Correspondences Page 50
CORRESPONDENCES
Presence corresponds to absence, love to death, life to destruction and truth to
darkness. The sense of how things "correspond" to one another runs
throughout Judith Wright's poetry. She was impressed with Baudelaire's
theory of "correspondences":
My real interest... is the question of man in nature - man as part of
nature. The theory of correspondences that Baudelaire brought
forward - the question of nature as a symbol of one's experience has
always seemed to me to have a great deal in it.61
Baudelaire's poem "Correspondences" contains some of the major themes of
his theory:
In Nature's temple living pillars rise,
And words are murmured none have understood,
And man must wander through a tangled wood
of symbols watching him with friendly eyes.
As long-drawn echoes heard far-off and dim
Mingle to one deep sound and fade away;
Vast as the night and brilliant as the day,
Colour and sound and perfume speak to him.
Some perfumes are as fragrant as a child,
Sweet as the sound of hautboys, meadow green;
Others, corrupt, rich, exultant, wild,
Have all the expansion of things infinite:
As amber, incense, musk, and benzoin,
Which sing the senses' and the soul's delight. 62
61 Kiernan, Considerations, p.73
62 Charles Baudelaire. Poems and Prose, Introduction by James Huneker ( New York: Brentano. 1919) p.24
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