could the poet's memory have been flooded by (mythical) tears if not through the mediation of the image? Taken literally, the reader is ready to admit that these two stanzas consist, simply, of a series of disjunctions in image and in phrase: a disjunction which is continued by the development of the level of allegory, but overcome by the introduction of the image of the swan.

There are four elements in the opening lines which also set up conflicting levels of reality: Andromaque, the mythological mother of Hector; the poet, writing actually in the first person; he, in addressing Andromaque as "vous," brings her to the present — she is no longer mythological, but allegorical ; finally, in the midst of these, there is the level of poetic language which the poem creates. The river takes on these levels of meaning, too. There is that transfer, to begin with, from the mythical which, by means of the poetry, becomes present in allegory, to the actual presence of a river, which is not only the Simoïs but also the Seine. Again, the mythological Simoïs becomes the allegorical Simoïs as it takes on meaning in this poem. The poetical Simoïs exists in , since it floods, the poet's memory, and the Simoïs which he crosses is actually the Seine. Mythology, allegory, poetry, actuality, present themselves as four possible levels for the interpretation of reality. It is not these various interpretations that the reader seeks: poetry is poetry (poetic language is poetic language) by its manner of combining these possible levels of significance. Poetry and fiction dwell in language, apart from reality; but apart also from both myth and allegory which may be derived linguistically but have their meaning outside of their linguistic derivation. (This point may also be made by the situation of the poet in the city.)

The first two stanzas contrast, or set up a tension, between the change in Paris, change which is temporal and alters form, and the continuously grieving Andromaque. The origin of her grief is the death of her husband, which is similar to the origin of the poet's grief over the change in the city of Paris. The origin of the poem lies in her grief, and therefore in death. The "poor and sad" image of her grief, which the river reflects, lies , and in lying is an image also of the poem. Memory, which resists (contains) change, responds to the river's mirrored image of Andromaque, who enters thereby into the creation of the poem like the swan, who also sets loose a string of associations.

The process of change of images is the same as the alternation of figures of language: the portraits act as sudden metaphor, the substitutions as linking metonymy. But the alternation of these figures is not simple. They are related, sometimes through the poet, and sometimes through their language or structure.

The three dominant images in the first half of the poem are those of Andromaque,of the swan, and of Paris. The image of the swan is linked by association with the image of Andromaque grieving, and the two to the creation of the poem. Thus, the swan is , to some extent, the creation of the poem itself more than its subject. On a mythical level, it is linked to Andromaque and the Simoïs; on a more immediate level with its context of Paris. The tension lies in the contrast of myth and image—imaged myth: the creation of poetry, and its nature. They transform the city in the context of the mortal heart to that form which does not change, of myth. But what lies behind the formation of the myth; what is the reason for its creation? And conversely, what is the relation of poetry to Paris, to politics and to a change in form?

It is not until the second stanza that the dominant image of the swan opens up the process of correspondence, or metonymy, which accelerates toward a larger vision of which each single portrait is a part. The swan is the only portrait which is not included in but dominates the sequence. It is not a simple metaphorical portrait; its situation is less important to its definition than to its significance. (Situation defines the relevance of the remainder of the portraits to the poem.) The swan, then, is the only one of the portraits capable of making a political statement, of universalizing the human condition and specifically embodying the plight of men in a modern world.

* * *

The second part of the poem begins with the introduction of change: " Paris change ! Mais rien . . . ." This exclamation parallels the beginning of the first stanza, " Andromaque, je pense a vous ! Ce petit fleuve . . . ." In each case the exclamation provokes a reaction of opposition: the first stanza turned its attention to the river; the second turns to a discussion of the poet's situation. The remainder of the stanza like a river twists and turns, seeking some continuity between exclamation and reaction, between external and internal event or perception.

Internal change, which is reaction to the external, is betrayed by the verb "devient": if the poet's memories and images of vieux Paris are disconnected symbols, then allegory becomes their only possible mode of explanation. But allegorical symbols are symbols of the past and do not serve to interpret the present time as present. In front of the Louvre, a museum whose symbols have lost their significance among the changed forms of Paris, comes the stronger image of the swan, which weighs on him and opens, through the infinite ("désir sans trêve . . .") the catalogue of myths: of Troy, of Africa, of whoever has lost what he will never find again; finally opens the poet's lexicon, and his myth which, as a voice of poetic creation is not stiffened into allegory except in "Le Voyage." What is the relation of the swan to this catalogue of myths, and to its point of culmination, The Voyage?

