Something to Smile About Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Something to Smile About - Essay Example Further, the changes in temperature of the foods and water we usually intake affect the colors of our teeth. Aging and other internal activities such too much fluoride may also stain the teeth ("Something to Smile About". Metro. July 2005. Volume 15 (6). pp 86). However, this teeth discoloration issue can easily be solved through various methods. At home bleaching such as the use of specially prepared toothpastes can be an alternative. Laser tooth whitening is another option for those who would want a shorter process, because this would only entail a one to two-hour session. The topic is again very simple yet a very helpful tip for its readers. I know for a fact that teeth discoloration has been a pertinent problem of most people now a days, especially because beauty and physical appearance now matters a lot. I also liked the simplicity of its presentation. Just the smile of a person having perfect teeth is enough to connote what is inside the story. It does not need further graphics nor pictures because those can only look the page a bit messy. What seemed a bit awkward to me was the mentioning of Colgate's Simply White product. It looked like it was just advertising the product and not giving tips to the readers. May be this could be minimized if Colgate's product was shown in a not too "hard sell" way. A small picture of its product on just one small corner of the page is enough to denote that this product is made to help people to maintain perfectly white teeth. Conclusion As for its "ethos", the magazine where it was published or advertised maintains a good credibility standards. Metro Magazine has been in the publishing industry for several years already, and so far, everything that is published or written in the every issue of this magazine are found to be of good value. Every reader who will be reading this material will surely not have any second thoughts on believing what has been claimed in the advertisement. With regards to the "pathos" aspect, the magazine advertisement is very objective. It has directly 'attack' the emotions of the readers, particularly the feeling of 'vanity'. I personally believe that each and every person desires to look good so as to feel good. The advertisement has made use of this idea. More so, it has created a tremendous impact to all the reader's minds that white teeth can indeed make one look beautiful and of course neat. Needless to say, this ad has attacked the mind and the hearts of all readers. It has enlightened the minds of the people on how one can maintain a pearly white teeth, while providing the hearts an avenue to aspire for additional beautiful attribute. With regards to the third aspect which is the "logos", this ad has provided logical proofs of what to do best with discolored teeth. It has given several alternatives or methods on cleaning one's teeth so as to remove stains and other matters that make it looks dirty. These things alone make this ad credible. on the first

Five causes for the public not to trust government, and five causes Coursework

Five causes for the public not to trust government, and five causes for the public to trust government - Coursework Example (Nye Jr., 1997) These are indeed pretty much required because the public views the government as its ultimate savior at the end of the day and if the government misses out on this tangent, then the public has only the government to blame and no one else. The third cause for the public not to trust the government is the way in which government officials run away from the people after they have been elected to their respective offices. This creates a sense of insecurity within the people and they start disrespecting law since they are being continuously treated the wrong way by the government. The fourth cause is the way the government changes its stance every now and so often when it comes to the general and important policies which are drafted by the government on a consistent basis. This is a very pivotal aspect of the debate since these policies indeed pave the way for the future lives of the public. The fifth and last cause includes the government giving up on the service aspect o f the public. This usually happens when the government loses the plot and goes into doubling its own assets and forgets the general public. (Diiulio Jr., 1994) There are also moments when the public trusts the government and this is indeed an aspect which could be seen in the positive aspects under the relationship between the two. First cause includes the way when the government meets the expectations of the public as well as exceeds the very same time and again. This is appreciated by the public and is looked up with a sense of pride and confidence by the people. The second cause of the public trusting the government is when the government takes care of the most basic utilities that are related with the people. This is a very positive aspect and one that needs high praise for the government. The third cause for the public to trust the government is when there are rescue and relief operations carried out on a quick basis by the

A Memetic Algorithm for Multi Level Redundancy Allocation

A Memetic Algorithm for Multi Level Redundancy Allocation Abstract Reliability Redundancy allocation problem determines the component reliability and redundancy level for each subsystem in order to improve the system reliability. Redundancy allocation problem is NP-hard problem and hence various Heuristic and meta-heuristic approaches are being applied.[1] This paper proposes a memetic algorithm to solve the RAP problem. Although the real engineering experience deals with multi-level systems, in this paper prior assumptions are made such that the algorithm has been applied to single level systems. This proposed MA is then compared against the HGA of a two multi-level systems and the proposed MA has outperformed the HGA of two multi-level system. INTRODUCTION of Articles In this article, a new Memetic algorithm has been proposed to solve the Redundancy Allocation Problem which has attained great attention in recent years. Prior assumptions has been made in order to investigate the Multi-Level Redundancy Allocation problem and the three important assumptions are: If a unit is not at its lowest level then its child units are assumed to be serial and they are fixed. The second assumption is that the redundancy can be allocated to the units at any level and the final assumption is that the quality of each component is predefined and the cost and the reliability are calculated based on child units if and only if the unit is not a component. From the various literature review which has been carried out, it is found that there are few approaches to MLRAP and these are rarely being investigated. Genetic Algorithm and the modified Genetic Algorithm which is the Hierarchical Genetic Algorithm is although considered to be the significant approach for MLRAP, the effectiveness of these approaches can be improved. Thus for the improvement in these approaches, the new Memetic Algorithm has been proposed in this article. Memetic algorithm is a population based eta-heuristic search method which uses the combination of global search engines along with the local search heuristics. According to the article MA is more successful than the GA because of two key issues. One is the appropriate balance between the global and local search engines and the other is the cost effectiveness. In this article two new genetic operators and a new problem specific local search operator are incorporated in the MA framework and a new MA has been proposed for approaching the MLRAP. In this article, the parts of a multi-level serial system has been defined hierarchically at the topmost level and the sub system has been defined at the lower level and the components in the lowest level. As per the assumption made previously, there is fixed number of child units for each unit except a component. The redundancy allocation procedure always starts from the system level and moves to the component level for a multi-level serial system. The reliability of the multi-level serial system can be calculated using, While the reliability of the units at the lower level can be calculated on the basis of the components using, Also the cost for the multi-level serial system is calculated using, When applying the Conventional GA for solving MLRAP, the decision variables becomes in fixed number during problem solving. Whereas in MLRAP problem solving the decision variable changes due to the change in redundancy allocation to a unit. Hence to overcome this problem, a hierarchical structure has been proposed in the article which is capable of changing the decision variables. Nomenclature Explanation of the work presented in journal articles The proposed MA