ABSTRACT
In the first line of the poem “La Musique,” from Les Fleurs du Mal, Charles Baudelaire announces that “music often carries me away like the sea.” Throughout the stanza, spatial coordinates map the position of the poet, poised “under a ceiling of mist,” moving “through vast ether,” “towards a pale star,” and propelled to “set sail” as though seized by an unseen, irresistible force. The poet links listening to music with an ocean voyage, employing verbs and prepositions that connote spatiality to visualize the lived experience of immersion in sound that music evokes in him. In subsequent stanzas the poet transforms into a ship, his inner turmoil revealed through further spatial equivalents as he soars the heights to “climb each wave” or plumbs the depths to be rocked “within the immense abyss.” At mid-journey, night casts “a veil” that surrounds the poet, an apt image of physical and psychic submersion within an ineffable and immeasurable space.1