To begin once again by examining the series of portraits which the poet sketches (portraits and not images because portraits may contain relationships—intentional juxtaposition or distortion of perspective. . . ), the first is of the poet in Paris. The city has changed; the poet—or at least his melancholy—has not. I do not think I assume a particular reading of the poem if I understand, by his melancholy, the grief over change, the separation between the poet and the world. So the melancholy, an expression of change, does not itself change. But the images, in the poet's mind, may. They seem to appeal on three levels of reality: descriptive (". . . palais neufs, échafaudages, blocs, vieux faubourgs . . ."); allegorical ("pour moi devient allégorie"); remembered ("/Et mes chers souvenirs . . ."); which achieve a sort of actuality ("sont plus lourds que des rocs . . . .") Where, in this forest of images may the swan (. . . a sign . . .) enter?

The forest of images, with its many levels of growth and undergrowth, is an appropriate context for the swan. Language emphasizes the difference between the levels of growth in the forest which are all alien to the situation of the swan. (But it doesn't help to introduce a metaphor to characterize images.) Within the first stanza, there is a transferral of realities: the new palaces, scaffolds, blocks, old quarters become transposed into his head, become allegory; the poet's memories take on solidity, are as heavy as rocks. Transformation, if not change, occurs in the midst of the poet's melancholy into different manners: external perception is transformed into allegory which does not change but interprets change. Internal memory, or experience, bears no relation to the allegory and seems to sink below it, heavier.

This stanza, read as a paragraph , emphasizes the discontinuities, which appeared earlier in the text, between the poet and the world around him. His melancholy is an awareness of the separation of the eternal from the external, despite that transformation which asserts continuity between "palais . . . , échafaudages, blocs,./ . . . faubourgs" and allegory, and between "souvenirs" and "rocs." Pairs of adjectives are, however, placed in opposition (neufs and vieux, chers and lourds), as are memory and allegory, building and rocks, within the images of transformation.

I here propose a partial theory of poetry, a way of looking at the transformations in Baudelaire's poetry. These are the linguistic links between the poet and the modern world which the poet forms within the series of portraits that constitute the poem. If change is understood to occur through linear time in the historical world, and therefore along a horizontal line in any representation of it; and if, at any point along this line of time, the poet's presence adds a third dimension to it, then the relation of world and poet yields the following diagram:

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW (world)

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm (man

This diagram reckons with a separation between the world and the poet and different ways of bridging it. Talking only about language, which does of course include so many other possibilities for significance apart from "meaning" (sound and visual relations, structures, repetitions and images . . . ), in this diagram, poetry is the only vertical line which links the poet to (his perception of) the world. It is not another dimension but a bridge between dimensions: between time-space (external historical reality) and consciousness through language. Along the horizontal line of the world progresses change; across the vertical line of poetry proceeds transformation. These occur in different dimensions to account for the same phenomenon. Can this framework help in any way to define, in Baudelaire's terms, the relations between allegory/Louvre and myth/image/swan sign?

The second portrait of this second section appears in the second stanza — "Aussi devant ce Louvre une image m'opprime": The Louvre, symbol of a Paris whose symbols seem unanchored, has no vertical dimension, no relation to the poet. This Louvre is the transformed image of the changing Paris become allegory. Art takes on a fascinating dimension, but it does not seem to suffice to make that image of allegory (the Louvre) become accessible to the poet. The image, of the swan, oppresses him, recalling the granite weight of his "dear" memories. A certain continuity was established between the poet and the external structures which change — "new" palaces, scaffoldings, blocks and old quarters, — by allegory, the allegory of the city of Paris, bottled up in the Louvre. Allegory exists parallel to change in the city of Paris, across historical time; the dimension of poetic symbol does not span that mode of time. Memories sink also along the vertical dimension, expanding through language into moments which are not time-bound. The swan, allied with this dimension of interpretation, gives access to the symbolic level of memory (myth).

A string of continuous images reaches from the poet's melancholy back through his memories to the image of the swan, which opens up to him the myths of ancient and exotic worlds, the sufferings of others, and his own allegory of the voyage. The swan here is the active image, the image of the poem and of its power to give access to (express) situations removed from its own (. . . how?); its appearance represents the turning point — the breaking of the dam — in the poem.

