French · Spleen and Ideal

Le Mauvais Moine

The Bad Monk

14 lines · 8 notes

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1
The ancient cloisters, upon their great walls,
Lesthele · determiner, pluraldeterminer of cloîtres
cloîtrescloisterscloître · noun, masculine, pluralhead of the phrase
anciensancientancien · adjective, masculine, pluralmodifies cloîtres
suronsur · prepositionpreposition marking murailles
leurstheirleur · determiner, pluraldeterminer of murailles
grandesgreatgrand · adjective, feminine, pluralmodifies murailles
murailleswallsmuraille · noun, feminine, pluralmodifies cloîtres
Word«le cloître» — cloister and monastery «le cloître» is both the covered walkway round a monastery courtyard and, by extension, the monastic life or the monastery itself. The circumflex on «cloître» marks a long-lost «s» (compare the English 'cloister'). «les murailles» are massive defensive walls — heavier and more fortress-like than ordinary «murs», fitting for the great medieval houses the poem conjures.
2
Spread out in painted tableaux the holy Truth,
GrammarImperfect «étalaient» and the capital with no accent «étalaient» is the imperfect of «étaler» (to spread out, display), the tense of habitual, scene-setting past action — the cloisters 'used to display'. The word opens with «É» but is printed «Etalaient»: nineteenth-century typography routinely dropped accents on capitals, so the bare «E» is period spelling, not an error. «Vérité» is capitalized to mark it as an allegory — Truth itself, painted on the wall.
3
Whose effect, warming the pious innards,
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Tempered the coldness of their austerity.
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In those days when the sowing of Christ flourished,
GrammarVerb-before-subject inversion Normal prose order would be «les semailles du Christ florissaient». Here the subject «les semailles» is held back until after its verb «florissaient» (imperfect of «fleurir», to flower / flourish), a poetic inversion that also serves the alexandrine and the rhyme. «les semailles» literally means 'the sowing(s)' — the seed of faith scattered in the early Church, a Gospel image of the word planted in the world.
6
More than one illustrious monk, little cited today,
Grammar«plus d'un» takes a singular «plus d'un» ('more than one') governs a singular noun and verb in French — «plus d'un illustre moine ... glorifiait» — even though it means several. The phrasing keeps each forgotten monk an individual rather than a crowd. «peu cité» = 'seldom quoted / little spoken of now', setting the vanished devotion of the past against the poet's barren present.
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Taking the field of funerals for his workshop,
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Glorified Death with simplicity.
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— My soul is a tomb that, a bad cenobite,
Word«le cénobite» — a monk of the community A «cénobite» (from Greek 'koinos bios', common life) is a monk who lives in a community under a rule, as opposed to a hermit. The poet casts himself as a «mauvais cénobite» — a bad one — turning the historical monastery of the octave inward: his own soul is now the cloister, and he is its delinquent inmate. The em-dash «—» opening the tercet marks the turn from description to the speaker's first-person lament.
10
Since all eternity I roam and inhabit;
GrammarTwo verbs sharing one object «que» The relative pronoun «que» at the end of line s3-l1 is the direct object of both verbs here: the tomb that I both «parcours» (roam, walk the length of, from «parcourir») and «j'habite» (inhabit, dwell in). «Depuis l'éternité» — 'since / for all eternity' — uses «depuis» for duration up to the present, stretching the soul's imprisonment across endless time.
11
Nothing adorns the walls of this hateful cloister.
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O slothful monk! when, then, shall I learn to make
Grammar«savoir faire» and the inverted future «saurai-je» is the future of «savoir» (to know / know how) with the subject «je» inverted after the verb to form a question — literary and emphatic. «savoir faire» here means 'to know how to / manage to make', so «quand saurai-je faire» = 'when will I manage to make'. «donc» is again the insistent particle, not 'therefore' but 'then, on earth': 'when on earth will I learn to make...?'. «fainéant» (do-nothing, idle) brands the poet a sluggard in his own monastery of the soul.
13
Out of the living spectacle of my sad misery
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The labor of my hands and the love of my eyes?
Grammar«faire de X, Y» — to make Y out of X The closing question runs across three lines in the pattern «faire de [X] [Y]» — 'to make Y out of / from X'. Here X is «Du spectacle vivant de ma triste misère» (the living spectacle of my sad misery) and Y is «Le travail de mes mains et l'amour de mes yeux» (the labor of my hands and the love of my eyes). The poet asks when he will at last turn his wretchedness into art — make his own suffering the work that the old monks made of Death.

The particulars

The text: Les Fleurs du mal, Charles Baudelaire. Spleen and Ideal.
Words: Every word of the text, by letter.
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