Write a commentary on the poem Music from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of evil)
http://fleursdumal.org/poem/175
different translations of this poem
La Musique
La musique souvent me prend comme une mer!
Vers ma pâle étoile,
Sous un plafond de brume ou dans un vaste éther,
Je mets à la voile;
La poitrine en avant et les poumons gonflés
Comme de la toile
J’escalade le dos des flots amoncelés
Que la nuit me voile;
Je sens vibrer en moi toutes les passions
D’un vaisseau qui souffre;
Le bon vent, la tempête et ses convulsions
Sur l’immense gouffre
Me bercent. D’autres fois, calme plat, grand miroir
De mon désespoir!
— Charles Baudelaire
Music
Music often transports me like a sea!
Toward my pale star,
Under a ceiling of fog or a vast ether,
I get under sail;
My chest thrust out and my lungs filled
Like the canvas,
I scale the slopes of wave on wave
That the night obscures;
I feel vibrating within me all the passions
Of ships in distress;
The good wind and the tempest with its convulsions
Over the vast gulf
Cradle me. At other times, dead calm, great mirror
Of my despair!
— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)
Music
Music uplifts me like the sea and races
Me to my distant star,
Through veils of mist or through ethereal spaces,
I sail on it afar.
With chest flung out and lungs like sails inflated
Into the depth of night
I escalade the backs of waves serrated,
That darkness veils from sight.
I feel vibrating in me the emotions
That storm-tossed ships must feel.
The fair winds and the tempests and the oceans
Sway my exultant keel.
Sometimes a vast, dead calm with glassy stare
Mirrors my dumb despair.
— Roy Campbell, Poems of Baudelaire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952)
Music
Music oft seizes me and sweeps me like a sea toward where my star shines pale,
With mists for ceiling, or through an immensity of ether I set sail.
My breast flung forward and my lungs swollen like white canvas, windswept I scale
The backs of heaping waves over which gentle night has wound a darkling veil.
So all the passions of a vessel suffering rise in me; the brave blast
Of winds, and storms in their convulsive movements, swing me, cradled on the vast
Abyss. At other times, dead calms, like mirrors there, reflecting my despair.
— Jacques LeClercq, Flowers of Evil (Mt Vernon, NY: Peter Pauper Press, 1958)
Music
Oft Music, as it were some moving mighty sea,
Bears me toward my pale
Star: in clear space, or ‘neath a vaporous canopy
On-floating, I set sail.
With heaving chest which strains forward, and lungs outblown,
I climb the ridged steeps
Of those high-piled clouds which ‘thwart the night are thrown,
Veiling its starry deeps.
I suffer all the throes, within my quivering form.
Of a great ship in pain,
Now a soft wind, and now the writhings of a storm
Upon the vasty main
Rock me: at other times a death-like calm, the bare
Mirror of my despair.
— Jack Collings Squire, Poems and Baudelaire Flowers (London: The New Age Press, Ltd, 1909)
