French · Spleen and Ideal

Spleen (Pluviôse irrité)

Spleen (Pluviôse, Enraged)

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Pluviôse, enraged against the whole city,
PluviôsePluviôsePluviôse · proper nounhead of the phrase (subject, continues in s1-l2)
Pluviôse: the rainy month (roughly Jan–Feb) of the French Republican calendar, personified here.
irritéenragedirrité · adjective (past participle), masculine, singularmodifies Pluviôse
contreagainstcontre · prepositionpreposition marking ville
lathele · determiner, feminine, singulardeterminer of ville
villecityville · noun, feminine, singularobject of contre
entièrewholeentier · adjective, feminine, singularmodifies ville
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from his urn in great floods pours a tenebrous cold
Word«urne» and the pouring vessel «une urne» is both a funerary urn and the tilted vessel from which a river-god or the zodiac sign Aquarius pours water. «verser» = 'to pour, to spill'. The image fuses death-urn and rain-urn: «Pluviôse» tips it «à grands flots» ('in great floods') to spill a «froid ténébreux» — a 'tenebrous', shadowy cold — over the living and the dead alike.
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on the pale inhabitants of the neighbouring graveyard
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and mortality upon the misty outskirts.
GrammarZeugma: one verb, two objects «verse» from line 2 still governs this line: Pluviôse pours «un froid ténébreux» onto the dead and «la mortalité» onto the living suburbs. Yoking a concrete object (cold) and an abstract one (mortality) under a single verb is a zeugma — the same gesture spills chill on the graveyard and death on the «faubourgs» (the outlying districts). The verb is held back across three lines, mimicking the slow seep of the cold.
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My cat on the tiled floor, seeking a bed of straw,
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stirs its thin and mangy body without rest;
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the soul of an old poet wanders in the gutter
Word«errer» — to wander «errer» = 'to wander, to roam' — a false friend, not 'to err'. The dead poet's soul has come to nothing grander than a ghost roaming the «gouttière» (the roof-gutter), the realm of stray cats and damp, its voice that of a «fantôme frileux» (a shivering phantom) in the next line.
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with the sad voice of a shivering phantom.
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The great bell mourns, and the smoking log
Grammar«se lamenter» (pronominal) «se lamenter» = 'to lament, to wail, to bewail oneself' — the pronominal «se» makes the verb reflexive, the bell mourning of its own accord. «le bourdon» is the deep tenor bell of a church (its low droning note); it 'wails' the funeral toll that pervades the stanza alongside the wheezing clock and smoking log.
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accompanies in falsetto the clock with its cold,
Word«enrhumé(e)» — having a cold «enrhumé(e)» means 'having a head-cold, stuffed up' (from «un rhume», a cold). The mantel clock «pendule» is personified as 'rheumy', its tick gone thick and snuffling; the green log answers it «en fausset» ('in falsetto', a strained high pipe). The whole hearth is sick — Baudelaire's deadpan way of making domestic objects share the season's chill.
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while, in a deck of cards full of foul odours,
Grammar«cependant que» — while «cependant que» is a literary conjunction meaning 'while, all the while that' — the older, fuller form of «pendant que». It opens the long final sentence that runs across the two tercets, setting the card game «un jeu» (here a deck of playing-cards) alongside the wailing hearth of the stanza above.
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fatal legacy of an old dropsical woman,
Word«hydropique» — dropsical «hydropique» = 'suffering from dropsy' (edema), the old name for a body swollen with retained water. The greasy, foul-smelling deck of cards is the deathbed bequest of a bloated old woman — disease passed down with the inheritance. The water-logged body chimes with the rain and flooding «urne» that opened the poem.
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the handsome jack of hearts and the queen of spades
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talk sinisterly of their departed loves.
Grammar«amour» and its shifting gender «amour» is masculine in the singular but traditionally feminine in the poetic plural — yet Baudelaire writes «amours défunts» with the masculine adjective, a licence the older usage allowed and that suits the formal, archaic tone. «défunt(e)» = 'deceased, departed'; here the cards' loves are themselves dead, the only thing left to talk about.

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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