The Albatross

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1861

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

The Albatross

The albatross, an oceanic bird with a remarkable wingspan, occupies an important place in literary history. The English Romantic writer Samuel Taylor Coleridge made the bird into a symbol of weighty guilt in his famous poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798). Baudelaire draws upon this literary history in his poem “The Albatross” by making the bird into an accursed figure, a symbol for the outsider poet. The first three stanzas detail the degradation of the albatross when sailors capture it and taunt it, making the creature appear “clumsy and shameful,” “awkward and weak” (Lines 6 and 9). The comparison between brutalized bird and poet becomes explicit in the final stanza, catching the reader off-guard with its startling vision of the poet as a degraded and mistreated creature of majesty.

The poet resembles the albatross because the albatross represents the flight and vision of the poetic imagination. While the albatross possesses “great wings in white” (Line 7), the poet, too, has “wings, those of a giant” (Line 16). The parallel images of wings reveal flight to be the natural state of both the albatross and the poet, as both prefer to remain aloof, above the rough world of civilization. Although flight endows the poet with a unique perspective on society, the poet’s detachment, Baudelaire suggests, also makes him a social outcast.

The Sailors

The sailors in the poem symbolize bourgeois society. The sailors act in pursuit of entertainment, happy “to amuse themselves” (Line 1) without regard for the albatross they harm in the process. Their interest in nature is purely utilitarian: They “Lay hold of the albatross” as if the living creature is an object, a common commodity (Line 2). Ripping away the bird’s autonomy, they plunder nature for their own satisfaction like greedy consumers. The sailors resent albatrosses for being “kings of the azure” (Line 6), eager to conquer and berate a superior being by bringing it down to their level. Baudelaire thus criticizes 19th century French bourgeois society for being insensitive to beauty and embracing utilitarianism.

The poem’s first word, “Often” (Line 1), describes the routine nature of the sailors’ capture of albatrosses, suggesting that their boorish pastime is common. For Baudelaire, cruelty was a pervasive aspect of French society, a part of the culture so mundane and naturalized that it went unnoticed. By making the boorish sailors symbolize a society that prided itself on refinement, Baudelaire asserts that the bourgeois are no better than coarse men who take pleasure in barbarity.

Royalty

The repetition of regal imagery is a motif that characterizes the exalted status of the albatross and the poet. Baudelaire depicts albatrosses as majestic creatures with regal qualities: “vast birds of the seas” (Line 2), “kings of the azure” with “great wings in white” (Lines 6 and 7). This choice of grandiose imagery is notable given Baudelaire’s historical context, as he published the poem in post-revolutionary France during the Second French Empire. Just as Napoleon III’s assumption of the throne harkened back to a supposed golden imperial age, so too does Baulelaire’s regal imagery recall a former age of poetic extravagance and glory: The poet speaks to his age but does not belong in it. The poet is instead the “prince of the clouds” (Line 13), above the vulgar, bourgeois world. This poetic prince suffers once “Banished to the ground,” forced to endure the “hootings” of the crowd’s derision (Line 15). The image of a dethroned king or an emperor in exile was a familiar one in post-revolutionary France, as French revolutionaries executed the last king, Louis XVI, in 1793, and Napoleon Bonaparte, France’s first emperor, was exiled to Elba in 1814. These images of deposed monarchs linger in the background of Baudelaire’s regal imagery, charging the poem with a nostalgic air of lost grandeur.