The swan in front of the Louvre expresses the situation most central to the poem. Andromaque, by the Simoïs, was internal to the poet's mind; the situation of the poet in Paris is one which he cannot see and which is paralleled and finds its expression in this image of the swan. The first three stanzas continue to work within and to represent these three initial situations, but expand into their correlatives in the poetry of the last three stanzas.

The third portrait of this section returns to Andromaque. Its central image is not of her bending over the river Simoïs: this time it has taken on religious connotation, and she is bending over the empty tomb of her husband, Hector. But the irony of the religious connotation of the image is that the tomb is not empty on account of his resurrection but because his body has been dragged around Troy by his conqueror, Achilles. In the ninth year of the Trojan war, after the death of Hector, Andromaque was taken prisoner by Helenus, the nephew of Achilles. The loss of her family and her shame as servant of the Greeks are the source of her great sorrow which, according to Homer, caused the Simoïs to overflow.

Andromaque, des bras d'un grand epoux tombée ,
Vil bétail, sous la main du superbe Phyrrus,
Auprès d'un tombeau vide en extase courbée ;
Veuve d'Hector, hélas! et femme de Hélénus!

The two participles, "tombée" and "courbée" give the scene its syntactic symmetry. The final exclamations, half exclamation and half lament, recall the initial appeals of the two sections—to Andromaque, and to . . . the poet? This stanza has a unity which is not typical of the poem, but, within it, the syntax is not simple. The two most extremely opposed modifiers, "vil betail" and "en extase" are not tied to their referents. Is she treated like a vile beast by proud Phyrrus; or is he the vile beast? Is it the master or the slave that here speaks; whose is the point of view that the reader adopts? And is it she who is in ecstasy, or is it somehow the tomb which, by its emptiness, becomes transfigured? What is the relation of "vide" to "extase"? What is expressed by the poet's melancholy ecstasy with which he names her in the last line? Where does the projection of self, the identification of language with its object, a possibility which the swan catalysed, enter into this portrait of Andromaque? Where : into its language, into its image, or by analogy into the sequence of stanzas, in which it finds itself . . . ?

Andromaque is characterized here with respect to three unequal relations (of contenant/contenu): to her old husband (Hector); to her new master (Pyrrhus); and to the tomb. The old and the new masters are contrasted in the descriptions by the adjectives, "grand" and "superbe." Her relation to the old is f rom his arms fallen to under the hand of the new. Perhaps I stress this relation of change overly, this change from a past state of relative equality to one of misery and sorrow in the present, but the situation of Andromaque is not unlike the situation of the poet in Paris, to an old Paris, to a new one, and now as she bends finally over an empty tomb in ecstasy. This third relation, to absence, or discontinuity, takes priority in the creation of the poem.

The second of these four consecutive stanzas portrays a black woman, "piétinant . . ." and "cherchant . . ."

Les cocotiers absents de la superbe Afrique
Derrière la muraille immense de brouillard;

There are several repetitions of the syntactic and lexical patterns, and patterns of imagery and situation return. The beginning, "Je pense a . . ." recalls the second stanza (of the second section,) "Je pense a mon grand cygne . . ." with which all these images are parallel. It also reaches back to contrast with the perception of the initial stanza, "Je me vois qu'en esprit. . ." The "amaigrie et phthisique" accentuates the series of dark-toned adjectives which have accompanied the descriptions of the poet, the swan, and Andromaque. "Piétinant dans la boue" recalls specifically the description of Paris, "les gros blocs verdis par l'eau des flaques,"; "cherchant, l'oeil hagard" recreates both the searching and the uncertainty of the swan ("Baignant nerveusement ses ailes dans la poudre . . . . ")
But the most persistent similarity is the constant presence of absence; the woman seeking the absent coconut palm of Africa, since she is not there, the land of her birth. Like the swan, "le coeur plein de son beau lac natal," and the poet weighted down by memories, the African woman takes on the burden of sorrow and the unrooted glance of desperation. The situation — the portrait — is again one of a figure in a context: a woman is seeking something "whole" of the past and to overcome alienation and estrangement; to overcome the absent, which is hidden "Derrière la muraille immense du brouillard." The language teases the reader here, first creating the image of coconut palms in proud, distant Africa, then taking it away behind an immense wall of fog. Fog makes vision inaccessible: the woman becomes a figure for the poet, seeking expression. The image of the woman becomes a figure for the poem, bridging the gap between presence and absence.

