WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The Poetry Fix: Episode 3

Episode Date: February 12, 2024

In this episode of The Poetry Fix, we explore Charles Baudelaire's "Correspondences."

Welcome to the Poetry Fix. I'm your host, Erica Kaiba, bringing you your weekly fix of poetry from across time. Today we're reading Charles Baudelaire's Correspondences. It's a French poem, so we'll read the original, followed by a translation. Correspondences is about how mankind experiences and attempts to interpret the universe. Baudelaire opens with a description of nature as a temple. The use of the word temple implies that the world is sacred. Bodilier doesn't think we're living in a clockwork universe that can be explained to a T by scientific rules. We're living on holy ground. Baudelaire describes the pillars of nature's temple as living, and that these pillars sometimes whisper unintelligibly. What could these pillars be?

It certainly brings to mind the myth of Atlas, who is condemned to bear the world on his shoulders, a sort of living pillar himself. Either way, whatever supports and upholds our universe, is both living and inaccessible. Baudelaire next describes nature as a symbol forest, emphasizing the mysterious nature of the world we find ourselves in. We don't go through life immediately possessing all the right answers. We don't know how to explain the world around us.

Yet we are living in an inherently meaningful world. Symbols, after all, stand for something greater than the whole. Baudelaire's poetry clearly presents a world governed by some deeper meaning, some deeper meaning, one he searches for. Botelair then describes the way humans primarily experience the world through the senses. He describes fragrances, colors, and sounds calling to each other, which combine in the human mind to interpret the surrounding world. The union of these senses, however, is deep, shadowy, and vast. Where Francis Bacon might have described the senses as tools to pick at nature and force it to reveal its secrets, Baudelaire talks about the

senses as perhaps raising more questions than they answer. They allow us to experience the world in all its delicacy and richness. They allow us to revel in the universe, but they do not allow us to fully understand it. The original French poem is in the form of an English sonnet. In the English sonnet, the three opening quatrains set up the problem of the poem. In correspondences, this would be our struggle to understand the world. The Volta is found in the couplet at the the very end of the poem, and this is where Baudelaire gives up navigating the world like a labyrinth and simply embraces the ability of our senses to elevate us to a sort of transcendence. With all that said, let's dive in.

Correspondences by Baudelaire The nature is in temple or of vivant-pilliers lets sometimes start to confuse parole. The man is pass at the traverse of cymbal, that he observes with their regards familiar, like a long echo who, to long echo, who, de long echo, who, de deep and profound,

unite, vast like the night and like the clarity, the perfum, the colors, and the sounds respond.

It is the perfam fray, like the chare of the chare of the brown,

like the prairie, and other, coranpue, rich, and triumphant, having the expansion

of the things infinite, like the number, the musk, the banjoin, and the incense, who chant the transport of the spirit and the sense. Translation by Louis Piaget-Shanks Nature's a feign, where down each corridor of living pillars,

darkling whispers roll. A symbol forest, every pilgrim's soul must pierce neath gazing eyes it knew before, like echoes long that from a far rebound, merged till one deep, low, shadowy note is born. Vast as the night or as the fires of morn, sound calls to fragrance, color calls to sound. Cool as an infant's brow some perfumes are. Softer than oboes, green as rainy leaves. Others, corrupt, exultant, rich, unbar wide infinities wherein we move at ease. Musk, amber grease, frankincense, Benjamin, chant all our soul or sense can

Revelyn. You've been listening to The Poetry Fix with Erica Kaiba. Join me next week and we'll be revisiting Tennyson.