CLASSICAL PAST IN BAUDELAIRE ' S LE CYGNE : A RECONSIDERATION

In the the third preface to Les Fleurs du Mai, Baudelaire curiously refers to Virgil as the only 'source' for his Le Cygne. It has been seen that Horace's description of the living poet's metamorphosis into a swan (Carmina 2.20) is a much more obvious classical reference as far as the title character is concerned, and the mention of »l'homme d'Ovide« seems to point the reader to Ovid's narrative of the creation of man in the Metamorphoses (1.76-86) as a model e contrario for the degradation of the divine bird in Baudelaire's poem. Baudelaire's modern version of the classical symbol of the sublime at first seems to suggest an ironic response to Horace and Ovid. On a second reading, however, the basic 'negativism' orsaudelaire's swan myth reveais a hidden thread of continuity with the classical past: it reveals Ovid's experience as an exilee as the primary parallel to the situations of Andromache and the swan. Conversely, Horace's swan-metamorphosis, though essentially Platonic, provides, through its over-literal, grotesque realism, an ante litteram alternative to the Platonising aesthetics of the earlier Romantics. In a note at the end of the third preface to Les Fleurs du Mal, Baudelaire strikingly acknowledges his debt to a number of classical and contemporary poets by a dry list of 'plagiarisms': Note sur les plagiats. Thomas Gray. Edgar Poe (2 passages). Longfellow (2 passages). Stace. Virgile (tout le morceau d'Andromaque). Eschyle. Victor Hugo. For a literary historian inquiring into the poet's literary lineage, this short stock of models is an invaluable source of information although it is little more than a reaffirmation of the obvious. Moreover, its risk of diverting the critic's attention from other, less obvious but no less important literary presences in the collection is quite realistic. Le Cygne is a case in point. Baudelaire's Andromache clearly is a Virgilian character, but only the first part of the first of the two poems (Le Cygne I) is conspicuously based on Virgil's Aeneid: Andromaque, je pense a vous ! Ce petit fleuve, Pauvre et triste miroir ou jadis resplendit

In a note at the end of the third preface to Les Fleurs du Mal, Baudelaire strikingly acknowledges his debt to a number of classical and contemporary poets by a dry list of 'plagiarisms': Note sur les plagiats.-Thomas Gray.Edgar Poe (2 passages).Longfellow (2 passages).Stace.Virgile (tout le morceau d'Andromaque).Eschyle.Victor Hugo. 1   For a literary historian inquiring into the poet's literary lineage, this short stock of models is an invaluable source of information although it is little more than a reaffirmation of the obvious.Moreover, its risk of diverting the critic's attention from other, less obvious but no less important literary presences in the collection is quite realistic.
Le Cygne is a case in point.I was walking away from the harbour leaving ships and shore behind me when I caught sight of Andromache, offering a ritual meal and performing rites to the dead in a grove in front of a city on the banks of a river Simo is.but not the true Simois of Troy (lit.'the false Simois').
She was weeping her useless tears and sobbing bitterly as these words poured from her when the hero Helenus, son of Priam, arrived from the walls of the city with a great escort.He recognized his own people and took us gladly to his home.He too was weeping and could speak only a few broken words to us between his tears.As I walked I recognized a little Troy, a citadel modelled on great Pergamum and a dried-up stream they called the Xanthus.
