The Swan by Charles Baudelaire
"The Swan" is a poem by Charles Baudelaire featured in his collection "Flowers of Evil." In this work, Baudelaire reflects on themes of exile and loss, drawing parallels between his own experiences and those of iconic figures from literature and history. The poem presents a poignant portrayal of a swan that has escaped its cage, struggling to adapt to an unfamiliar environment, symbolizing Baudelaire's feelings of dislocation and nostalgia for a lost Paris. The imagery in the poem operates on multiple levels, contrasting the swan's current suffering with memories of its beautiful homeland, thereby evoking a sense of longing for what once was.
Baudelaire also alludes to Andromache, a figure from Greek mythology, to underscore feelings of widowhood and captivity. Additionally, he introduces the image of a Negress searching for the absent coconut trees of Africa, further emphasizing the theme of displacement. Through these layered symbols, Baudelaire articulates a deeper existential struggle, positioning himself within a broader commentary on exile and identity. Ultimately, "The Swan" encapsulates the complexity of longing for one's origins in a rapidly changing world.
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The Swan by Charles Baudelaire
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of World Literature, Revised Edition
First published: “Le Cygne,” 1861 (collected in The Flowers of Evil, 2006)
Type of work: Poem
The Work
In “The Swan,” a poem appearing much later in Flowers of Evil than “By Association,” Baudelaire’s perspective has considerably evolved. Numerous disappointing experiences with women and other distractions have persuaded him that what he has lost through his dissipation has been of more lasting importance than what he has enjoyed. He now finds himself removed from his once-clear vision of his ideal.
The imagery of “The Swan” functions on two levels of complexity. The surface meaning remains deceptively simple. Baudelaire enumerates several examples of exile—Victor Hugo, Andromache, and the swan—and proposes them as simple analogies for his own separation from “old Paris.” Hugo’s name appears only in the dedication, but it would have been sufficient to remind the readers of Baudelaire’s time that Hugo was in exile on the island of Guernsey. Andromache appears in the poem as she was after the fall of Troy, widowed and captive in a strange land: “Andromache, I think of you! This little river/ Poor, sad mirror where once shone/ The immense majesty of your widow’s pain.” The sad mirror of the river reflects not only Andromache’s present suffering but also her former, happier life. The analogy of the river with the Seine, by which Baudelaire stands, “Suddenly fertilized” his “fertile memory,” and he regrets, as he walks by the place du Carrousel near the Louvre, that the city of Paris is changing around him. As he passes a place where “animals were once sold,” he meets “a swan that had escaped from its cage.”
With the appearance of the swan, the complexity of the imagery changes. The bird suffers superficially because, in strange surroundings not adapted to its needs, it cannot find water to drink: “Rubbing the dry pavement with his webbed feet/ On the rough ground dragged his white plumage/ By a dry gutter the beast open[ed] his beak.” Yet the wings dragging on the pavement convey the degree to which this animal is out of place in its surroundings. Baudelaire imagines the emotions of the swan, “his heart filled with the beautiful lake of his birth.” The water that he needs is not merely what is necessary to drink but that of his homeland. The swan thus becomes the “strange and fateful myth” that figures Baudelaire himself. Yet Baudelaire remains in his native Paris. The nature of his exile becomes clear only through suggestions begun with the exotic webbed feet and “beautiful lake of his birth” of the swan that suggest the more tropical climates emblematic of Baudelaire’s ideal.
Baudelaire sees himself like “the man in Ovid,” an allusion to Ovid’s distinction that man looks toward heaven and animals toward earth. Yet he looks at “the ironic and cruelly blue sky,” cruel because it now mocks the poet’s futile aspiration. In the second part of the poem, Baudelaire repeats this revelation, detailing the suffering of each creature in exile and adding the image of the Negress: “I think of the skinny and consumptive Negress/ Tramping in the mud, and seeking, with haggard looks/ The absent coconut trees of proud Africa.” The plight of the woman, perhaps inspired by the example of Jeanne Duval, reinforces the haunting presence of tropical nature contrasted at the end of the poem with “the forest where my Spirit is exiled.”
Bibliography
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