Analysis of Crowds
Charles Baudelaire 1821 (Paris) – 1867 (Paris)
It is not given to every man to take a bath of multitude; enjoying a crowd is an art; and only he can relish a debauch of vitality at the expense of the human species, on whom, in his cradle, a fairy has bestowed the love of masks and masquerading, the hate of home, and the passion for roaming.
Multitude, solitude: identical terms, and interchangeable by the active and fertile poet. The man who is unable to people his solitude is equally unable to be alone in a bustling crowd.
The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself of someone else, as he chooses. Like those wandering souls who go looking for a body, he enters as he likes into each man's personality. For him alone everything is vacant; and if certain places seem closed to him, it is only because in his eyes they are not worth visiting.
The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a box, and the slothful man like a mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived of. He adopts as his own all the occupations, all the joys and all the sorrows that chance offers.
What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire, all it poetry and all its charity, to the unexpected as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes.
It is a good thing sometimes to teach the fortunate of this world, if only to humble for an instant their foolish pride, that there are higher joys than theirs, finer and more uncircumscribed. The founders of colonies, shepherds of peoples, missionary priests exiled to the ends of the earth, doubtlessly know something of this mysterious drunkenness; and in the midst of the vast family created by their genius, they must often laugh at those who pity them because of their troubled fortunes and chaste lives.
Scheme | A X A X X X |
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Poetic Form | |
Metre | 11110110011101110010011110101110011010010011010101101100101010111001001110010110 10100100100100101001010011101011011011000101101001001 01001001000101101011011111110111001111010101101110111010011011011001101011111110010111111100 010001010101000010010100100111110100101100011011100110010011101001111010001110111110010101010101110 1111101010101010111010010101010101100101011100011100100101110110101110 1101101110100111110110111011011111011110011010110010110100111011011110110100100000110110001011101110111110101111010011 |
Characters | 1,995 |
Words | 356 |
Sentences | 13 |
Stanzas | 6 |
Stanza Lengths | 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 |
Lines Amount | 6 |
Letters per line (avg) | 265 |
Words per line (avg) | 59 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 265 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 59 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on April 22, 2023
- 1:47 min read
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"Crowds" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 28 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/4912/crowds>.
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