Shall you get flowers of evil for this anniversapoetry?

Let's wish some bitter-sweet feeling to Charles Baudelaire's grave so as to heal his poor damned soul. Superior forces have mercy of you, our dear poet!

160 years ago, a ragged, depressed, bullied, misunderstood but genius, modern and ingenious dandy and poet - that deserves now to be called the vert first modern! - published his lifetime poetry book that had cost him 15 years of Spleen fighting and that would be condemned two months later. Damn it and the censorers. Anyway, we still talk about it nowadays...

To celebrate this prodigious book, I'll be posting some of mmy fav poems from both 1857 and 1861 versions.
Therefore, let's begin with "Correspondances", that is one unless THE key of the baudelairian poetry and the bases of symbolism, theorising and illustrating the two forms of correspondances: vertical and horizontal or synesthesia. Vertical ones make links between our material world and the invisible world of the Truth behind the things, or matches senses with ideas. Synesthesias are links between senses, aka like Frida you're hearing images, you're seeing songs no poet has ever painted (ABBA - I Let the music speak). Naturally I give you the origina version, in French.

Correspondances
La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.

Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.

II est des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants,
Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,
— Et d'autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants,

Ayant l'expansion des choses infinies,
Comme l'ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l'encens,
Qui chantent les transports de l'esprit et des sens.


— Charles Baudelaire

 

Video by DODV14TakerFan