Charles Baudelaire’s poetry recreates a small moment as a way to communicate a larger and universal experience with the reader. Baudelaire chooses a moment that may either be a common image that is made extraordinary or a spectacle that is made applicable to everyday life through metaphor. Tension is then created by pairing the descriptions with an argument that contrast with the imagery. Walter Benjamin’s essay “On some Motifs in Baudelaire” alludes to the book Matière et mémoire and the definition about the “nature of experience...in such a way that the reader is bound to conclude that only a poet can be the adequate subject of such an experience” (Benjamin 157). Baudelaire is subject in his ability to contrast ideas as seen in the poems
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The fantastical descriptions are grounded with familiar language such as “blue water” and color descriptions like “green and rosy” but made unfamiliar because of words such as “sheets” and “quays [coming] from a multitudes of openings”. The image of a painter at their easel is also familiar but the uncommon images pulls the reader away from the expected allegorical depiction of a waterfall and instead introducing them to a new image. Also in part one, the poem lacks a consistent rhyme scheme so the use of free verse eludes to a lack of control seen in the other poems. A rhyme scheme is constraining and is often broken when started:
Insouciant and taciturn,
Some Ganges, in the firmament,
Poured out the treasure of their urns
Into the gulfs of diamond.
“Taciturn” and “urn” maintain an “aa” rhyme scheme but that is broken with “firmament” and “diamond”. The words are nearly slant rhymes, which does not match with the perfect rhymes ending in “urn”. The poem breaks from the sonnet structure Baudelaire often uses which suggests a movement towards a different understanding of poetic form.
The want to return to more traditional art is exemplified in part two of “Parisian Dreams”, when the speaker wakes up from the dream. Once awake, he expresses discomfort which his surroundings: Open, my ardent eyes could see The horror of my wretched hole: I felt my cursed cares to be A needle entering my
The fantastical descriptions are grounded with familiar language such as “blue water” and color descriptions like “green and rosy” but made unfamiliar because of words such as “sheets” and “quays [coming] from a multitudes of openings”. The image of a painter at their easel is also familiar but the uncommon images pulls the reader away from the expected allegorical depiction of a waterfall and instead introducing them to a new image. Also in part one, the poem lacks a consistent rhyme scheme so the use of free verse eludes to a lack of control seen in the other poems. A rhyme scheme is constraining and is often broken when started:
Insouciant and taciturn,
Some Ganges, in the firmament,
Poured out the treasure of their urns
Into the gulfs of diamond.
“Taciturn” and “urn” maintain an “aa” rhyme scheme but that is broken with “firmament” and “diamond”. The words are nearly slant rhymes, which does not match with the perfect rhymes ending in “urn”. The poem breaks from the sonnet structure Baudelaire often uses which suggests a movement towards a different understanding of poetic form.
The want to return to more traditional art is exemplified in part two of “Parisian Dreams”, when the speaker wakes up from the dream. Once awake, he expresses discomfort which his surroundings: Open, my ardent eyes could see The horror of my wretched hole: I felt my cursed cares to be A needle entering my