Punishment of Pride by Charles Baudelaire

Extract

[...] The words can therefore escape the poet without him being able to do anything about it. You v.16 to 20, The metaphors used transform this individual crisis into a universal catastrophe. Everything collapses due to pride: man ("his reason"), nature ("that the universe social, economic, aesthetic, and religious order (the "temple", "opulence", "pompe", "ceilings"). Nature and the stars are upset: it is not only the individual who becomes mad but the entire universe. The balance is broken, the world sinks into darkness and silence, or death (v.20): the inside and outside respond to each other. [...]

[...] "Punishment of Pride" is the sixteenth poem of "Spleen and Ideal" by Charles Baudelaire. Juxtaposed with "Don Juan in Hell", with which it forms a pair, this poem has as its object the fall of an allegorical figure, that of the theologian, which corresponds to that of the poet. The effort of elevation towards the sacred and the supernatural leads man to fall into humiliation. The poem, here, seems to illustrate the phrase "Who wants to make an angel makes a beast" in condemning the pride of excess. [...]

[...] With v.26, these are the only verbs in the imperfect durative of the poem: they mark the eternal temporality of the fault. v.26 The poem closes on a sacrificial scene, that of the theologian once master and now victim of the weakest, namely the children. But the term 'joy' implies a certain compassion, although it is at the expense of the theologian, figure of the poet. [...]

[...] This is a denunciation of pride: the theologian, like the poet, sin because they adore their own words, they admire their own eloquence and the power that these speeches give them. They then become a satanic figure, those who lie proudly in a cry. The rejection of the term "cried out" makes it possible to insist on this cry. v.11-14 These four verses correspond to the time of blasphemy. The appearance of the first-person singular pronoun marks the excess of the theologian's ego in his blasphemous cry. [...]

[...] The doctor of theology is the allegory of the figure of the poet. This assimilation assumes that the poem contains a lesson related to the function of the latter. The identification is possible because both use discourse to convey something that escapes the common man. The poem is therefore allegorical." v.4-5 The terms "forced the indifferent hearts" therefore metaphorically define the poetic activity. The hearts are stirred in their darkness, which recalls the dark theme proper to the collection of Flowers of Evil (see the poem A Maggot)." "Forcé" recalls the force of the energy and sap of v.2, but also announces a force that constrains and abuses others. [...]