in the article has two types of operators which consists of the genetic operator for global explorations and the local search operator for exploitation. This section explains the articles you reviewed. In the proposed model, the quality of the solutions should be evaluated and from the literature the author of the article has pointed out many techniques to measure the quality of the solution out of which a penalty function which has been proposed by Gen and Cheng has been used to derive the fitness function to evaluate the quality of the solution during the search process. This fitness function is given by, ÃŽÂ ¨(x) is the penalty function which measures the extent of the solution violating the constraints. The initialization of the MA is generally done at the system level and it starts from generating the random population of solutions. For a system of multi-level series, K integer is generated randomly for n child unit n X k redundancy units have to be generated at the second level and goes on until an individual is obtained. Of the two proposed genetic operators, before being applied the hierarchical representation need to be selected. And hence the solution highly depends on type of the hierarchical representation being selected. Then the two genetic operators will be applied to the iteration and both the operator treat the unit or the system at the same level. Of the two genetic operators, the crossover between two individuals occurs in three steps. Initially an intermediate is selected from the system and component level and the higher level is being assigned higher probability. Finally the selected levels exchange their lower structures to give two new individuals. Whereas the mutation also occurs in three steps but is applied to individual level. The first two steps remains the same as the crossover and the third step is replacing the redundancy of the selected unit by a randomly generated integer. Also when changing the redundancy corresponding decision variable o the parent unit should also be updated. The other operator of the proposed MA is the local search operator. In the new MA proposed in the article, local search operator is implemented in three steps. The population solution are evaluated through the metric which is given by, Then a single individual is chosen from the population solution. The local search is carried out based on it. Then the individual with the higher metric is selected for local search. For an MLRAP, it is desired to have an optimal system for a higher reliability and the reliability to cost ratio serves as a measure to determine the potential of the individual solution. The local search operator randomly selects ten pairs of components and for each pair the redundancy of the components are modified and during this search newly generated individual will be stored in the archive if and only if it donot violate the cost constraint. Finally, the preserved inividual will be mixed with the population solution and arranged descendingly and the top most individuals will be used discarding others. Discussion of Contributions Two systems has been taken into consideration. One system with three levels and the other system with four levels. With this systems into consideration, the performance of the proposed MA is to be evaluated and compared with the performance of conventional HGA. Since there are a number of control parameters in both HGA and the proposed MA, there are some values which are to be preset before beginning the experiment. For fair process, the values which has been set for HGA is used as same for the proposed MA for problem A. In this experiment the aim is to study the convergence behavior of the proposed MA in order to compare it with HGA. The best solution obtained in each generation is recorded and the corresponding system reliability is calculated. It is seen that both the methods converged fast whereas the convergence of the proposed MA is significantly better than the convergence of the HGA which is shown in Fig 1. Fig:1 Comparison of convergence between HGA and MA for Problem A.[1] Furthermore the comparisons has been carried by varying the numerous cost constraints. 20 cost constraint values are varied between the intervals 150 to 340 leaving the system parameters unchanged. For every constraint values, MA and HGA were applied 10 times to each cost constraint. The observations are made for each and every run and the reliability and the cost constraints are calculated and compared between MA and HGA. From the calculative comparison, it is evident that the proposed new MA has outperformed the conventional HGA for problem A that is the system with three levels. The same kind of experiment is carried out for problem B to examine whether the advantage of MA holds a variety of system parameters. Similar to the problem A, ten test instances are obtained and the MA and HGA are applied to each instances for ten times. The convergence of MA is significantly better than the convergence of HGA which is shown below. Fig:2 Convergence of MA and HGA for problem 2[1] Since the same kind of experiment was done on problem B, the results were also quite the same. The proposed MA has outperformed the conventional HGA. Discussion of Dificiency and Potential Improvements The article being reviewed here discusses only about the multi-level serial system and the experimentation has been done considering this system alone. Changing the condition and the structure of the system changes the reliability and the cost function of the corresponding solution changes. Also the proposed MA gives significant reliability for the multi-level serial system, the proposed MA should also be extended to multi-level serial systems of complex structures. Also the problems which is being formulated in the article are single objective or are of only one goal of increasing the reliability of the system by having the cost reduction as only one constraint. Instead, in the future research, the problems can be formulated with multiple objective and multiple constraint along with the cost constraint. This type of approach with multiple objective problems will yield multiple solutions which has trade-off between the system reliability and cost constraint. Summary The RAP which has attained a global attention among the researchers motivating them to find the solution for the RAP. Though many algorithms, techniques and approaches have been proposed by many researchers around the world, there is something which can be improved in each and every approach proposed by researchers to solve the MLRAP. In this article, the author has given a detailed approach on how does a reliability problem works and formulated in a way that the problem deals with the multi-level serial system of simple structure. Upon formulating a problem, the author tries to make proper assumptions to advocate the formulated problem. Then the author just solves it with the conventional GA approach which yields a good system reliability. Then the problem is again solved with the new method. This new method is being proposed by the author is the novel Memetic Algorithm where some preconditioning is being done to the solution that is being selected form the population solution. The solution is checked for the quality by using a fitness function. Now the population solution will be initialized and the two search operators of the MA is applied to the selected and preserved solution from the population samples of solution. The solutions which are being obtained from the search operators are then being combined with the population and the best among them is selected. The process is repeated for various generations and the best individual will be selected as the solution for the MLRAP. Then the approaches are compared and it is found that the proposed MA has outperformed the conventional HGA irrespective of the type of multi-level serial system of same structure. Acknowledgments I would like to thank Dr. Wang,   fellow, IEEE, and Dr. Tang, fellow, IEEE and Dr. Yao, fellow, IEEE for their research study that was done by them to prepare the article, which helped me to understand the concept behind the RAP and MLRAP and the techniques used to solve or approach MLRAP. I would also like to express my Thanks to Dr. Pingfeng Wang, Graduate Coordinator in Wichita State University for his valuable advice which guided me through this project and helped me to complete this review successfully. References [1] Wang, Z., Tang, K., Yao, X. (2010). A memetic algorithm for multi-level redundancy allocation. IEEE Transactions on reliability, 59(4), 754-765. [2]  Ãƒâ€šÃ‚  Ãƒâ€šÃ‚   Sharifi, M., Cheragh, G., Maljaii, K. D., Zaretalab, A., Daei, A. V. F., Vahid, A. (2015). RELIABILITY OPTIMIZATION OF A SERIES-PARALLEL K-OUT-OF-N SYSTEM WITH FAILURE RATE DEPENDS ON WORKING COMPONENTS OF SYSTEM. International Journal of Industrial Engineering, 22(4), 438-453.

