The Living Dead in "Song of Autumn I"
Think You're Desensitized to Current Events? Check This Out
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Song of Autumn I by Charles BaudelaireSoon we plunge into the chilly fogs;
Farewell, swift light! our summers are too short!
I hear already the mournful fall of logs
Re-echoing from the pavement court.
All of winter will gather in my soul:
Hate, anger, horror, chills, the hard forced work;
And, like the sun in his hell by the north pole,
My heart will be only a red and frozen block.
I shudder, hearing eery log that falls;
No scaffold could be built with hollower sounds.
My spirit is like a tower whose crumbling walls
The tireless battering-ram brings to the ground.
It seems to me, lulled by monotonous shocks,
As if they were hastily nailing a coffin today.
For whom? - Yesterday was summer. Now autumn knocks.
That mysterious sound is like someone's going away.
Charles Baudelaire's "Song of Autumn I" is a ballad which mourns the death of man's humanity toward man. True to his belief that "every good poet has always been a realist", Baudelaire uses detailed imagery to invoke sight, touch, and sound (Norton 1382). Incorporating an amalgamation of this realistic imagery with metaphor, simile, meter, and irony, Baudelaire examines man's relationship to man in an increasingly alienated society.
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Takeaways
- Charles Baudelaire's poem is a ballad which mourns the death of man's humanity toward man.
- We live in a world where self-abosrption is paramount and men are used as lifeless logs.
- We can choose to change our course; we can choose summer over winter.
Did You Know?
Although this applies to current events, Baudelaire wrote this in the mid-1800s.Resources
- The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Volume E, Eds. Sarah Lawall and Maynard Mack.
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