Baudelaire's poem "Destruction"

This study will analyze Charles Baudelaire's poem "Destruction." The study will include consideration of such issues as how the poet shocks his readers, how the speaker lives in boredom, and how the boredom allows the speaker to have some sense of security.

Some of the ways in which Baudelaire shocks the readers of the poem are fairly obvious. Certainly a final phrase such as "All Destruction's bloody bag of tricks" (Baudelaire 121) is designed to shock the reader. Certainly the poet aims to shock when he declares that the Demon "hurls into mt startled face/ the open wounds, the rags they have soaked through" (Baudelaire 121). These are meant not only to shock but to horrify. In this relatively short poem, there is much that is meant to shock, but the most obvious shocks are not on the surface of the poem. The poet wants the reader to be frightened of the same things he himself is frightened of, and to be awakened by that fear. He wants to shock the reader and frighten the reader not merely to shock and frighten, but to awaken the reader up to a new way of looking at and experiencing life. After reading this poem, the reader who is affected by it as the poet hopes he is affected will look differently at his own life and the role of good and evil forces in that life. It must also be noted that Baudelaire is also using shock to impress the reader, to make the reader consider how brave the poet is to look so deeply into such fearsome depths of existence.

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allow he fills my burning lungs with sinful cravings never satisfied (Baudelaire 121). So complete is the Demon's hold on this man that the very act of breathing involves communion with the evil force. Women are said to be representatives of the Demon, not a fresh idea, but the speaker says that their despair is what wears away his resistance to their (the Demon's) temptation. The most horrible place for this thrill-seeking speaker, however, is not the torture of "sinful cravings never satisfied" (Baudelaire 121)), but "Boredom": Thereby he leads me out of God's regard, spent and gasping---out to where the vast barrens of Boredom stretch infinitely. . . . (Baudelaire 121). The speaker is tempted by desperate women who represent the Devil. He is left "spent and gasping" and in the aftermath of what appears to be devilishly sexual pleasure, the speaker is taken by the Demon to "Boredom." The speaker seeks pleasure, or is irresistibly drawn to seeking pleasure, but once he finds it he is left in a state not of satisfaction but of boredom. It is only the suffering of "sinful cravings" and "squalid appetites" which excites the speaker and makes him feel alive. Once he has sated those appetites, he suffers the hell of Bored

Category: Literature - B