General George Smith Patton Essay -- Papers

General George Smith Patton A burning desire to go forth and reach personal conquests exists inside every man. This passion often navigates the would-be hero into a state of tragedy involving pain and suffering for those around. One individual, in particular, inflicted strain and duress on others with a harsh, and often criticized unorthodox style of leading when he took his campaign across Europe and into Germany. General George Smith Patton, Jr. led an expedition across a continent to rid the world of its Nazi powers. This journey marked the conquest of perhaps the world's greatest war general and his reputable demeanor. Patton experienced respect and admiration throughout his life, starting very early when he was just an infant. He was born into a highly respected and extremely wealthy family in San Gabriel, California. It was this early taste of good fortune that allowed Patton to develop a taste for fine things such as horses. Growing up he was an avid polo player and became very good especially in college. After attending exquisite private schools, Patton left and attended the U.S. Military Academy and graduated in 1909. (WB 140) After his graduation, Patton joined the cavalry and eventually served in World War I. Patton was an excellent physical specimen and a strong addition to any early fighting battalion. Along to go with his sleek build was a strong mentality of perseverance and excellence, which he drilled into his life everyday. "From his earliest years, he believed himself destined to be a soldier. Much of his life was spent in the limelight. As a young cavalry officer and well-rounded athlete, he competed in five events during the 1912 Olympic games held in Stockholm, Sweden. He placed ... ... Essame, H. Patton: A Study in Command. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1974. Farago, Ladislas. The Last Days of Patton. New York: McGraw Hill Book Company. 1981. Mysak, Joe. "Patton: The Man Behind the Legend 1885-1945." National Review. 38 (April 25, 1994): 52-53. "An Educated Army." Africe News Service. 11 Feb. 2000: 179. Patton. Dir. Franklin J. Schaffner. 20th Century Fox, 1970. New Line Home Video, 1985. "Patton." Encyclopedia of World Biography. Second Edition. 12. Orozco-Radisson. Cole. Detroit. 1998. "Patton's Plan for Winning the War." Newsweek. 8 Mar. 1999: 48. "General George S. Patton, Jr. Biography." 2000 WriteForCash.com. http://www.allsands.com/generalgeorgep_ra_gn.htm. "George Smith Patton, Jr." GSP. 1 Jun. 1998. http://www.angelfire.com/sys/popup_source.shtml.

Racism Against Native Americans and African Americans Essay

Racism against Native Americans and African Americans Sometimes I imagine that racial diversity would be a boon to human kind if there was no such thing called â€Å"racial hatred†. Now if you tell me that if there was only one kind of race then I will tell you that if all roses were red then what you would have given for a funeral? My point is that diversity is what makes this world keep going amusingly and these notions of race and ethnicities as big and small, upper class and lower class, superior and inferior are just mere perspectives. In my opinion there is only one kind of race and that is â€Å"Human Kind† and we all are doing these buzzes because we lack unity in diversity. There are no race-specific DNA traits which demonstrate my view that racism is social but not biological. From the Roman Empire to today’s ultra modern age, from Hitler to Osama Bin Laden, and from Thomas Jefferson to Rev. Jeremiah Wright; people never forget to show this acquired sense of racism. Why I called it acquired? Because a white man is not born to hate black or a black man is not born to hate white. But we are the mere appointee of this prejudiced perspective we have been taught by our family, neighborhood, and society for years and years. Society has never been able to get away from this prejudice but we pretend like we don’t care about it calling ourselves trans-racial society but I doubt the truthfulness of our intention. Why? Because the ghosts of our bitter experience of racism either towards Native Americans or towards African Americans keep on haunting us with the events like one in Rosebud and Pine Ridge counties in South Dakota or even worse event like â€Å"Jena 6† in Louisiana. It looks like this thing will go on and on unless the elimination of social prejudice to â€Å"judge people by color but not the content of character† they have as MLK used to say. But I have to be optimistic that we have been able to institutionalize this racial discrimination by creating Civil Rights Act which prohibits the discriminatory treatment in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. You have posed a very important question in the lecture that- How is that so much discrimination exists, when there are laws to protect it? The Jena 6† incident answers this query because a person who is obliged to protect the juveniles start treating them on the basis of their skin color clearly demonstrates that the laws are very weak and vague to protect one as a free citizen. I think that race is not a problem here but racism is the problem. When we use the terms race and color why it does directly applies to blacks and browns which makes me think that whites are the â€Å"status quo† of all races. As you have mentioned in the lecture that the history of the Native Americans often gets overlooked is true because the act of ethnic cleansing by the white European settlers was kind of victory to them but I actually consider it an inhumane act. And the act of Americanizing the Native Americans is an invasion of culture and norms which is the true color of a colonist. The racist images and stereotypes by the European Americans against the Native Americans as explained by the authors in chapter 6 clearly proves the â€Å"Dominant Rules† slogan. Recently, the whole world seemed obsessed talking about president Obama. Why? Because he gained astonishing success in his short political career or he is a very skilled orator or he is a very intelligent man who was also the president of prestigious Harvard Law Review. I think these are superficial reasons but the real reason is that he is the first black president in the history of United States. Anybody who runs for president should be a good orator, intelligent, and smart but Obama gained much more buzz than usual because he broke the â€Å"status-quo† as I have mentioned earlier. The black neighborhoods are generally considered poor and the white neighborhoods rich. These patters of thinking have the general consequence of institutionalizing racism in terms of poverty. The stereotype that young black men are criminals and drug abusers has further ghettoized the African- American community and has destroyed any possibility for normal family and community relations. As a result it has contributed in the disruption of the family, prevalence of more single parents, children raised without a father in the ghetto. Inability of these people to get jobs has further complicated the living standard of the people. If you are from the Boston area, it’s no surprise that there are more shootings and stabbings in Dorchester and Roxbury than Newton and Beacon Hill. So, it sends a wrong message that young black men are violent and hostile. The place where I was born and raised never had racial problem but immense ethnic and caste problem. The south Asian countries are in great turmoil of caste exploitation and ethnic exploitation which I think is new to most Americans. So, it’s very interesting for me to draw the comparisons in between racial and ethnic exploitation in terms of power. Usually, the higher castes dominate the lower castes and virtually enslave them for their benefits. The lower castes are regarded â€Å"Untouchables† which I think is an evil and the ugliest form of humanity. In case of race, I think discrimination and privilege portrays the power. At the individual level someone who is an advantaged member of a disadvantaged group could discriminate against someone less privileged than him/her or against someone with less power from a privileged group and at the institutional level that cannot happen because it is the groups in power who do the discrimination.

