A Reading of Baudelaire’s “Recueillement”

Akash Mehta
10/30/10

“Recueillement” is about as difficult a poem to translate as I can imagine, chiefly because

it so centrally relies on the reader following the repeated injunction in its last line: to listen. Like

a lullaby crooned to a child or sweet words murmured to a lover, its effect comes as much from

its sounds and rhythms as from the meaning of its words. The poem soothes and shushes through

stressed s sounds: the first stanza opens with the double-s of ‘sois sage’, continues with ‘soir'..

‘descend’… ‘voici’… ‘atmosphère'… ‘obscure’… ‘aux‿uns'… ‘aux‿autres’, and closes with

another double-s in ‘souci’. Like a background hum, the sound keeps recurring throughout the

poem, most powerfully in the poem’s last word (‘marche’) whose half-pronounced (and perhaps

lingered on, in a good reading) last syllable, echoing ‘arche’ and ‘chère,’ turns the s into the

whispered onomatopoeia of the even softer sh.

Indeed there is scarcely a sound in the poem that doesn’t seem to melt into or out of

another. (Even ‘fouet’, which at first grates harshly, whip-like, is dulled by the next line’s ‘fête

servile.’) The alliteration is incessant and brazen (‘tiens-toi plus tranquille. / Tu,’ ‘des mortels la

multitude vile,’ ‘ma douleur, donne-moi la main,’ ‘comme un long linceul traînant à l’Orient’), the

assonance equally so (‘aux‿uns… portant… pendant,’ ‘traînant à l’Orient’), and yet neither ever

sounds forced. Not content with simply rhyming end-words, Baudelaire often pairs the sounds of

the last several syllabes of lines (‘plus tranquille… —oppe la ville’, ‘la multititude vile… la fête

servile,’ ‘—tes‿Années… surannées’). And the rhythm of the poem is no less deliberate, with

the commas slowing the pace, the dignified long Alexandrian lines, the breathtaking concluding

couplet made tangible by the iambs in soft, steady succession.

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 The total effect of all this sonic work is not just to soothe the reader’s mind, but also to

bring it to a state of heightened receptivity. The music of the poem doesn’t distract from the

individual words and their meaning but on the contrary intensifies our attention to them; the

cohesiveness and almost ethereal beauty of the poem as a whole imbues each word—which we

feel could not have been any other—with significance. And this corresponds, I think, to where

Baudelaire is trying to guide his Sorrow, which does not fall asleep at the end of the poem but on

the contrary becomes more awake to the world and more receptive to its grace, its ‘ténébreuse et

profonde unité’.

‘Recueillement’ comes from ‘recueillir’, which can mean to collect or to gather. Howard’s

translation as ‘meditation’ no doubt captures its primary meaning, but the title seems also to carry

something, if only a trace, of ‘gather yourself together’ or ‘be self-collected.’ This undertone is

repeated in ‘tiens-toi plus tranquille’, to which ‘let’s have no more scenes’ doesn’t quite do justice.

‘Hold yourself together’ is too dramatic, but in exaggerated form it captures part of the poet’s

admonition to his ‘Douleur’: to rein in its excesses, to carry itself with more restraint and dignity.

To hold oneself together and upright, to keep from being overwhelmed internally and from too

sudden or emotive movements externally, is to practice a kind of self-aesthetization through self-

discipline. (We also refer to this as ‘self-composition’, which I think reveals another

correspondence between the the poet’s aim and the poem’s ultra-refined and classical

composition.) This is undoubtably part of what we mean when we tell children to ‘behave’; but

it’s also part of what the poet (aware of the more literal translation of ‘sois sage’) sees as wisdom.

This deliberate restraint and self-composition is key to the movement of the second

stanza. The stanza’s first line, with its eleven syllables, is the only break with the otherwise

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classically pristine Alexandrian lines;1 even the grammar seems to slightly break down, with the

two nouns ‘des mortels’ and ‘la multitude’ jammed together without a comma. This corresponds

to a change in Baudelaire’s register, which now threatens to drop into that of “Au Lecteur”

(compare in particular the depictions of ‘plaisir’): a self-indulgently intemperate scornfulness

towards the human race (inevitably turning into harsh bitterness, upon the self-recognition as a

member of that race). One can imagine Baudelaire writing “Au Lecteur” while racked by an

acute ‘Douleur’ to which this poem enjoins, ‘tiens-toi plus tranquille.’ When Baudelaire coaxes it

to turn away from pathetic sights and towards higher, nobler things, he is asking it to gather and

compose itself, and in so doing to turn into a higher, nobler form of itself; a translation

prioritizing sense over subtlety might render the first ‘Douleur’ as ‘Pain’ and the second, in view

of what it is being refined into, as ‘Sorrow.’