The woman becomes a figure for the poet; the image of the woman becomes a figure for the poem: what transformation has gone on between poet and woman, image and poem? "Je pense à . . ." introduces her as an image suggested by the swan, the "vue d'un animal souffrant . . . ." The poet's sympathy for the swan is extended to the woman. Her situation, of absence of longing, represents the tension of desire and alienation in the swan. The central image has been displaced and partially re-expressed in a situation exterior to it.
The poet's identification with the animal brings other associations to him: of his own situation in Paris; of Andromache,—mythology and the process of inspiration. Their order is altered in the poem, and the image of the swan is recreated through experience of its identification with other images, mythological and personal, which it links . The images which follow attempt to include historical change: the Louvre and allegory; the introduction of weight, the concreteness of rocks which were (unable to be) introduced before the introduction of historical time; the myth again, but myth with a black hole in it...; a supernatural image whose dimension is space, with a wall through it . . . ; and then, again expanding, to whomever , and ever , and "ceux qui . . ." where he introduces both direct allegory (using D ouleur and S ouvenir to replace "mes souvenirs. . ." and "ma melancholie" . . .) and the necessity of simile . In accepting simile, does the poetry weaken? but what is its ecstasy?

The swan, "mon grand cygne," has also begun to expand with the accelerating stanzas. He almost becomes, implicitly, the "grande Créature" to which Baudelaire refers in "La Mort des Artistes" or "l'animal plein de genie" of his critical writing. The poet sees the swan as something outside of him which embodies his suffering as poet in the modern world, both changed and changing. The world has always been changing, but a specific consciousness of its having changed, as opposed to its change, casts the shadow which may be measured. The swan, (who is never swan-poet, in that he represents that separation which makes that identification impossible) represents to the poet both his position in the world as man as modern man, and as artist: his agony in the creation of the poem. The swan takes on the suffering of man in the world, and of the poet before his poem; but, more specifically, of modern man in the modern world—estranged, alienated, without recourse to God or contact with nature, — and of a modern poet seeking the means to express his estrangement from the world. He creates a symbol — a sign whose referent is contained within it — the swan, in whom is fused the active subject with its action, with its becoming object, and in whose simple being the process of writing is recreated.

The portraits, at this point in the poem, have achieved a different value than they bore at the beginning. The original image of Andromache, in the first two stanzas, had to lead the poet to the sources of his grief and of his inspiration (water). That image, like a flashback, precedes the introduction of the central image of the poem — the swan. Realization of that image in poetic language had to be made possible through the poet's identification of himself in it. But the image stands alone and gives access to a series of metonymic correspondences. From one image to the next, through the last five stanzas, the poem grows, the language crescendoes. The effort, contained within each image, nevertheless does not break their continuity. Each stands, with respect to the swan, a step closer — not to the poet, the direction in which the first stanzas moved, but away from, outside of the poet; the poem loses the tension which bound each portrait to a context, sets its images free to discover and recreate a whole of which they are only the part. The tension still exists, however, both within the images and their relation to the poet's mind. They are bounded, and contained, within the poet's mind: each episode is prefaced with "Je pense à . . " or, simply, "à." The section as a whole is prefaced by the stanza which forces it into the dimension of temporal, contemporary change ("Paris change!") and, forcing it into that context of meaning , it (the context) becomes allegory, the symbols tangible. The poet, within his mind, pursues the symbols as they take on a life of their own, find substance behind the shadow of "image."

The reader could deconstruct each vision at this point in the poem. But that is not the primary impetus of the poem; it is a necessary precondition for that impetus, that "life" of their own. Alongside the allegory, there exist images — not anguished animals, like the swan, but beastly animals, thoughtless actions: "vil betail," "piétinant dans la boue," la "louve" qui "tette(nt)." This language seems terribly estranged from the abstract and unlimited use of the allegorical words, "Douleur" and "Souvenir."

