I have come back to this poem more often than to any other in Les Fleurs du Mal, and I do not entirely know why. It is not the most ambitious in the book. It is not the most beautiful. The metaphor is almost embarrassing in its directness: poets are albatrosses, the merchants of the world are sailors, the deck is exile, the air is home. Baudelaire is in his thirties when the poem is published; the book had been simmering for over a decade. He has not yet earned the right to the comparison. He earns the right by writing it.

The poem is four quatrains. The first three describe the bird being captured and tormented by bored sailors. The fourth pivots to its subject. Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées. The poet is like the prince of the clouds. The image is too easy. It is also exactly right. There is no harder claim in nineteenth-century French verse than the one this poem makes plainly: that the deep mind is correctly diagnosed as out of place by the people around it, and that the diagnosis is not the deep mind's problem to solve.

The line about the giant wings keeping the bird from walking has had a longer afterlife than most of Baudelaire's longer arguments. It now sits in commonplace quotation, often without attribution, often softened. The poem itself was harder than the quoted line. Read it whole and you find Baudelaire is not asking for sympathy. He is naming the situation. The sympathy is implied to be unavailable, which is the point of bothering to write the poem.