Spleen: I Have More Memories Than If I Had Lived a Thousand Years

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

I have more memories than if I had lived a thousand years.

A large chest of drawers cluttered with balance sheets,
With verses, love letters, lawsuits, romances,
With heavy locks of hair rolled in receipts,
Hides fewer secrets than my sad brain.
It is a pyramid, a vast vault,
Containing more dead than the common grave.
– I am a cemetery hated by the moon,
Where like remorse long worms crawl
That forever torment my dearest dead.
I am an old boudoir full of faded roses,
Where lies a clutter of outworn fashions,
Where the plaintive pastels and pale Bouchers,
Alone, breathe the scent of an opened flask.

Nothing equals in length the limping days,
When beneath the heavy flakes of snowy years
Ennui, fruit of gloomy incuriosity,
Takes on the proportions of immortality.
– Henceforth you are no more, O living matter!
Than a granite surrounded by a vague dread,
Drowsing in the depths of a misty Sahara;
An old sphinx ignored by the carefree world,
Forgotten on the map, and whose fierce mood
Sings only in the rays of the setting sun.

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-spleen-i-have-more-memories-than-if-i-had-lived-a-thousand-years-charles-baudelaire/

Arthur

Interpretation

Arthur's analysis

Isolation, discouragement, and boredom—spleen, that feeling of inexplicable sadness that Baudelaire describes repeatedly in Les Fleurs du mal—is here for the author an opportunity to take stock of his life.

This assessment begins in the very first line, unique and isolated from the rest of the poem: “I have more memories than if I had lived a thousand years.” One can already sense the weariness that the author will express later.

Assessments, verses, love letters, romances… An inventory of Baudelaire's memories and the events that marked his life, yet he draws from it only despair, a profound ennui. The feeling he experiences of having accomplished everything seems to prevent him from moving forward; all forms of desire or curiosity seem to have left his body.

By the end of the poem, the reader has the opportunity to read the consequences that Baudelaire draws from this inventory: ennui leads to death, living matter turns into granite, a hard and cold stone, and the world forgets him.

Thus, the spleen from which Baudelaire tells us he suffers seems to prevent him from continuing his work as a poet: incapable of speaking of anything but death—his death—and the oblivion of which he will be the victim.

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