This gulf which opens within the language of the poem (which also, at the frail, ephemeral point of its efficiency succeeds in uniting, or transferring, the reality of the concrete terms to the vocabulary of absence and desire) seems to gape widest between the poet and the arc of his own language. Where does he stand with respect to its voyage: where does it succeed (arrive); does it fall short?
A repeated image (figure, situation) through the last six stanzas, is that of exile. The swan "avec ses gestes fous,/Comme les exiles, ridicule et sublime. . ."; the negress, exiled from Africa; "quiquonque a perdu ce qui ne se retrouve. . ."; with respect to the poet, ". . .le forêt où mon esprit s'exile/"; the forgotten sailors, the captives, the vanquished, are all removed from their place of origin. If the poet seeks to return to the place across his language, he may not simply recreate it, because then there is no bridge; he cannot bring it to himself. His access is in the leap of metaphor; creation alone only enforces his exile.

As the poem goes farther from its origin with the poet, from containing its tension; as it frees itself, it looses urgency (gains ecstasy) and opens a gulf between itself and the world. That gulf lurks between the "Spleen et Idéal;" the "Idéal" where "tout . . . devient allegorie:' the "Spleen" where not only the separation of the poet from his source of inspiration (imaged throughout this poem in the repetition of relations to water) but his consciousness of his being as separate causes his anguish. However, this poem does not belong to the collection "Spleen et Idéal" but to "Tableaux Parisiens." The condition of separation dramatized in "Spleen et Idéal" determines a stage on which language may act, — sets forth its analogy or relation to its origin. But the "Tableaux Parisiens" go further in interpreting this analytical conception in the context of the modern world. It is this sequence of poems which develops the most intelligible terms of response to the modern world.

The final two stanzas, then, dramatize this separation without bringing it to consciousness. The language reaches towards the infinite: after the swan's "désir sans treve" the "Jamais, jamais! . . .," the images coming thick and fast (three in one stanza, an accelerated and multiplying four in the last two lines), the increasing excitement expressed in the exclamations and dropping of modifiers from the language, the repetition and sonority ("sss.—." and accented rhythm), and simplification of the visual imagery: these suggest an unlimited expansion, an expansion which does however seem to lose its present, or the immediacy of the image of the swan, and hide itself behind "an immense wall of fog . . . ." It becomes much less visual and much more musical in its appeal as though the inspired poetry is trying to reach toward a language of the soul; and yet, if the possibility of inspiration is not created and sustained on the plane of metaphor, this language does fall flat and loses its hold.

The poet ceases to be the active speaker or image at the end; he is both caught up in and left behind his poetry:

Ainsi dans la foret où mon esprit s'exile
Un vieux Souvenir sonne à plein souffle du cor!
The "plein souffle du cor" enters as music into the text. But the horn is the horn of memory, and memories were become as heavy as rocks. There is irony in this music of old Memory. Does the horn not call the poet back from the forest where his spirit is exiled? (Memory and allegory—"tout . . . devient allegory"—are not on the same threshold.) The spirit is still exiled in that forest; even the spirit exalted and transported to a threshold of "Correspondences." It is called back into memory, into the agony of memory; and Baudelaire's associations, almost his appeal

. . . aux matelots oubliés dans une île
Aux captifs, aux vaincus! . . . à bien d'autres encor!

carries the anguish, the identification, the reintroduction of subjectivity which the previous stanza ("À quiconque. . .," ". . .à ceux," "Aux maigres orphelins sechant comme des fleurs!. . .") had abandoned.

The end of the poem leads on to "Le Voyage," which overshadows "La Cygne" finally, and gives the "symbol" an imaginative framework (not a specific context of allegory) in which to be interpreted. In Fusées XXII, there is a passage which links the two central images of the poems, and hence their forms.

"Le Voyage," despite its dimension of space, time and movement, is not concerned with allegory, but with an image. Baudelaire defines his poetic idea or image here as encompassing the temporal dimension of allegory. The process operative within a single image is expanded to envelop the dimensions of the voyage, to reinforce not the progression but the unity of the poem, so that it does not need to be read as a referential sequence of images but as a completed topos , a projected symbol of the imagination. Central to this use of symbol are its physical qualities, "la regularité et (a) la symetrie" of movement, or the elements of rhythm, form, and the audible and visual qualities of language (words) used in its construction as poem. These tangible qualities of language which are not abstract are capable of generating "les courbes et figures imaginaires" of the referent in a audio-visual field of space. The specificity of language, and its involvement in image-production has suddenly and essentially become a characteristic of poetic discourse. This "symbolist" trait was most highly developed by Mallarmé.

