The Flowers Of Evil Analysis

Great question! It is a little daunting to confront all at once like that, though. Time and Death are gigantic themes... and The Flowers of Evil is a rich and very moody work. (His emotions shift a lot, as do his perceptions and impressions). So, perhaps it'd be best to look at a poem ("The Swan"-- a very well-known one) and just think about it... keep in mind that your themes here have strong ties with memory and ideals, change and stasis (the death of ideals with time, for instance; everything changes, everything must die-- many combinations of ideas like that).

For the Swan
And one old Memory like a crying horn
Sounds through the forest where my soul is lost . . .

Consistent with Baudelaire's statement about the life of man consisting …show more content…
Here's the last little section I would draw your attention to (as helpful and important):

And of the negress, wan and phthisical,
Tramping the mud, and with her haggard …show more content…
Perhaps the richest line in the poem (well-worth your thinking hard over): "Of all who lose that which they never find." Confusing, is it? It's a bit of a paradox... how does on lose something they never find to begin with? These dreams/ideals that have haunted them their whole lives, which have no substance to them, but which are real enough only to cause them to feel loss and misery... they create a reality that has no basis in the world outside of the individual whom they haunt... and that world does not follow the same phases of change as the city (as it is not actually grounded in that external reality).

Everything in life, in reality-- everything real must change and must die. Only the artificial things seem to resist time-- perhaps through artifice (through art, but also through trickery, deception-- lies. The great lies behind our myths that tell us what we want to hear, things which often never were true and never existed-- the fair lake in the