Correspondences Page 51
Nature is presented as a temple of vast proportions, its pillars "living" like great
trees rising in a holy place. Words are "murmured" that cannot be
"understood" by human beings as they "wander" through a forest of symbols
("des forets de symboles", translated as "tangled wood") that watch us "with
friendly eyes".
Colour, sound and perfume mingle and "speak" like far-off, long-drawn echoes
dark and deep. This is clearer in the French:
Comme de longs echos, qui de loin se confondent
Dans une tenebreuse et profonde unite,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarte,
les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se repondent. 63
The "words" of nature, of perfume, colour and sound are more than spoken,
they are a response, an answer or a reply. "Se repondre" means to match, to
call to each other, to answer each other, to correspond to each other. Perfume
colour and sound call each other and merge in a dark and profound unity. The
sound of colour, the colour of perfume, the perfume of sound - all are like far-
off echoes or "traces" of "things infinite".
The "crystal of sense" dwells for the rest of the poem on perfume. Because of
this "narrowing down" from the vast expanse of nature to the elusive quality of
perfume, the poem has been seen by some as a "pyramide renversee".64 That
would mean that we would be left with exactly the same arrangement of things
only the other way round. A spirituality of correspondences is not one of
hierarchies. The poem indicates that perfume (though it could have been sound
or colour or any other thing) has, in itself, "all the expansion of things infinite".
63 Baudelaire Les Fleurs Du Mal, Edition Etablie par Jacques Dupont, (Paris: GF Flammarion, 1991) p.62
64 See D.J. Mossop, Baudelaire 's Tragic Hero, (London: 0xford University Press, 1961) p.72
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