In breaking down this description of characteristics of poetic action and thought, it becomes evident that three relations are included in the figure of 'le navire.' The firs is metonymic in nature; the contemplation of the boat leads "a la multiplication successive . . . de toutes les courbes et figures imaginaires . . .." The second is metaphoric: their "generation dans l'espace par les elements reels de l'objet." The third movement is involved with a transferral of consciousness "ou l'idee poetique . . . se degage . . . ." This is really not a transferral, but a transformation, because the movement retains its metamorphic nature. Or, it may be metonymic with respect to the achieved vision of the imagination, but metaphor still in its poetic action: l'etre vaste, immense, complique, mais eurythmique, d'un animal plen de genie, souffrant et soupirant tous les soupirs et toutes les ambitions humains ." This description is the prototype of the swan.
I have developed the question of the poet's association with this symbol of creation, and with the process of writing, through an analysis of the guiding tensions and intentions of "Le Cygne." I hope to have demonstrated that "Le Cygne" develops a third sort of figure in language, a non-referential 'sign' or image which is the core of the poem. "Le Voyage" is given over to the extension and exploration of this image and carries it through to its denouement.

"Le Voyage" extends its form to include its audience in the dialogue. The primary voice is of the voyager who recounts (and in recounting, retravel) his adventures to an audience. He represents, at the interior of the poem, the external situation of poet and reader. The first and the last sections are spoken directly by the poet, who has created his voice apart from the dialogues between voyagers and listeners in the central five sections. Speaking alternately in the first and the third persons plural, he is both voyager and critic, spokesman for the voyage and critic of his own voice. These two voices are contained within the voyage itself, which becomes both process and image for the poem.

The first stanza spans the event of the voyage. It projects dreams of youth forward on to the universe they imagine, and looks back upon this universe which,once traveled, is bound (but not limited) by memory. The first four lines pose contradictory perspectives on time, a reciprocal tension between desire (the curiousity of the child) and definition (the ennui of the voyager). This tension guides the course of the voyage, and of the poem as it unravels,". . .Bercant notre infini sur le fini des mer."

The reader may notice that three levels of figuration also appear in "Le Voyage." The process toward the infinite is the metonymic in Baudelaire's poetry; what spans the gap between finite and infinite is metaphor; and the voyage as a completed image (travelled or told) reflects back on the voyager as a mirror. The poem, like an accordian, expands and contracts its possibilities; the final image, of Death, consciously retains the contradiction of these two movements. As a result,the poem is readable both as sneer and as promise; the mirror-image (of reflection, imitation, and self-deception) dominates a negative interpretation, and forces the listeners to acknowledge that novelty has proven to promise nothing new. On the other had, once again the ecstasy of the language suggests a point of transcending this reciprocal, reflected image. The use of light and darkness is reversed and, although the language remains paradoxical, the reversal might promise something new : a voyage which is not escape, nor running to outrun time; an encounter. But irony dominates the truth value of the process, and appears to deny the poet the option of venturing with courage into the darkness of his own image.

The poet's identification with the swan stands as a point of departure for the voyage. In "Le Voyage," Baudelaire starts with a stanza which telescopes the process of voyage into a single movement, an antithetical expansion and retraction. The expansion is a desire for the infinite; the retraction is consciousness that experience is finite. The tension of these two movements was contained in the image of the swan. Here it is presented in a more narrative form,and carries the image or series of images which the swan evoked not only to expression (correspondence and ecstasy) but also to self-mockery (irony and despair). There are echoes of the "swan" in the passages attributed to the voyagers, some direct:

Tel le vieux vagabond, pietant dans la boue,
Reve le nez en l'air, de brillant paradis. . .;

some concerned with the separation between human and animal nature:

Criant a Dieu, dans sa furibonde agoni:
"O mon semblable, o mon maitre, je te maudis!"

In this poem, the split between "la boue" and "paradis," between les "betes" and "l'enivrement," between "l'Humanite" and "Dieu," seems more pronounced, neither bridged nor fused by a single image except in the larger process of voyage (and in the possible resolution suggested by "La Mort.") The double persona of the poet is not resolved—his desire does not find expression in his experience, or in an image. "Le Voyage" has gone further than "Le Cygne" in its presentation of the futility of poetic voyages.

