Saturday, February 2, 2019
Appreciating Baudelaire’s “A Carcass”
In initially reading Baudelaire’s “A Carcass” by myself, I did not notice all the life/death and nourishment/rotting imagery. Baudelaire’s use of the carcass as an object that embodies both death and life is a pure stroke of genius; the carcass, although itself deceased, grants other organisms life. Maggots swarm around the carcass and eat it as a dog devours the carcass. In addition to his use of the carcass as an object that connects both life and death, Baudelaire also uses the sun to connect these seemingly contradictory concepts. The sun, contrary to the carcass, is a primarily life-giving body. It’s basic knowledge that without the sun there’d be no life on Earth. Baudelaire also highlights the fact that the sun accelerates the decaying pace of the carcass as it’s hot rays smolder the carcass. I appreciate Baudelaire’s juxtaposition here. Overall, Baudelaire’s imagery in the poem is perfect.
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4 comments:
I like your post! I also didn't recognize the symbolism right away; the morbid nature of the descriptions kind of distracted me at first, and I thought it was a bit gross! After reading it again and understanding the reason he chose certain words and such impactful descriptions, I also came to appreciate it more, and I like the poem. I agree, the dead body being described as bringing life was really cool! Especially the sentence about the number of bugs looking and moving like liquid.
I definitely agree with you here. The way that Baudelaire structures his poem is really interesting with multiple examples of powerful imagery that encapsulate the ideas of life and death. The way he juxtaposes death imagery with life imagery is clever because at the end of the day, death is what gives other things life, as you say. This discussion of death begetting life in this poem reminds me of the discussion we had about creativity, destruction, and death in The Underground Man. The Underground Man makes it a point that man wishes to keep creating in order to strive towards a goal. Because man is a creative being, man will keep creating throughout their lives considering that life is limited (i.e. life is short). If life went on forever, there would be no incentive to accomplish goals. Thus, in our short lives, we pass we create ideas and we then spawn a new generation. With that new generation, we pass down our ideas to them and we, well, die. This new generation then either comes up with their own ideas or builds upon previous ideas. The fact that we die, therefore, in a way, makes it so that we advance as a species. By advancing as a society, the deaths of other people quite literally makes life because if you think about it, as time has passed on, humans have on average lived longer with advancements in technology and medicine.
I agree, the symbolism is very strong and morbid. To me, the thing that makes it so creepy is the fact that it sounds calm, sing songs and normal. It’s kind of like Ted Bundy in the aspect that everyone thought he was a decent young man when actually he was a serial killer. Sometimes the uncertainty and the too calm can be creepy in itself.
Great posts guys, I must add that while reading the poem I thought that the dead body was of a human rather than an animal. However, this is not possible given the the title “A Carcass” which specifically means the dead body of an animal. If Baudelaire simply changed the title name from “A Carcass” to “A Corpse” (meaning the dead body of a human and NOT an animal), would readers interpret his lines differently?
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