A Brief Analysis of Charles Baudelaire’s ‘Be Drunk’
Baudelaire’s poem, ‘Be Drunk’ focuses on the crucial and ever-changing conceptions of time. While other poems in Paris Spleen such as ‘The Eyes of the Poor’ center on human relationships in an urban context, ‘Be Drunk’ meditates on man’s relationship to time. His poem conveys an aversion to the overwhelming influence of time on everyday life, which has been heightened within the context of Paris’s modernization and previous decades of industrialization and rapid urbanization. Drunkenness becomes an ideal because it allows one to lose their attention to time.
As the poem begins, Baudelaire urges the reader to “be drunk always.” He uses hyperbole when he writes that whether or not to be drunk is “the only question,” as if it is the only matter of importance. The reason for this is to escape the “horrible burden of Time.” By capitalizing time as if it is a proper noun, Baudelaire personifies it as a tyrant, whose influence dominates the city dweller. The imagery that time “crushes your shoulders, and bends you earthward,” evokes oppressive power that causes one to bend ‘earthward’, which connotes one’s grave, their death. This language has a simple poignance: time rules over people, ages them, and leads them to their end.
Next, Baudelaire asserts that one must be continually drunk without pause — and he means this in both a literal and metaphorical sense. You can “take your pick”: become drunk “on wine”, or drunk “on poetry, on virtue.” As an experienced poet himself, he likens appreciation of poetry, or engagement in writing prose, to intoxication. This characterizes poetry as having potency, perhaps to underline poetry’s aesthetic value. With the notion of being drunk on virtue, he employs irony, as drunkenness is generally regarded as sinful. This paradox effectively draws attention to virtue with the idea that it can completely overcome a person’s senses. It brings up the question: What does one who is drunk on virtue look like? Maybe Baudelaire means devoting all of one’s attention to a moral inquiry or being in awe of what is considered morally good or desirable. But what does Baudelaire regard as virtuous?
The next three scenes he mentions — a palace, a ditch, a bedroom — seem disconnected: awakening on the steps of a palace evokes extravagance, as if one has passed out during a lavish celebration, awakening in a ditch evokes disorientation, awakening in one’s bedroom is dull and lonely. Perhaps this is to convey that where you are when you awaken from drunken sleep is unimportant. What is important, again, is to continue being drunk: if you ask “of the wind, of the wave, a star, bird, clock,” what hour it is, they will reply ‘the hour to be drunk!’ What is interesting about this imagery is that the natural world of both living and non-living things and their movements are presented as a measurement of time in addition to the clock. All of these elements, however, will offer the exact same answer that Baudelaire stated previously: be continually drunk, do not be a ‘racked slave’ of ‘Time’.
‘Be Drunk’ is a concise and repetitive poem, but it is not simple nor explicit in its meaning. I believe it connects well to Baudelaire’s commentary on the changing ways of living in Paris and is a hyperbolic expression of how he believes one should live. I think it is fair to say that he is critical of how time is so important to society, industry, and individuals that it enslaves them. It also may connect to Baudelaire’s influence on the Decadent movement, which aestheticized pleasure and indulgence, instead of focusing on societal progress and upholding conventions. Also, I wanted to mention that when I read this poem, I was reminded of the poet Arthur Rimbaud, who wrote “the best known of Paris Spleen’s offspring,” Illuminations and A Season in Hell. Rimbaud was a Symbolist poet, who was often drunk, but unlike Baudelaire intended, he did this not to escape time but to elevate his artistic capacity: “The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, rational and immense disordering of all the senses,” he writes in an extract from the ‘Voyant’ letter. I think that Rimbaud’s approach to drunkenness is an interesting comparison to Baudelaire’s, as the former claims, it is enlightening, while the latter emphasizes its incapacitating effect.