The separation, presented most dramatically in the first stanza by the contrast between the child and the memories of an older person, becomes pronounced in the dialogue between those who stay home and question the voyagers with the curiosity of children, and the dis-illusioning answers which the voyagers supply. It is more pronounced in the play of shadow and light, and of reflection and sight in the repeated mention of "yeux" both seeing and unseeing. Subjective vision casts its own light and reflects its own dreams; objective vision has perceived the shadow of the world and man's place in it. The poet's "vision" brings these poles together.

Children see with the "clarite des lampes;" they contrast with the experienced to whom, "Aux yeux de souvenir . . .", the world is reduced. Some voyagers are drowned in "les yeux d'une femme (Circe);" but the voyage, compared to dreams ("meme dans nos sommeils . . ."—when eyes are closed—) takes its motto from the watchman, "Ouvre l'oeil!" Ironically, there is deception in his sight: each island, which seems to be "un Eldorado promis par le destin . . ." is in fact a reef; and dreams of America are what have invented her. The eye contains the contradiction of its dreams, of shedding light on its objects of vision, and of that light's being deceptive, of its being infact a darkness, adisservice to subjectivity. But Baudelaire is not seeking to convey mere objectivity in his expression; his point lies in the contrast of perception between teh listener's and the voyager's.

"Le Cygne" was also seen for the most part; and, having been seen, it enetered into memory. But here seeing brings no sudden identification with an object; rather, it relects back into the eyes of the viewer the projection of his own dreams. It is a purely subjective state,a childlike state, which is brought out in the tone of eagerness, (Dites, qu'avez-vous vu ?" and later, "Et puis, et puis encore?") with which the listeners ask to be told the voyager's saga. Seeing varies with the eyes that do the seeing: the eyes of the voyagers appear to the listeners as "yeux profonds comme la mer. . ." But they have lost their dreams, have seen stars and waves and also sand; have seen more splendid cities in the setting of the sun than in any of their travels; have realized that behind the visions instilled by desire there lies illusionment.

Theri quality of vision differs from the vision of the swan, which was able to bring meanign to allegory; subjective vision (which sees those things "qui sont pour les yeux une ivresse. . .") is not the vision of a seer, a visionary or a poet. Objective vision reaches alienation of the subjective from the objective in a view of humanity which it has not sought out (". . . partout, et sans l'voir cherche. . ."). The conclusion of the dialogue, "—Tel est du globe entier l'eternel bulletin. . .", is bitter knowledge, and leaves no room for allegory:

Amer savoir, celui qu'on tire du voyage!
Le monde, monotone et petit, aujourd'hui,
Hier, demain, toujours, nous fait voir notre image:
Une oasis d'horreur dans un desert d'ennui!

The poem has expanded the first stanza to the point that the readers (listeners) have arrived where the boyagers were, where the world is reduced—shrunk within the bounds of objective experience. The world now relects teh image ofhimself that man does not want to see. With this knowledge, the voyager may not leave as before, "pour la Chine,/ Les yeux fixes au large. . ." but,if he goes at all "sur la mer des Tenebres. . .," he decieves himself and remains drunk or entranced with the wine of forgetfulness.
The contrast of light and darkness has, until now, been allied with the process of "seeing" in the poem. Eyes have cast light, have interpreted, have seen either their subjective or their objective image. Time has hung heavy at their back. The reversal at the end of the poem greets time, and acknowledges that this voyage must be into darkness, blindness and the unknow if it is to escape its own image.

O Mort vieux capitaine,il est temps! levons l'ancre!
Ce pays nous ennuie, o Mort! Apareillons!
Si le ciel et la mer sont noirs comme de l'encre,
Nos coeurs que tu connais sont remplis de rayons!

Allegory is discarded in the final imperative, "Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou ciel, qu'importe? The voice of irony, of self-destructive consciousness, is also overcome. The ending may retain an ironic emphasis (that there is no exit from this constant search, the restless boyage.) But it imposes a way out through death, a conclusion which the poet proposes to accept in its full reality. This second possibility is one not of despair (ennui) but of fear in facing the unknown. The poet does not face the unknown in his poetry: he is forced to wear a mask. Death, as inthe poem which originally concluded Les Fleurs du Mal (CXXIII "La Mort des Artistes") is at the same time a source of hope, and of mockery. it lifts the mask; it opens "le Neant."