(Tr.D. West) The parallel is almost too neat: the vieux Paris is as dead as Troy, and the architectural complex constructed by Haussmann in the place of the old quarter between the Arc du Carrousel and the Louvre as a part of the urban renewal of 1852 is an artificial substitute similar to Andromache' s miniature model of Troy. 3 A further similarity, neglected or considered of marginal importance by most interpreters, is the water imagery introduced by the river augmented by a flood of tears: »Ce Simois menteur qui par VOS pleurs grandit.«Simois is described as 'false' in Virgil's text; the rendition of falsus with the stronger menteur+ seems to suggest that in Baudelaire' s version, Andromache' s 'fake Troy' is little more than a delusion metaphorically referred to as a river watered by tears.While the stream of tears is not Virgilian, the underlying idea of a dry riverbed definitely is: Xanthus (=Scamander), the main river in Andromache's parva Troia (and indeed the main river of the Troad), is described as 'dry' (arens Xanthus, 350; cf. the ruisseau sans eau in the swan scene, 20).Taken together, the flow of tears and the attribute menteur suggest, or at least make possible, a rationalising explanation of Andromache's 'little Troy' as a psychological delusion produced by grief.Virgil's Simois is a palpable although artificial replica of the real river, and the riverbed of Xanthus is there, even if empty.But the fusion of two Virgilian rivers, one 'deceiving' and the other 'arid', results in the surrealistic metaphor of a dry riverbed filled with tears: even if the little Troy is really there, the big river Andromache sees in the place of the dry channel is a hallucination sprung from 'tearful' memories. 5he imagery of water is one of the few 'Virgilian' elements in the second part of Le Cygne I. Andromache's situation is almost literally reproduced in the swan's dustbath besides a waterless brook: le beau lac natal is just a dream inspired by memories.Except for the ruisseau sans eau, however, the image of the swan hardly recalls Virgil.It could recall the transformation of Cycnus, Apollo's beloved, into a swan, a metamorphosis curiously narrated atAeneid 10.189-93, but only as one among many ancient passages.What, then, is the swan doing in Le cygne? 6Curiously enough, the most likely ancient model for the swan is provided by Horace, an author curiously not acknowledged as an influence in the preface.
The The gradual transformation of the poet-figure into the feathered white animal repelled critics like Frankel,8 and it might have inspired Baudelaire's drastic realism, but the fact that Horace's 'swanification' draws on Platonic imagery9 is only a further speaker of the poem, on the contrary, is more self-consciously aware of the illusionary character of visual memories: Jene vois qu'en esprit ... On the self-conscious character ofBaudelaire's spleen (as opposed to the contemplative melancholy of the Romantics) see the fundamental study by Starobinski. 6Terdiman 115.
element of dissension between Baudelaire and his classical model.At the same time, the almost parodic degradation of the classical swan marks Baudelaire's own departure from the more classicising stance of his earlier poem, L'Albatros:10 Le Poete est semblable au prince des nuees Qui hante la tempete et se rit de !'archer; Exile sur le sol au milieu des huees, Ses ailes de geant l'empechent de marcher.
In Spleen, Baudelaire's dialogue with Horace's more famous Exegi monumentum (C.3.30) suggests a decidedly polemical attitude towards Horace's classicising aesthetics: the timeless tyranny of spleen materializes in the imagery of death and decay Horace uses only as a negative foil to his claim to eternity. 11 Virgil, as far as the author of Les Fleurs du Mai is to be trusted, provided the material for »the whole Andromache piece«.The only poetic model explicitly referred to in the poem, though, is Ovid.The mention of Ovid, who described two swan metamorphoses in his epic poem ( , might by itself suggest the idea of metamorphosis, all the more since the swan is called »a strange and fatal myth« (ce mythe etrange et fatal, 24).But again, this self-evident association is glossed over by a more concrete allusion to the creation of man narrated at the beginning of Ovid's Metamorphoses: The innate dignity of Ovid's man, created to look upwards to the sky, is mirrored in the swan as a classical paradigm of the sublime.Interestingly, Ovid presents the creation of man as a metamorphosis, and a very atypical, overtly 'optimistic' instance of metamorphosis: not only is the creation of man from earth and water one of the few instances of transition from dead matter to life (cf.Pygmalion's statue); it also gives birth to a semi-divine sanctius animal.Yet at the same time, Baudelaire's antropomorphic (de ses pieds palmes frottant le pave sec, 18) representation of the sublime bird bathing in dry dust opens a still wider gap between the earthly and heavenly realms.The ascension of Ovid's semi-divine man to the ranks of a swan implies a fundamental reversal of status: Baudelaire's swan is not a divine singer but a miserable beast, a parody, as it were, of the classical divine bird.It has literally returned to the dust from which Prometheus had created the human race.The absence of the second ingredient used by Prometheus, the 'pluvial water', speaks for itself.