Charles Baudelaire

Born in Paris in 1821, Charles Baudelaire has long been recognized as not only one of the greatest poets of the nineteenth century but also a forefather of modern art. Baudelaire lived during a tumultuous time in French history and his work was impacted by a number of political events. However, his personal life was also turbulent: One of the most scarring episodes of his life was the death of his father in 1827 and his mother's hasty remarriage to a general in the French army. Baudelaire detested his stepfather both personally and as a symbol of the corrupt July monarchy established following the 1830 Revolution.He went to great lengths to upset his stepfather, squandering his inheritance and living a bohemian lifestyle. Worried about his behavior, his family sent him on a trip across the Mediterranean, whose exotic beauty left a lasting impression on the young poet. Shortly after Baudelaire's return to Paris, the 1848 Revolution overthrew the July monarch and established a republic in France for the first time in more than fifty years. Baudelaire greeted the revolution with enthusiasm, fighting among the barricades and openly defying his stepfather in public.However, his joy soon turned to disenchantment when Louis Napoleon, the original Napoleon's nephew, overthrew the Second Republic in 1851. Louis Napoleon's coup d'etat instituted the Second Empire, ending the hopes for a republican form of government that men like Baudelaire favored. His disenchantment then turned to despair when Louis Napoleon began an intense rebuilding and public works project aimed at modernizing Paris. Baudelaire was horrified with the destruction of the ancient and medieval sections of Paris that he had called his home. His longing for the â€Å"old† Paris would play a major role in his poetry.Baudelaire's disgust with politics led to a rejection of reality in favor of an obsessive fantasy world inspired by drugs, the exotic beauty of the Mediterranean, and the search for lov e. He was strongly influenced in this regard not only by his experiences along the Mediterranean but also by Edgar Allen Poe, whose writings he translated into French. Baudelaire was fascinated by Poe's evocation of the dark side of the imagination, and he found a comparably sinister seductiveness in the paintings of Eugene Delacroix and Edouard Manet, as well as the music of Wagner. These themes and influences play a redominant role in Baudelaire's 1857 collection of poetry, The Flowers of Evil, which juxtaposed the negative themes of exile, decay, and death with an ideal universe of happiness. Baudelaire's exotic themes quickly caught the attention of the government, which condemned The Flowers of Evil for immorality. Unlike his friend, Gustave Flaubert, whose Madame Bovary was also put on trial, Baudelaire lost his case, had to pay a fine, and was forced to remove some poems from the collection. Baudelaire was devastated by this rejection of his work, which he attributed to the h ypocrisy of a bourgeoisie incapable of understanding artistic innovation.Yet at the same time, he saw the condemnation of his work as the culmination of the different themes and events that had shaped his artistic talent since his youth: no achievement of beauty could be unaccompanied by bitterness and disappointments. Indeed, with this philosophy, Baudelaire shifted the attention of the art world to the darker side of life, inspiring contemporary and future artists to new levels of perception and provocation. Analysis A confession of hopes, dreams, failures, and sins, The Flowers of Evil attempts to extract beauty from the malignant.Unlike traditional poetry that relied on the serene beauty of the natural world to convey emotions, Baudelaire felt that modern poetry must evoke the artificial and paradoxical aspects of life. He thought that beauty could evolve on its own, irrespective of nature and even fueled by sin. The result is a clear opposition between two worlds, â€Å"spleen † and the â€Å"ideal. † Spleen signifies everything that is wrong with the world: death, despair, solitude, murder, and disease. (The spleen, an organ that removes disease-causing agents from the bloodstream, was traditionally associated with malaise; â€Å"spleen† is a synonym for â€Å"ill-temper. ) In contrast, the ideal represents a transcendence over the harsh reality of spleen, where love is possible and the senses are united in ecstasy. The ideal is primarily an escape of reality through wine, opium, travel, and passion. Dulling the harsh impact of one's failure and regrets, the ideal is an imagined state of happiness, ecstasy, and voluptuousness where time and death have no place. Baudelaire often uses erotic imagery to convey the impassioned feeling of the ideal. However, the speaker is consistently disappointed as spleen again takes up its reign. Read also Edgar Allan Poe DrugsHe is endlessly confronted with the fear of death, the failure of his will, and the suffocation of his spirit. Yet even as the poem's speaker is thwarted by spleen, Baudelaire himself never desists in his attempt to make the bizarre beautiful, an attempt perfectly expressed by the juxtaposition of his two worlds. As in the poem â€Å"Carrion,† the decomposing flesh has not only artistic value but inspires the poet to render it beautifully. Women are Baudelaire's main source of symbolism, often serving as an intermediary between the ideal and spleen.Thus, while the speaker must run his hands through a woman's hair in order to conjure up his ideal world, he later compares his lover to a decomposing animal, reminding her that one day she will be kissing worms instead of him. His lover is both his muse, providing ephemeral perfection, and a curse, condemning him to unrequited love and an early death. Women, thus, embody both what Baudelaire called th e elevation toward God and what he referred to as the gradual descent toward Satan: They are luminous guides of his imagination but also monstrous vampires that intensify his sense of spleen, or ill temper.The result is a moderate misogyny: Baudelaire associates women with nature; thus, his attempt to capture the poetry of the artificial necessarily denied women a positive role in his artistic vision. Baudelaire's poetry also obsessively evokes the presence of death. In â€Å"To a Passerby,† a possible love interest turns out to be a menacing death. Female demons, vampires, and monsters also consistently remind the speaker of his mortality. However, the passing of time, especially in the form of a newly remodeled Paris, isolates the speaker and makes him feel alienated from society.This theme of alienation leaves the speaker alone to the horrific contemplation of himself and the hopes of a consoling death. Baudelaire further emphasizes the proximity of death through his relia nce on religious imagery and fantasy. He earnestly believes that Satan controls his everyday actions, making sin a depressing reminder of his lack of free will and eventual death. Finally, elements of fantastical horror–from ghosts to bats to black cats– amplify the destructive force of the spleen on the mind.Baudelaire was inspired by Edgar Allen Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination, and he saw Poe's use of fantasy as a way of emphasizing the mystery and tragedy of human existence. For example, Baudelaire's three different poems about black cats express what he saw as the taunting ambiguity of women. Moreover, the presence of tortured demons and phantoms make the possibility of death more immediate to the speaker, prefiguring the fear and isolation death will bring. Summary Baudelaire famously begins The Flowers of Evil by personally addressing his reader as a partner in