The trope of sight relates the levels of imagery to the reality they represent or misrepresent, and reveals the relations between the differenct voices in the poem.. There are three sorts of discourse at the base of this poem. One is the naive allegory which constitutes the dreams of the audience. One is the ironic account of the voyager who has seen that these dreams are self-respecting illusions. The third is the voice of the poet which interprets both these stances through the form of dialogue, the contrasting vision, and the double reading of the final stanza. As allegory ofthe poetic process, of the poet's "vision," the insight of the final stanza must be read back into the voyage as its end—an end either final, logical, and necessary, or still partial and self-deceptive in nature. Since the nature of the moment of insight is blindness, that cannot shed light but darkness on reading the rest of the poems. A moment of light will be ecstatic but illusive in nature; at the end of its voyage, poetry is forced to take account of darkness.

"Le Voyage" contains within it these many elements which find partial resolution in the rest of the poems of Les Fleurs du Mal . Several poems contain references to the problem of teh 'double' of the poet—the brother, "hypocrite lecteur" or "frere implacable. . ." That image is raised in "Le Voyage," in the lines "Freres qui trouvez beau tout ce qui vient de loin!" and "O mon semblable, o mon maitre, je te maudis!" (of humanity to a god). If the poem is to create its own reading, to dtermine any "interpretation" which might be placed upon it, that problem may be translated into the poet's problem of creating his reader, particularly in a modern audience.
The reader has suddenly been brought into the poem, an actino which represetns a new self-consciousness on the part of the writer. Does this also represent a new relation of poetry to its reader: Has poetry ceased to assume its authority over its reader? Has it taken the place of a more personal voice, a whisper, a confession, from one man to another when there is no god to confide in? What is the source of the poet's authority in his new position with respect to his audience? . . . or has poetry ever needed a god who was other than a brother?

In the voices which the poet projects into another and sympathetic persona (such as that of the swan or the old vagabond,) he reproaches a god who is similar tohimself—who is his equal, his relfection. That god encloses the poetry within a frame of self-doubt and critical consciousness, and excludes the concept of transcendence.
"La Cygne" is one of these images. Neither "Spleen" nor "ideal." It is, rather, a "Fleur du Mal": an image derived from the deterioration of the city, from the "Tableau Parisien," to oppose it, to catch its process not only in death or self-destruction, but also in its creation not as an ideal, totally separate; not as 'spleen,' irredeemable; but as a thing in itself made accessible and conceivable; made present within a fallen world.

The poems do not all achieve, do not intend, this synthesis of imagery. But if, in reading, one dissects the images, one finds that each is concerned with its components. These form a dichotomy which runs through Baudelaire's work, but which seems to be broken by the concept interjected by his title, "Fleurs du Mal." Fleurs du Mal refers to the poems themselves; it is the poems which present and contain the dichotomy which exists not in the expression of the theory, but in the theory itself of the level of idea distinct from form. But the Dichotomy is not present as such in Baudelaire's work. Its two poles are expressed through conflict or desire—a hybrid form, but true to human nature ("esprit"). "Correspondance" presents a level of creation/interpretation on which the ideal successfully introduces itself; here, metaphor works ; things (images, words . . . ) are both distinct and fluid in nature. "Une Charogne," Baudelaire seems to bring his perceptions of nature not simply inside his poetry but inside himself, frozen to change yet still subject to disintegration. To symbolize this internal image, the poem must contain teh seeds of its own destruction, of discontinuity or death.

Thus interiorization of form so as to have to project its own order (Where is that statement, and does it belong here?) exists conversely within the structure of the more metonymic poems, which attain a state (image or impression) which reaches to nothingness (le ?ant), to the negation of creation and of conflict. This is the only object that can satisfy the poet's desire—this erasure of object into infinite subjectivity. The swan as image, is no object but subject, not end of but expression of the poet's desire.

From the end of the book to the beginning reflects a circling in structure back of the poems upon themselves. That circle contains its beginning and its end on its perimeter, and conceals from itself an empty center which it cannot reach. The evident consciousness of its language is not ocnfident but defensive, and unaware of its separation from its object. That circular image for the operation of language does not lend itself to an explanation of either allegory or irony. These are related to a concept of the ontology of Baudelaire's language.