The line that bridges the second and third stanza presents a perhaps unexpected counter to

the preceding bitterness: compassion. The way to wisdom and peace, it suggests, is not to

castigate one’s pain or try to exorcise it but to speak to it gently, if firmly, to address it in

intimate tones and to recognize it as one’s own, to touch it and offer it one’s hand. Thus the self-

discipline discussed earlier must be of a nurturing kind (‘hold yourself together’ would have been

not just too dramatic but also too severe a translation). How far this compassion can take us is

reflected in the distance between the second and third stanzas, manifested formally in the

enjambed ‘loin d’eux’ and the shift to the tercet. Here Baudelaire redirects attention from the

Earth to the Heavens and from the contemporary to the past. (Yet another meaning of

‘recueillement’, I should mention, is ‘recollection.’) Looking into the sky, clothed in light minutes

or eons old, is quite literally looking into the past (as Baudelaire may well have been aware, the

1 I’m assuming that the last syllable of ‘enveloppe’ in the third line is voiced. Admittedly this is playing a
little fast and loose, considering I don’t count the final voiced syllable of ‘marche.’

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finitude of light’s velocity having been known for nearly two centuries). And yet that the light

reaches our eyes establishes it equally in the present, just as to see in the present tense the

departed years is to bring them, in a sense, into the here and now. In any case we feel, for the rest

of the poem, that we have somehow stepped out of time, not arresting it (the night’s tread is

inexorable) but beholding it as a totality.

This sense of having risen above the particulars to contemplate the whole—of stepping

back to see the bigger picture—is elicited again with the capitalization and singularization of ‘le

Regret’ in contrast to the earlier ‘des remords’2 of the vile multitude, with its thousand petty

pleasures and pains.3 If we detach ourselves from the current moment, if we restrain ourselves

from getting riled up by all within it that provokes us, we become able to take the enlarged

perspective that comes with distance. This does not escape pain but rather deepens it, gives it

beauty and dignity. With perspective, everything gains poignancy as a piece of the larger

composition; in the stars we now see the dead, in the setting sun (now framed, as by an artist,

‘sous une arche’) the dying, in the approach of the Night the living, soon to be dying, soon to be

dead. There is no pleasure in these visions, but there is a sort of kindly peace. The Regret is

smiling tenderly and the Night air is sweet and the shroud promises warmth, like a blanket.

In the final line the evocation of compassion, of love, returns with full force in ‘ma

chère’. This love suggests a reason for addressing a poem to one’s Sorrow in the first place, for

creating an inner distance between self and Sorrow mirroring the distance created between self

and world in the third stanza: the project of self-composition, like that of composition of a poem,
2 The multitude “va cueiller des remords,” which literally translates to ‘will pick remorses,’ as if they were
flowers… of evil? If Baudelaire was indeed thinking along these lines, it’s further support for the
suggestion in my discussion of “Au Lecteur” that “Recueillement” might aspirationally depict what a
resolution of the central, framing anxieties of the book might look like.
3 The third stanza’s jump from the sky to the waters may be another guesture towards the composite
unity of the whole. We know from other poems (e.g. “L’Invitation au Voyage”) that Baudelaire was
attuned to the reflective relationship between the two. Just as the sea mirrors the sky, Regret mirrors the
past; in one image Baudelaire presents both temporal and spatial integration.

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requires the creation and balance of tensions and relations between parts in order to give rise to a

whole. The poem thus presents the more redemptive flipside of “L’Homme et la Mer”, in which

man’s ‘esprit n’est pas un gouffre mois amer’ than that of the sea. If the distances are created from

a place of serenity rather than bitterness, receptivity rather than evasion or distraction, love rather

than contempt, then perhaps in their very creation they may be bridged.