the creation of his poetry: â€Å"Hypocrite reader–my likeness–my brother! In â⠂¬Å"To the Reader,† the speaker evokes a world filled with decay, sin, and hypocrisy, and dominated by Satan. He claims that it is the Devil and not God who controls our actions with puppet strings, â€Å"vaporizing† our free will. Instinctively drawn toward hell, humans are nothing but instruments of death, â€Å"more ugly, evil, and fouler† than any monster or demon. The speaker claims that he and the reader complete this image of humanity: One side of humanity (the reader) reaches for fantasy and false honesty, while the other (the speaker) exposes the boredom of modern life.The speaker continues to rely on contradictions between beauty and unsightliness in â€Å"The Albatross. † This poem relates how sailors enjoy trapping and mocking giant albatrosses that are too weak to escape. Calling these birds â€Å"captive kings,† the speaker marvels at their ugly awkwardness on land compared to their graceful command of the skies. Just as in the introdu ctory poem, the speaker compares himself to the fallen image of the albatross, observing that poets are likewise exiled and ridiculed on earth. The beauty they have seen in the sky makes no sense to the teasing crowd: â€Å"Their giant wings keep them from walking. Many other poems also address the role of the poet. In â€Å"Benediction,† he says: â€Å"I know that You hold a place for the Poet / In the ranks of the blessed and the saint's legions, / That You invite him to an eternal festival / Of thrones, of virtues, of dominations. † This divine power is also a dominant theme in â€Å"Elevation,† in which the speaker's godlike ascendancy to the heavens is compared to the poet's omniscient and paradoxical power to understand the silence of flowers and mutes. His privileged position to savor the secrets of the world allows him to create and define beauty.In conveying the â€Å"power of the poet,† the speaker relies on the language of the mythically subli me and on spiritual exoticism. The godlike aviation of the speaker's spirit in â€Å"Elevation† becomes the artistry of Apollo and the fertility of Sybille in â€Å"I love the Naked Ages. † He then travels back in time, rejecting reality and the material world, and conjuring up the spirits of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Hercules in â€Å"The Beacons. † The power of the poet allows the speaker to invoke sensations from the reader that correspond to the works of each artistic figure.Thus, he uses this power–his imagination– to create beacons that, like â€Å"divine opium,† illuminate a mythical world that mortals, â€Å"lost in the wide woods,† cannot usually see. After first evoking the accomplishments of great artists, the speaker proposes a voyage to a mythical world of his own creation. He first summons up â€Å"Languorous Asia and passionate Africa† in the poem â€Å"The Head of Hair. † Running his fingers through a woman's hair allows the speaker to create and travel to an exotic land of freedom and happiness.In â€Å"Exotic Perfume,† a woman's scent allows the speaker to evoke â€Å"A lazy island where nature produces / Singular tress and savory fruits. † The image of the perfect woman is then an intermediary to an ideal world in â€Å"Invitation to a Voyage,† where â€Å"scents of amber† and â€Å"oriental splendor† capture the speaker's imagination. Together with his female companion, the speaker expresses the power of the poet to create an idyllic setting just for them: â€Å"There, all is nothing but beauty and elegance, / Luxury, calm and voluptuousness. † FormBaudelaire was a classically trained poet and as a result, his poems follow traditional poetic structures and rhyme schemes (ABAB or AABB). Yet Baudelaire also wanted to provoke his contemporary readers, breaking with traditional style when it would best suit his poetry's overall effect. For example, in â€Å"Exotic Perfume,† he contrasted traditional meter (which contains a break after every fifth syllable in a ten-syllable line) with enjambment in the first quatrain. The result is an amplified image of light: Baudelaire evokes the ecstasy of this image by juxtaposing it with he calm regularity of the rhythm in the beginning of the poem. Other departures from tradition include Baudelaire's habit of conveying ecstasy with exclamation points, and of expressing the accessibility of happiness with the indicative present and future verb tenses, both of which function to enhance his poetry's expressive tone. Moreover, none of his innovations came at the cost of formal beauty: Baudelaire's poetry has often been described as the most musical and melodious poetry in the French language. Commentary The Flowers of Evil evokes a world of paradox already implicit in the contrast of the title.The word â€Å"evil† (the French word is â€Å"mal,â₠¬  meaning both evil and sickness) comes to signify the pain and misery inflicted on the speaker, which he responds to with melancholy, anxiety, and a fear of death. But for Baudelaire, there is also something seductive about evil. Thus, while writing The Flowers of Evil, Baudelaire often said that his intent was to extract beauty from evil. Unlike traditional poets who had only focused on the simplistically pretty, Baudelaire chose to fuel his language with horror, sin, and the macabre.The speaker describes this duality in the introductory poem, in which he explains that he and the reader form two sides of the same coin. Together, they play out what Baudelaire called the tragedy of man's â€Å"twoness. † He saw existence itself as paradoxical, each man feeling two simultaneous inclinations: one toward the grace and elevation of God, the other an animalistic descent toward Satan. Just like the physical beauty of flowers intertwined with the abstract threat of evil, Baudelair e felt that one extreme could not exist without the other.Baudelaire struggled with his Catholicism his whole life and, thus, made religion a prevalent theme in his poetry. His language is steeped in biblical imagery, from the wrath of Satan, to the crucifixion, to the Fall of Adam and Eve. He was obsessed with Original Sin, lamenting the loss of his free will and projecting his sense of guilt onto images of women. Yet in the first part of the â€Å"Spleen and Ideal† section, Baudelaire emphasizes the harmony and perfection of an ideal world through his special closeness to God: He first compares himself to a divine and martyred creature in â€Å"TheAlbatross† and then gives himself divine powers in â€Å"Elevation,† combining words like â€Å"infinity,† â€Å"immensity,† â€Å"divine,† and â€Å"hover. † The speaker also has an extraordinary power to create, weaving together abstract paradises with powerful human experiences to form an ideal world. For example, in â€Å"Correspondences,† the speaker evokes â€Å"amber, musk, benzoin and incense / That sing, transporting the soul and sense. † He not only has the power to give voice to things that are silent but also relies on images of warmth, luxury, and pleasure to call upon and empower the reader's senses.In â€Å"Exotic Perfume,† the theme of the voyage is made possible by closing one's eyes and â€Å"breathing in the warm scent† of a woman's breasts. In effect, reading Baudelaire means feeling Baudelaire: The profusion of pleasure-inducing representations of heat, sound, and scent suggest that happiness involves a joining of the senses. This first section is devoted exclusively to the â€Å"ideal,† and Baudelaire relies on the abstraction of myth to convey the escape from reality and drift into nostalgia that the ideal represents. This theme recalls the poet's own flight from the corruption of Paris with his trip along the Mediterranean.In â€Å"The Head of Hair,† the