Comparing the French Poets

Antony Bush said: to me poetry is an expression of self thought. It would seem then that poetry a personal journey that a poet shares with a willing audience. This journey through the poet’s ego or consciousness is what allows poetry to be dynamic, enigmatic, and provocative. Poetry then isn’t a way in which a poet can complain about a broken heart or a broken family but a way in which they can more vividly and truthfully express their surrounding circumstance and place metaphor in the place of cliche.

For instance, instead of saying ‘my heart is broken’ a poet can say ‘my heart splinters into a thousand galaxies’ thereby relating their personal pain into a more worldly occurrence and thus making the poem accessible to their audience. The aim of poetry then is to make readers feel more human when they read lines like “We flit each other, fluid affectionate, chaste, matured. You grew up with me, were a boy with me or a girl with me” in which Walt Whitman expresses to his reader how he knows them – and in knowing them he transcends time, gender, and space thereby making the reader a little less lonely.

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That is the goal of poetry, to make people feel less lonely, to have them feel as if someone else has felt their love, joy, pain and grief and made it through these human emotions – it gives the reader hope that they too will make it through life. In Baudelaire’s poem One O’clock in the Morning he expresses enthusiasm for being alone. Except, in his third sentence he says ‘ours’ meaning that he is not alone, his desire was to be alone with someone – to be left by the world so that he can exist in a world of two. This is a common theme among poets.

However, this ‘ours’ is rather ambiguous and the reader is left with the impression that Baudelaire is indeed alone. He states, “tyranny of the human face” meaning he attributes almost everything wrong in the world to humanity and not to simply one person but all people. Is he then an exception? The poem does not say. The poem is however definitely pointing out how sick humanity is. The poet expresses rather masochistic tendencies in wanting to be alone (the turn of the key in the lock) and how he wants to be bathed in darkness.

With such metaphors and imagery the poet succeeds in delivering his desire to be alone. In Rimbaud’s poem Barbarian the poet speaks of distant – distant from humanity (again). This is shown with his allusions to humanity being a “banner of bleeding meat” and how being far from such barbarism, one can be at peace again. He perhaps has had his vision of heroism denied or proven false as this banner (a banner which is carried in battle) is what drives the narrator quite mad with barbaric thoughts.

Perhaps Rimbaud is talking about death. His reverie in stating “Oh World” is a cry of a dying man, and the “eyes floating” confirms this argument. Rimbaud’s poem goes on to state something about the world and the treasures of that world that he will miss – this statement is given in parenthesis, “(Far from the old retreats and the old flames, that are known, that are felt)” (Rimbaud line 11-12). He is making a comparison between life and this new place and how both perhaps have their positive and negatives.

Rimbaud however leaves the reader in an ambiguous state as he does not seem to favor one state of being over the other (unlike Baudelaire) but merely makes exhalations about either place and his feeling toward both. In the end, perhaps it is not death he is explaining in his poem, but heartbreak – a love over a woman. He states he that he sees the eyes and hair and the floating form before him – so in the end, the poem is perhaps more about how being out of favor or out of someone’s love affects him.

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