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.
However, we must take Baudelaire seriously and assume that he wants to do more than merely impress the reader with frightening and shocking ideas and images. The creator of any serious poem wants the reader in some way to identify with the feelings or thoughts in the poem, even if that identification comes in the form of violent disagreement. Baudelaire's violent, shocking and frightening poem in this case asks that the reader to consider that human existence is indeed a struggle ...