“ô Mort! Appareillons!”: con Baudelaire, a vele spiegate verso il “nuovo”

Abstract

'Le Voyage' is the longest poem appearing in Baudelaire’s "Fleurs du Mal": it is constituted by thirty-six quatrains of alexandrine verses with alternate rhymes, and in its sixth and last section “La Mort”, the exclamation “ô Mort! Appareillons!” can be found. The article wants to trace a reading itinerary through the works of Baudelaire, by focusing on the privileged nucleuses of death (a private event and a source for poetry) and ‘the new’. After a first examination of some noteworthy phases of the phenomenon which concerns ‘death’, the author proceeds with a study of some of Baudelaire’s writings. To Baudelaire, death, after the elimination of the Christian connotation, becomes an extreme and courageous means of acquiring knowledge, the way to get to that Inconnu, that là bas or that nouveau which he has always desired but never reached. Death, sea, voyage, ‘the new’, time and ennui are all indissolubly united in this final poem 'Le Voyage'.