Baudelaire was born in Paris in 1821, the son of an aged scholar who died
when Charles was only six. His mother re-married shortly after but his step
father had little in common with the bewildered poetic child nor, as an aspiring
diplomat, much time to devote. Baudelaire had a distinguished schooling but
declined to follow a career in diplomacy and was allowed to live a bohemian
life debauching himself in the Latin Quarter (learning his trade the hard
way).
By the age of 21 he inherited sufficient of a fortune to devote his life to
the arts and his profligacy, resulting in veneral disease and a blow to his
virility such that he could not attain the real love of his life, MMe Sabatier.
Out of a life of anxiety and distress emerges a cycle of poems, "Les
Fleurs du mal" dedicated to his unrequited love.
The sonnet "Correspondences" is part of a mystical theme, the correspondence
between the spiritual and natural world, the power of scent playing on the
memory and the poet as a medium suffering to gain redemption in the afterlife.
For me the poem was evocative and the words warm so much beauty for someone
racked in misery.
Correspondances
La Nature est un temple ou de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L'homme y passe a travers des forets de symboles
Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.
Comme de longs echos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une tenebreuse et profonde unite,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarte,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se repondent.
Il est de parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants,
Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,
-Et d'autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants,
Ayant l'expansion des choses infinies,
Comme l'ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l'encens,
Qui chantent les transports de l'esprit et des sens.
I translate as follows
Nature is a Temple whose vibrant columns
hold a mystical language for those that look.
Man travels through this forest of symbols
that watch him with a friendly gaze
Like echoes from afar that merge together
in a mysterious and profound unity,
Boundless as are night and day,
the fragrances, the colours and sounds correspond.
Some perfumes are as unblemished as a child's skin,
as sweet as the oboe sounds, green as the river meadows,
and others, intertwined, rich and trumphant.
Having the vastness of infinity,
Like amber, musk, gum benzoin and incense,
aromas evoke sensations to the soul's delight.