speaker indeterminately refers to â€Å"Languorous Africa and passionate Asia,† whose abstract presence further stimulates the reader's imagination with the mythical symbolism of â€Å"sea,† â€Å"ocean,† â€Å"sky,† and â€Å"oasis. † The figure of women further contributes to this ideal world as an intermediary to happiness. The speaker must either breathe in a woman's scent, caress her hair, or otherwise engage with her presence in order to conjure up the paradise he seeks. His fervent ecstasy in this poem derives from the sensual presence of his lover: â€Å"The world†¦ o my love! wims on your fragrance. † Spleen and Ideal, Part I Summary Baudelaire famously begins The Flowers of Evil by personally addressing his reader as a partner in the creation of his poetry: â€Å"Hypocrite reader–my likeness–my brother! † In â€Å"To the Reader,† the speaker evok es a world filled with decay, sin, and hypocrisy, and dominated by Satan. He claims that it is the Devil and not God who controls our actions with puppet strings, â€Å"vaporizing† our free will. Instinctively drawn toward hell, humans are nothing but instruments of death, â€Å"more ugly, evil, and fouler† than any monster or demon.The speaker claims that he and the reader complete this image of humanity: One side of humanity (the reader) reaches for fantasy and false honesty, while the other (the speaker) exposes the boredom of modern life. The speaker continues to rely on contradictions between beauty and unsightliness in â€Å"The Albatross. † This poem relates how sailors enjoy trapping and mocking giant albatrosses that are too weak to escape. Calling these birds â€Å"captive kings,† the speaker marvels at their ugly awkwardness on land compared to their graceful command of the skies.Just as in the introductory poem, the speaker compares himself to the fallen image of the albatross, observing that poets are likewise exiled and ridiculed on earth. The beauty they have seen in the sky makes no sense to the teasing crowd: â€Å"Their giant wings keep them from walking. † Many other poems also address the role of the poet. In â€Å"Benediction,† he says: â€Å"I know that You hold a place for the Poet / In the ranks of the blessed and the saint's legions, / That You invite him to an eternal festival / Of thrones, of virtues, of dominations. This divine power is also a dominant theme in â€Å"Elevation,† in which the speaker's godlike ascendancy to the heavens is compared to the poet's omniscient and paradoxical power to understand the silence of flowers and mutes. His privileged position to savor the secrets of the world allows him to create and define beauty. In conveying the â€Å"power of the poet,† the speaker relies on the language of the mythically sublime and on spiritual exoticism. The godlike aviation of the speaker's spirit in â€Å"Elevation† becomes the artistry of Apollo and the fertility of Sybille in â€Å"I love the Naked Ages. He then travels back in time, rejecting reality and the material world, and conjuring up the spirits of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Hercules in â€Å"The Beacons. † The power of the poet allows the speaker to invoke sensations from the reader that correspond to the works of each artistic figure. Thus, he uses this power–his imagination– to create beacons that, like â€Å"divine opium,† illuminate a mythical world that mortals, â€Å"lost in the wide woods,† cannot usually see. After first evoking the accomplishments of great artists, the speaker proposes a voyage to a mythical world of his own creation.He first summons up â€Å"Languorous Asia and passionate Africa† in the poem â€Å"The Head of Hair. † Running his fingers through a woman's hair allows the speaker to create and travel to an exotic land of freedom and happiness. In â€Å"Exotic Perfume,† a woman's scent allows the speaker to evoke â€Å"A lazy island where nature produces / Singular tress and savory fruits. † The image of the perfect woman is then an intermediary to an ideal world in â€Å"Invitation to a Voyage,† where â€Å"scents of amber† and â€Å"oriental splendor† capture the speaker's imagination.Together with his female companion, the speaker expresses the power of the poet to create an idyllic setting just for them: â€Å"There, all is nothing but beauty and elegance, / Luxury, calm and voluptuousness. † Form Baudelaire was a classically trained poet and as a result, his poems follow traditional poetic structures and rhyme schemes (ABAB or AABB). Yet Baudelaire also wanted to provoke his contemporary readers, breaking with traditional style when it would best suit his poetry's overall effect.For example, in â€Å"Exotic Per fume,† he contrasted traditional meter (which contains a break after every fifth syllable in a ten-syllable line) with enjambment in the first quatrain. The result is an amplified image of light: Baudelaire evokes the ecstasy of this image by juxtaposing it with the calm regularity of the rhythm in the beginning of the poem. Other departures from tradition include Baudelaire's habit of conveying ecstasy with exclamation points, and of expressing the accessibility of happiness with the indicative present and future verb tenses, both of which function to enhance his poetry's expressive tone.Moreover, none of his innovations came at the cost of formal beauty: Baudelaire's poetry has often been described as the most musical and melodious poetry in the French language. Commentary The Flowers of Evil evokes a world of paradox already implicit in the contrast of the title. The word â€Å"evil† (the French word is â€Å"mal,† meaning both evil and sickness) comes to sign ify the pain and misery inflicted on the speaker, which he responds to with melancholy, anxiety, and a fear of death.But for Baudelaire, there is also something seductive about evil. Thus, while writing The Flowers of Evil, Baudelaire often said that his intent was to extract beauty from evil. Unlike traditional poets who had only focused on the simplistically pretty, Baudelaire chose to fuel his language with horror, sin, and the macabre. The speaker describes this duality in the introductory poem, in which he explains that he and the reader form two sides of the same coin. Together, they play out what Baudelaire called the tragedy of man's â€Å"twoness. He saw existence itself as paradoxical, each man feeling two simultaneous inclinations: one toward the grace and elevation of God, the other an animalistic descent toward Satan. Just like the physical beauty of flowers intertwined with the abstract threat of evil, Baudelaire felt that one extreme could not exist without the other . Baudelaire struggled with his Catholicism his whole life and, thus, made religion a prevalent theme in his poetry. His language is steeped in biblical imagery, from the wrath of Satan, to the crucifixion, to the Fall of Adam and Eve.He was obsessed with Original Sin, lamenting the loss of his free will and projecting his sense of guilt onto images of women. Yet in the first part of the â€Å"Spleen and Ideal† section, Baudelaire emphasizes the harmony and perfection of an ideal world through his special closeness to God: He first compares himself to a divine and martyred creature in â€Å"The Albatross† and then gives himself divine powers in â€Å"Elevation,† combining words like â€Å"infinity,† â€Å"immensity,† â€Å"divine,† and â€Å"hover. † The speaker also has an extraordinary power to create, weaving together abstract paradises with powerful human experiences to form an ideal world.For example, in â€Å"Correspondences,â €  the speaker evokes â€Å"amber, musk, benzoin and incense / That sing, transporting the soul and sense. † He not only has the power to give voice to things that are silent but also relies on images of