— Anonymous
Upon reading Charles Baudelaire’s “A Carcass,” I had a lot of thoughts come into my mind. He first introduces his perspective of death and uses a lot of imagery to describe the perishable beauty of a decaying body. Which brings up a question of “is the speaker a necrophiliac who is amuse of and fascinates with corpses?” in my mind. This uncomfortable feeling continues to arise as the lines continue, “— And yet you will be like this corruption, Like this horrible infection, Star of my eyes, sunlight of my being, You, my angel and my passion!” Reading these lines gave me a chill down to the spine as if a psychopath is enjoying his sensual moments with the cadaver. My first thought was “this is scary and if someone says this to me, I will definitely think he or she is a psychopath.” But then as I reread the whole poem for a few more times, I started to understand a little more about this poem. The author personifies the corpse throughout the poem and gives the death a living, which shows his perspective of life. “The sun shone on this fester, As though to cook it to a turn, And to return a hundredfold to great Nature What she had joined in one,” whenever there is death, there will also be life, one cannot detach from another. As quotes from Genesis 3:19, “for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return,” all living must die, and death leads to the continuation of life. The putrefaction of the body is horrifying only if we depict it as the dark side of life. Hence, we shall not be afraid to live, love and die. We shall live the way we are and be who we want to be. The last stanza where, “Then, O my beauty! Say to the worms who will Devour you with kisses, That I have kept the form and the divine essence Of my decomposed love!” Our body will eventually become a carrion and spiritual love can survive in the decay of death. Therefore, the speaker is portraying love as something that is not physical or materialistic, but instead, it is spiritual. The symbolism of death is to convey that no one can fight against death, but death cannot separate the feelings of love between people and true love will never compromise to the death. Now I started to understand why the author wrote this poem to his love by contrasting corpse with love. This poem is romantic if the reader understands the poem deeply. Death will not change my love for you, I love you because of your appearance and values but I’m more attracted to your inner qualities, such as your soul and spirit. Unfortunately, I think this kind of eternal love is too idealistic and hard to achieve. Even though I believe that it can be real, the probability of its occurrence is low. This poem reminds us of the depressing reality of life and death, and also tells us the underlying beauty of humanity.
