The Representation of Death and Love in Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil

Extract

[...] The reference to the divine and religion comes to indicate a transcendence of this love. On the other hand, where love does not invite itself, in The Happy Death for example, the poet describes his own decomposition by 'black companions without ears and without eyes' (Baudelaire, 1857), of the 'lived philosophers' (Baudelaire, 1857). The poet seems to put these vile beasts in opposition, which having no sense (neither sight nor hearing) are companions of death; and himself wanting to live his decomposition until the end of his death. [...]

[...] We have chosen two poems to show one of the ways in which death is depicted in The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire. It seemed to us that these two poems were able to show the melancholy at work in the treatment of death. Death punctuates the amorous or even erotic discourse, to mark the persistence of love once death has occurred. In the poem La Charogne, death is described from the perspective of the decomposition of a vulture's body. [...]

[...] Obscenity reveals the purity of the essence of love. The divine comes to accompany death in its most prosaic form. In Harmony of the Evening, The same melancholic prism seems to govern the text, if this poem were less 'cruel', a chiasmus would appear at the end of the poem, indicating the persistence of the beloved person after their death or disappearance. 'The sun has drowned in its blood that freezes? / Your memory shines in me like a censer ' (Baudelaire, 1857). [...]