Stalled Flight: Horatian Remains in Baudelaire’s “Le Cygne”

Abstract

Dedicated to Victor Hugo and opening with thoughts of Virgil's Andromache, Baudelaire's Le Cygne1 situates poetic memory within a world of multiple influences. At first glance, the poem seems to follow a well-worn structure. It opens with the traditional nod to precursors remembrances of both Hugo and Virgil before progressing to the speaker's own personal memory of a past event the remembrance of seeing a swan in the heart of Paris.2 And yet, the significance of the swan continues to puzzle critics. Perhaps the most interesting question surrounding the poem remains that posed by Richard Terdiman: What's the swan doing in Baudelaire's 'Le Cygne'?3 Despite numerous hypotheses, critics have overlooked the possibility that even this most personal memory is the glimpse of yet another precursor: Horace's swan from Ode 2.20. In fact, comparison of the two poems yields more than just the revelation of another literary precursor disguised as a material and personal memory: in Horace's poem, the metaphor of the swan guarantees the future immortality of the poet, an immortality that renders lamentations or mourning unnecessary. But the swan reappears as an allegory in Baudelaire, an allegory in which the swan represents the truth of time's passage and the poet's eventual mortality. For Baudelaire, the swan no longer guarantees the pure presence of the lyric voice, as it does in Horace. Rather, it reveals the ghostly memories of other poets, memories that show up as fragments of the speaker's own past.4 The lyrical voice no longer preempts mourning but calls upon grief's very necessity by revealing, at its very core, the mortal remains of another. In Horace's Ode 2.20, the poet writes of his own immortality by literalizing the classical metaphor of the poet as swan. Even among Horace