When Baudelaire was young, his stepfather tried to convince him to quit poetry. While he saw Baudelaire’s determination, he demanded him to write poem about exotic lands and certainly not about the dirty and dark Paris, therefore he would pay him a trip to India. Baudelaire accepted. While the poet was on boat he stand out from the other passengers. One day, the crew killed an albatross because the boat crossed a line or something; it was a tradition at that time. After they killed the bird they played with it like an unsignificant thing. When Baudelaire saw this scene* he run and attacked the crew. Indeed, men feel confident and superior enough to despise the weak, the wild and the beautiful whereas as an artist Baudelaire spent his life admiring Beauty. He indentified himself with the bird and wrote a poem about it (see the poem below). He never reached India, and came back in Paris because he missed it. Baudelaire and Paris make one.
*This episode was related by a passenger and i read it in a biography of Baudelaire by Henri Troyat member of the Académie Française.
L’Albatros
Souvent, pour s’amuser, les hommes d’équipage
Prennent des albatros, vastes oiseaux des mers,
Qui suivent, indolents compagnons de voyage,
Le navire glissant sur les gouffres amers.
À peine les ont-ils déposés sur les planches,
Que ces rois de l’azur, maladroits et honteux,
Laissent piteusement leurs grandes ailes blanches
Comme des avirons traîner à côté d’eux.
Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule!
Lui, naguère si beau, qu’il est comique et laid!
L’un agace son bec avec un brûle-gueule,
L’autre mime, en boitant, l’infirme qui volait!
Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées
Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l’archer;
Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,
Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher.
— Charles Baudelaire
The Albatross
Sometimes for sport the men of loafing crews
Snare the great albatrosses of the deep,
The indolent companions of their cruise
As through the bitter vastitudes they sweep.
Scarce have they fished aboard these airy kings
When helpless on such unaccustomed floors,
They piteously droop their huge white wings
And trail them at their sides like drifting oars.
How comical, how ugly, and how meek
Appears this soarer of celestial snows!
One, with his pipe, teases the golden beak,
One, limping, mocks the cripple as he goes.
The Poet, like this monarch of the clouds,
Despising archers, rides the storm elate.
But, stranded on the earth to jeering crowds,
The great wings of the giant baulk his gait.
— Roy Campbell, Poems of Baudelaire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952)