warmth, luxury, and pleasure to call upon and empower the reader's senses. In â€Å"Exotic Perfume,† the theme of the voyage is made possible by closing one's eyes and â€Å"breathing in the warm scent† of a woman's breasts. In effect, reading Baudelaire means feeling Baudelaire: The profusion of pleasure-inducing representations of heat, sound, and scent suggest that happiness involves a joining of the senses.This first section is devoted exclusively to the â€Å"ideal,† and Baudelaire relies on the abstraction of myth to convey the escape from reality and drift into nostalgia that the ideal represents. This theme recalls the poet's own flight from the corruption of Paris with his trip along the Mediterranean. In â€Å"The Head of Hair,† the sp eaker indeterminately refers to â€Å"Languorous Africa and passionate Asia,† whose abstract presence further stimulates the reader's imagination with the mythical symbolism of â€Å"sea,† â€Å"ocean,† â€Å"sky,† and â€Å"oasis. † The figure of women further contributes to this ideal world as an intermediary to happiness.The speaker must either breathe in a woman's scent, caress her hair, or otherwise engage with her presence in order to conjure up the paradise he seeks. His fervent ecstasy in this poem derives from the sensual presence of his lover: â€Å"The world†¦ o my love! swims on your fragrance. † Spleen and Ideal, Part II Summary Despite the speaker's preliminary evocation of an ideal world, The Flowers of Evil's inevitable focus is the speaker's â€Å"spleen,† a symbol of fear, agony, melancholy, moral degradation, destruction of the spirit–everything that is wrong with the world. The spleen, an organ that rem oves disease-causing agents from the bloodstream, was traditionally associated with malaise; â€Å"spleen† is a synonym for â€Å"ill-temper. â€Å") Although the soothing ideal world in the first section does remain a significant presence for the speaker, it will now serve primarily as a reminder of his need to escape from a torturous reality. Even â€Å"The Ideal† begins with â€Å"They never will do, these beautiful vignettes. † Baudelaire's juxtaposition of the poem's title (â€Å"The Ideal†) with its content suggests that the ideal is an imagined impossibility.He insists that he cannot find the ideal rose for which he has been looking, declaring that his heart is an empty hole. The comforting, pure, and soothing presence of a woman has also given way to â€Å"Lady Macbeth, mighty soul of crime. † As the speaker acknowledges in â€Å"Earlier Life,† the beautiful majesty of blue waves and voluptuous odors that fill his dreams cannot ful ly obscure â€Å"the painful secret that lets me languish. † Baudelaire uses the theme of love and passion to play out this interaction between the ideal and the spleen.In â€Å"Hymn to Beauty,† he asks a woman: â€Å"Do you come from the deep sky or from the abyss, / O Beauty? Your look, infernal and divine, / Confuses good deeds and crimes. † The speaker projects his anxiety at a disappointing reality onto a woman's body: Her beauty is real but it tempts him to sin. Both angel and siren, this woman brings him close to God but closer to Satan. He then refers to his lover as a witch and demon in â€Å"Sed non Satiata† (â€Å"Still not Satisfied†). The reality of her tortuous presence awakens him from his opium-induced dream, his desire pulling him toward hell.This ambivalence between the ideal and the spleen is also played out with the juxtaposition of the speaker's lover to a decaying corpse in â€Å"Carrion. † While out walking with his lo ver, the speaker discovers rotting carrion infested with worms and maggots, but which releases pleasing music. He compares the carrion (a word for dead and decaying flesh) to a flower, realizing that his lover will also one day be carrion, eaten by worms. Just like the corpse, nothing will be left of their â€Å"decomposed love. † The theme of death inspired by the sight of the carrion plunges the speaker into the anxiety of his spleen.The nostalgic timelessness and soothing heat of the sun are replaced by the fear of death and a sun of ice in â€Å"De Profundis Clamavi† (â€Å"From Profoundest Depths I Cry to You†). The mythical and erotic voyage with a woman in the ideal section is now phantasmagoric pursuit by cats, snakes, owls, vampires, and ghosts, all of whom closely resemble the speaker's lover. In two separate poems both entitled â€Å"The Cat,† the speaker is horrified to see the eyes of his lover in a black cat whose chilling stare, â€Å"prof ound and cold, cuts and cracks like a sword. In â€Å"The Poison,† the speaker further associates the image of his lover with death. Unlike opium and wine, which help the speaker evade reality, the evasion of his lover's mouth is the kiss of death: â€Å"But all this doesn't equal the poison kiss / Arising in your green eyes. † The section culminates with four poems entitled â€Å"Spleen. † Depressed and â€Å"irritated at the entire town,† the speaker laments the coming of death and his defunct love, as a ghost and the â€Å"meager, mangy body of a cat† evoke the haunting specter of his lover. In the next â€Å"Spleen,† the speaker watches the world around him decompose.He is swallowed up by death, comparing himself to a cemetery, a tomb, and a container for withered roses. Empty physically and spiritually, only the miasma of decay is left for him to smell. In the fourth and final â€Å"Spleen,† the speaker is suffocated by the tradi tionally calming presence of the sky. Devoid of light, â€Å"the earth becomes a damp dungeon, / When hope, like a bat, / Beats the walls with its timid wings / And bumps its head against the rotted beams. † Drenched by rain and sorrow, the bells of a nearby clock cry out, filling the air with phantoms.Horrified and weeping with misery, the speaker surrenders as, â€Å"Anguish, atrocious, despotic, / On my curved skull plants its black flag. † Form Baudelaire uses the structure of his poems to amplify the atmosphere of the speaker's spleen. In â€Å"Spleen† (I) each stanza accumulates different levels of anguish, first beginning with the city, then creatures of nature and nightmare, and finally, other objects. This layered expression of pain represents Baudelaire's attempt to apply stylistic beauty to evil. Moreover, his sentences lose the first-person tense, becoming grammatically errant just as the speaker is morally errant.By beginning the first three stanzas of â€Å"Spleen† (IV) all with the word â€Å"When,† Baudelaire formally mirrors his theme of monotonous boredom and the speaker's surrender to the inexorable regularity and longevity of his spleen. Another aspect of Baudelaire's form is his ironic juxtaposition of opposites within verses and stanzas, such as in â€Å"Carrion,† with â€Å"flower† and â€Å"stink. † Commentary Baudelaire is a poet of contrasts, amplifying the hostility of the speaker's spleen with the failure of his ideal world. Like the abused albatross in the first section, the poet becomes an anxious and suffering soul.It is important to remember that the speaker's spleen is inevitable: It occurs despite his attempts to escape reality. The flowers he hopes to find on a â€Å"lazy island† in â€Å"Exotic Perfume† do not exist: It is the stinking carrion that is the real â€Å"flower† of the world. The failure of his imagination leaves him empty and weak; havi ng searched for petals, he finds their withered versions within himself. The poetry itself suggests a resurgence of the ideal through its soothing images only to encounter the disappointing impossibility of calming the speaker's anxiety.In this sense, the speaker's spleen is also the poet's. Indeed, the gradual climax and terror of the speaker's spleen in â€Å"Spleen† (IV) has often been associated with Baudelaire's