“Le Spleen de Paris”: the Posthumously Published Prose Poems Book of Charles Baudelaire, circa 1869

 

 

It was a hot weekend in the Arizona. But like in any desert, the nights remain cool allowing for long walks with my dog before sunrise and close to midnight. The rest of the weekend I spent reading. This time I revisited the “prose poems” of Baudelaire known as Le spleen de Paris, a collection of fifty prose poems published in 1869, posthumously.

Written in paragraph form like prose, Baudelaire’s work deals with the Parisian life through a musicality and aesthetic outlook one finds in his poems. He has used the word Spleen before in his previous works to describe his dislike of many aspects of life. In this case, it is specifically about aspects of life in Paris that he covers through a writing genre which was adopted years later by another famous and rebellious French poet, Arthur Rimbaud.

As I read “Les Fenêtres” (The Windows) I recalled a photo I had taken in 2019. After a second reading, I let my pencil slide on a yellow pad page. I often take notes of the moments a poem (or prose) inspires me during lecture.

Here is what my pencil tip left behind:

 

So let the window half-open

And recall skies in rain

Eyes in surprise taken

And words on lips forgotten

 

Summer rain and the sea deaf

To the cry of returning waves

Let the window half-closed

Salty winds keep your candles in dark

 

And in the stillness of the unsaid

Forget about skies in rain

And barefoot and the briny breeze in your hair

Dance on the beach

 

But leave the window wide open

 

June 29, 2025

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2025

 

PS/ I found a masterful translation of “Les Fenêtres” by Emily Leithauser at https://www.literarymatters.org