by Joseph Hay

Created on: July 06, 2008

To read the poem: http://fleursdumal.org/poem/148

It would be impossible to separate "Invitation to the Voyage" (L'Invitation au Voyage) from the other poems in Baudelaire's masterpiece, Flowers of Evil (Fleurs du Mal). For those who have not read it, this collection of poems, which was printed in four editions from 1857 to 1868, could be called an elegy to everything that is sickly sweet and beautifully corrupt. Baudelaire frequently juxtaposes love, death, depression, fear and pleasure, never shying away from grotesque imagery, such as corpses, venereal disease and murder - shocking for the highly moralizing era it was written in. Baudelaire did a lot to create the stereotype of the morbid, depressed Frenchman, but a fair reading of the work discloses a very passionate man who took it upon himself to illuminate how beautiful the complexity of life is, especially when it is grittiest and at its most physical. He was not a cynic simply out to batter the emptiness of innocence and chastity like a pinata, but a visionary who wanted his readers to see how rich and beautiful the world is, despite its scandals and hypocrisy.

This poem, the 51st in Flowers of Evil, might strike the reader as being exceptionally sentimental and cheerful. Of course, this is relative to the collection as a whole. After reading poem after poem of misery and sickness and death, "Invitation to a Voyage" somehow seems optimistic about beauty and fanciful things, and you want to ask: "Okay, where are the guts?" The two mentions of anything you could call unpleasant: "to die" (line 5) and "treacherous eyes" (line 11) are swallowed up by images of sunsets, delicate furnishings and boats loaded with gifts. This seems, at first glance, to be another love poem where the author, like a troubadour, mingles the love he feels for his lady with a broader love of the universe. He simultaneously promises the world to his beloved and dwells in the expectation of a world that is going to be returned to him - hoping that his lady will satisfy his need for the experience of mystery he saw in the sunset, in flowers, in the ancient waterways.

Like any good poem, this feeling of discord draws you in further. Re-reading the first paragraph, we dwell on that word mentioned above: "to die." This evokes a kind of pessimism that the average troubadour would try to gloss over. Not Baudelaire: if he wants his reader to remember anything, it is the reality of death. And we also notice that in this far away land Baudelaire

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