own nervous breakdown. The hostile and claustrophobic atmosphere of the speaker's world is most eloquently expressed in the failure of his ability to love. The poet originally intends his love to be a source of escape but is soon reminded of the cruel impossibility of love that characterizes his reality. For him, love is nothing but a decomposing carrion. Instead of life, love reminds him of death: A woman's kiss becomes poisonous.Baudelaire often spoke of love as the traditionally artistic attempt to escape boredom. Yet he never had a successful relationship and as a result, the speaker attributes much of his spleen to images of women, such as Lady Macbeth and Persephone. Cruel and murderous women, such as the monstrous female vampire in â€Å"The Vampire,† are compared to a â€Å"dagger† that slices the speaker's heart. But Baudelaire also finds something perversely seductive in his demoniacal images of women, such as the â€Å"Femme Fatale† in â€Å"Discordant Sky† and the â€Å"bizarre deity† in â€Å"Sed non Satiata. Baudelaire often described his disgust at images of nature and found fault in women for what he saw as their closeness to nature. However, what comes through in the poetry is not so much Baudelaire's misogyny as his avowed weakness and insatiable desire for women. The speaker's spleen involves thoughts of death, either in the form of an eventual suicide or the gradual decay of one's body. Sickness, decomposition, and claustrophobia reduce the expansive paradise of the speaker's ideal to a single city pitted against him.Baudelaire felt alienated from the new Parisian society that emerged after the city's rebuilding period, often walking along the city streets just to look at people and observe their movements. This self-imposed exile perfectly describes the sense of isolation that pervades the four â€Å"Spleen† poems. Yet while the city alienates and isolates, it does not allow for real autonomy of any kind: The speaker's imagination is haunted by images of prison, spiders, ghosts, and bats crashing into walls.Unlike the albatross of the ideal, the bat of the spleen cannot fly. This restriction of space is also a restriction of time, as the speaker feels his death quickly approaching. Baudelaire saw the reality of death as fundamentally opposed to the imagined voyage to paradise; rather, it is a journey toward an unknown and terrible fate. The â€Å"frightful groan† of bells and the â€Å"stubborn moans† of ghosts are horrific warning signs of the impending victory of the speaker's spleen. According to the poet, there are no other sounds. Parisian Landscapes SummaryBaudelaire now turns his attention directly to the city of Paris, evoking the same themes as the previous section. In â€Å"Landscape,† he evokes a living and breathing city. The speaker hears buildings and birds singing, also comparing window lamps to stars. He considers the city a timeless place, passing from season to season with ease. It is also a space of dreams and fantasy, where the speaker finds â€Å"gardens of bronze,† â€Å"blue horizons,† and â€Å"builds fairy castles† during the night. Paris becomes an enchanted city, where even a beggar is a beautiful princess.For example, the speaker admires the erotic beauty of a homeless woman in â€Å"To a Red-headed Beggar Girl,† especially her â€Å"two perfect breasts. † He does not see her rags but, rather, the gown of a queen complete with pearls formed from drop s of water. The speaker then laments the destruction of the old Paris in â€Å"The Swan. † Evoking the grieving image of Andromache, he exclaims: â€Å"My memory teems with pity / As I cross the new Carrousel / Old Paris is no more (the shape of a city /Changes more quickly, alas! than the heart of a mortal). All he sees now is the chaos of the city's rebuilding, from scaffolding to broken columns. Baudelaire then juxtaposes the pure but exiled image of a white swan with the dark, broken image of the city. The swan begs the sky for rain but gets no reply. The speaker forces himself to come to grips with the new city but cannot forget the forlorn figure of the swan as well as the fate of Andromache, who was kidnapped shortly after her husband's murder. The presence of the grieving Andromache evokes the theme of love in the city streets.But in the modern city, love is fleeting–and ultimately impossible– since lovers do not know each other anymore and can only cat ch a glimpse of each other in the streets. In â€Å"To a Passerby,† the speaker conjures up a beautiful woman and tries to express his love with one look: they make eye contact, but it is quickly broken, as they must each head their separate ways. The encounter is tragic because they both feel something (â€Å"O you who I had loved, O you who knew! â€Å") and yet they know that their next meeting will be in the afterlife; a foreboding presence of death looms over the poem's end.Baudelaire continues to expose the dark underside, or spleen, of the city. (The spleen, an organ that removes disease-causing agents from the bloodstream, was traditionally associated with malaise; â€Å"spleen† is a synonym for â€Å"ill-temper. â€Å") In â€Å"Evening Twilight,† he evokes â€Å"cruel diseases,† â€Å"demons,† â€Å"thieves,† â€Å"hospitals,† and â€Å"gambling. † The different aspects of the city are compared to wild beasts and anthills, while â€Å"Prostitution ignites in the streets. † Paris becomes a threatening circus of danger and death where no one is safe.By the end of the section, in â€Å"Morning Twilight,† â€Å"gloomy Paris† rises up to go back to work. Form It is important to note that most of the poems in this section are dedicated to Victor Hugo, who composed long epic poems about Paris. In this context, Baudelaire abandons the structure and rhythm of the previous section in order to emulate Hugo's own style. However, in â€Å"To a Passerby,† Baudelaire returns to his original form, using a traditional sonnet structure (two quatrains and two three-line stanzas).As in â€Å"Spleen and Ideal,† he emphasizes the imperfection of the speaker's spleen with imperfections in meter, isolating the words â€Å"Raising† and â€Å"Me† at the beginning of their respective lines. Commentary Baudelaire was deeply affected by the rebuilding of Paris after the r evolution of 1848. Begun by Louis-Napoleon in the 1850s, this rebuilding program widened streets into boulevards and leveled entire sections of the city. Baudelaire responded to the changing face of his beloved Paris by taking refuge in recollections of its mythic greatness but also with a sense of exile and alienation.The swan symbolizes this feeling of isolation, similar to the â€Å"Spleen† poems in which the speaker feels that the entire city is against him. The Swan asks God for rain in order to clean the streets and perhaps return Paris to its antique purity but receives no response. Suddenly, the city itself has become a symbol of death as its rapid metamorphoses remind the speaker of the ruthlessness of time's passage and his own mortality: â€Å"The shape of a city /Changes more quickly, alas! than the heart of a mortal. † The speaker sees Paris as a modern myth in progress, evoking such mythological figures as Andromache and Hector.Even the negative aspects o f city life, ranging from prostitution to gambling, are described as animals, giving Baudelaire's poetry an allegorical quality. For example, in â€Å"Evening Twilight,† the poet evokes â€Å"Dark Night,† which casts its shadow over the ants, worms, and demons, symbolizing Parisian prostitution, theater, and gambling. Together, the city, its vices, and its people form a mythical, â€Å"unhealthy atmosphere,† instructing the reader to learn his or her lesson. Yet Paris is primarily a cemetery of failed love, as described in