Poetry analysis: Invitation to the Voyage, by Charles Baudelaire

by Joseph Hay To read the poem: http://fleursdumal.org/poem/148

It would be impossible to separate "Invitation to the Voyage" (L'Invitation au Voyage) from the other poems in Baudelaire's masterpiece, Flowers of Evil (Fleurs du Mal). For those who have not read it, this collection of poems, which was printed in four editions from 1857 to 1868, could be called an elegy to everything that is sickly sweet and beautifully corrupt. Baudelaire frequently juxtaposes love, death, depression, fear and pleasure, never shying away from grotesque imagery, such as corpses, venereal disease and murder - shocking for the highly moralizing era it was written in. Baudelaire did a lot to create the stereotype of the morbid, depressed Frenchman, but a fair reading of the work discloses a very passionate man who took it upon himself to illuminate how beautiful the complexity of life is, especially when it is grittiest and at its most physical. He was not a cynic simply out to batter the emptiness of innocence and chastity like a pinata, but a visionary who wanted his readers to see how rich and beautiful the world is, despite its scandals and hypocrisy. This poem, the 51st in Flowers of Evil, might strike the reader as being exceptionally sentimental and cheerful. Of course, this is relative to the collection as a whole. After reading poem after poem of misery and sickness and death, "Invitation to a Voyage" somehow seems optimistic about beauty and fanciful things, and you want to ask: "Okay, where are the guts?" The two mentions of anything you could call unpleasant: "to die" (line 5) and "treacherous eyes" (line 11) are swallowed up by images of sunsets, delicate furnishings and boats loaded with gifts. This seems, at first glance, to be another love poem where the author, like a troubadour, mingles the love he feels for his lady with a broader love of the universe. He simultaneously promises the world to his beloved and dwells in the expectation of a world that is going to be returned to him - hoping that his lady will satisfy his need for the experience of mystery he saw in the sunset, in flowers, in the ancient waterways. Like any good poem, this feeling of discord draws you in further. Re-reading the first paragraph, we dwell on that word mentioned above: "to die." This evokes a kind of pessimism that the average troubadour would try to gloss over. Not Baudelaire: if he wants his reader to remember anything, it is the reality of death. And we also notice that in this far away land Baudelaire wants to visit, the sun is hidden by mist, that the light is not quite reaching the ground. Maybe nothing here is quite as real as we would hope it to be; perhaps the beauty we see in this land is fundamentally empty. There is perhaps a disconnect between how we experience it and its reality. This turns us back to ourselves: can we trust our own desires to lead us where we need to go?

The fact that Baudelaire compares his lover to this land, "this land that is like you" (line 6), does not speak well for the relationship. The narrator applies this distrust for the city and its potentially empty promises to his lady quite openly. He finds her eyes to be treacherous because of this fundamental insecurity about her, a passive experience of having to watch, endure and follow her shifting exterior without feeling a firm grasp of her inner life. This speaks of an awareness of his lover's ability to hurt him. There is a tremendous lack of hope of attaining a deep, spiritual connection. Normally, this kind of implicit accusation would be an assertion of bitterness, resentment and despair in terms of the relationship. We know, however, that Baudelaire relished the senses and despised high ideals, so his resignation here might not be entirely bitter. In fact, he might not merely be enduring his love's "treachery" - he might actually be enamored with it. There is a stereotype of the intellectual man of letters shunning the "superficial" and the "sensual" in favor of the ideal, the true, the pure. This was not Baudelaire. Perhaps the opposite of the troubadour, he did not celebrate his love as a step upward into the divine, but as a step downward into the earthy and sensual. Everything good in "Invitation to the Voyage" is superficial. The two-line refrain that punctuates each stanza of the poem might seem high-minded because of the abstract language, but, in reality, it is invoking all the joys of sensuality: "There all is order and beauty, / Luxury, peace and pleasure." Baudelaire, treacherous himself, has more or less tricked the reader into confusion. "How can this guy who is so infatuated with misery and death write about what is bright and happy?" Part of this is the sentimental, sing-song style the poet has adopted for this piece, taking a break from the denser, longerlined verse he uses for most of Flowers of Evil. Most love songs are optimistic, without forethought, grandiose and invest heavily in shallow feelings. Baudelaire uses this framework to teach the reader that it is possible to delight in the superficial and pleasurable without being superficial yourself - - and without being ignorant of the reality of suffering and mortality. What seemed at first to be distaste for the land and the lady, who are both enmeshed with sensual pleasure and concerns that seem ephemeral and futile, now appears to be respect. Any confusion on the reader's part is due to expecting every poet to favor lofty ideals over painful reality. This might seem commonplace today, but Baudelaire was one of the first modern poets to devote his life and work to praising the real. In "Invitation to the Voyage", we are invited to bask in the treacherous beauty of our own reality.