Poetry in the City

Abstract

This chapter discusses the poetic treatment of melancholy and time in ‘Tableaux parisiens’. It situates this section within the revised structure of the 1861 Les Fleurs du Mal and presents its ‘urban eclogues’ as cityscapes of melancholy. Following an analysis of ‘Paysage’, it argues that, for Baudelaire, Paris represents less the alienation caused by Second Empire capitalism than a symbolic city of ‘le Mal’: a nightmarish metropolis of damaged human beings and existential ill-being, a place of flux and disintegration. Coming directly after ‘L’Horloge’, these poems (arranged to suggest a twenty-four-hour cycle) transform the one-way river of Time into a two-way thoroughfare of personal, historical, and cultural memory (‘Andromaque, je pense à vous’) that permits an enriching layering of experience: the clear perspective of a ‘double present’ of remembering and writing (‘Le Cygne’, ‘Les Petites Vieilles’) with which to counter the blurred ‘double vision’ of a repetitive present (‘Les Sept Vieillards’).