Whereas a metamorphosis of some kind has taken place on the way between the two texts, the reference to Ovid rather calls attention to the fact that the swan cannot escape its present state as an exile by an 'Ovidian' metamorphosis -not even by a symbolic metamorphosis of sorrow into song.Unlike man, whose supremacy over other beings is largely based on the faculty of speech, Baudelaire's swan is an immobilized, silenced exile; his unrealized swan song, as a 'missing' metamorphosis, is a silent expression of spleen, and a testimony to the poem's modernity.»Comme l'homme d'Ovide« is to be read as »a la difference de l'homme d'Ovide«: the only real parallel is Ovid himself, the (almost) silenced exilee, as a parallel to the addressee of the poem, Victor Hugo. 12 Andromache, the tragic heroine par excellence, undergoes a similar metamorphic degradation (Le Cygne II, 37-40): Andromaque, des bras d'un grand epoux tombee, Vil b6tail, sous la main du superbe Pyrrhus, Aupres d'un tombeau vide en extase courbee Veuve d'Hector, helas!et femme d'H616nus! 13he grim wordplay tombee-tombeau strips Andromache, bowed in ecstatic mourning, of the last vestige of tragic decorum: she is now only a step away from »the starved and phthisic negress tramping the mud«.Andromache's posture is as un-Racinian as it can be; if there is a tragic model behind Baudelaire's vii betail, then it is Euripides rather than Racine.Her grieving posture and the convulsive gestures of the swan are a testimony to the spleen's antiphrastic relationship to the classical aesthetics, incorporated in the swan as an icon of musical harmony and immortal fame.
Baudelaire's strange modern version of the poetic swan seems to suggest, at least at the surface level, a bitterly ironic response to both Horace and Ovid.As a prisoner of his present exile, immobilized by nostalgia for the past, Baudelaire's grand cygne is the exact contrary to his fame-seeking Horatian counterpart, and the reproaches he addresses to the inexorable sky are simultaneously directed against Ovid's optimistic portrait of the first man.On a second reading, however, the basic 'negativism' of Baudelaire's swan myth reveals a hidden thread of continuity with the classical past.The context of the ironic reference to Ovid's semi-divine first man suggests Ovid's experience as an exilee as the primary (and indeed the only possible) parallel to the situations of Andromache and the swan.The same can be said of Horace's swanmetamorphosis: it is essentially Platonic, but it also provides, through its over-literal, grotesque realism, an ante litteram alternative to the Platonising aesthetics of the earlier Romantics. 14To be sure, this particular point of contact does not invalidate the basic contrast between the white singer triumphing over an empty grave and the silent beast bathing in dust, but it clearly shows that Baudelaire's use of the Horatian myth of poetic eternity is not purely polemical: it presupposes a model that is itself open to ambiguity.
--Perhaps there is more than a touch of irony about Horace's mention of Icarus, the mythic paradigm of the artist's downfall, in the context of poetic flight: »iam Daedaleo notior Icaro« (»Soon more famous than Icarus, son of Daedalus ... «). 15 The ironic possibility that the human swan is just a second Icarus might even explain why he so haughtily refuses the idea of a funeral.This is admittedly a very Baudelairean interpretation, but it is in fact suggested by another poem in Les Fleurs du Mai, a poem entitled Les plaintes d'un /care: En vainj'ai voulu de l'espace Trouver la fin et le milieu; Sous je ne sais quel oeil de feu J e sens mon aile qui se casse; Et brille par l'amour du beau, Je n'aurai pas l'honneur sublime De donner mon nom a l' abime Qui me servira de tombeau.
text in question is Carmina 2.20, a poem in which the poetic 'I' intriguingly describes his own bodily metamorphosis into a swan: 7 Already, even now, rough skin is forming on my legs, my upper part is changing into a white bird and smooth feathers are sprouting along my fingers and shoulders.Soon more famous than Icarus, son of Daedalus, I shall be a harmonious bird and visit the shores of the moaning Bosphorus, the Gaetulian Syrtes, and the Hyperborean plains ....Let there be no dirges or squalid mourning or lamentation at my corpseless funeral.Check your cries of grief and do not trouble with the empty honour of a tomb.(Tr.D. West)