Charles Baudelaire: Poems

will someone analyze the poem "Spleen LXXIX" its from the"The Flowers of Evil" volume by Charles Baudelaire please

read the Charles Baudelaire poems

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Remember that all of these poems are translations. I would encourage you to look at several. I am including the link to the version I am analyzing.

I am moving by end punctuation within the poem.

The first tells of a young king from a long line of kings with an evil, corrupted history. The land the king rules is rich and fertile(land of rains).

He has people who can give him good advice, but he is bored and would rather spend time hunting or falconing, but these bore him as well. Note that these are both violent, bloody hobbies, a recurring image with Baudelaire.

Nothing moves the king emotionally, whether it is his subjects dying outside his door or the court jester doing his most impressive trick( one translation had this as a hermaphrodite). The king has become sick(mentally) and twisted. Not even the ladies of the court, whose purpose it is to please the king can do nothing. The king is described as a "young skeleton" thus juxtapositioning images of life and death, another trademark of Baudelaire. Even the joys of his bed no longer bring happiness. Even the wisest(sage) cannot find a way to lift the king from the depths of boredom and despair. The poem ends with two allusions. The first to the Romans,whose corrupted lifestyle led to the bloody games of the coliseum, even this would not be enough to stir the blood of this corrupted young king. The king is basically a dead man among the living, emphasized by the reference to the river Lethe, which was one of the five rivers in Hades that caused anyone who drank from it to slip into obliviousness.

Source(s)

Http://www.poetry-archive.com/b/spleen.HTML