Destruction

Poem by Charles Baudelaire Collection The Flowers of EvilThemes SadnessPeriod 19th centuryArthur's analysis ↓

The Demon is forever stirring at my side;
He swims around me like impalpable air;
I swallow him and feel him burning my lungs
And filling them with an eternal and guilty desire.

Sometimes he takes, knowing my great love of Art,
The form of the most seductive of women,
And, under specious pretexts of a hypocrite,
Accustoms my lips to infamous philtres.

He leads me thus, far from the gaze of God,
Panting and broken with fatigue, into the midst
Of the plains of Ennui, deep and deserted,

And throws into my eyes full of confusion
Soiled garments, open wounds,
And the bloody apparatus of Destruction!

Charles Baudelaire

Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.

Text published on Poésies 123: https://www.poesies123.com/en/poem-destruction-charles-baudelaire/

Arthur

Interpretation

Arthur's analysis

Addressing his readers and expressing his torments as he also did in his poems Spleen, all taken from The Flowers of Evil, Charles Baudelaire here chooses the Demon as the personification of the evil that surrounds him and weighs him down.

He thus says he is surrounded by this Demon, an expression of his vices. "Impalpable burning air" in his lungs for tobacco or drugs, "infamous philtres" for alcohol, yet he sketches the ultimate representation of this evil in the guise of a femme fatale, a reference no doubt to his chaotic love affairs.

This Demon, who distances him from God, that is, from the right path of morality perhaps more than of religion, leads him only to Ennui, the tomb of his inspiration. For it is indeed of death that Baudelaire announces he is thus drawing near; it is toward "the bloody apparatus of Destruction" that he is heading.

The themes of sadness, of ennui or of death are recurrent in Charles Baudelaire's poems. Entering what he called Spleen, this poem is no exception to that rule.

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