[National Geographic] On the Wings of the Albatross

《庄子·内篇·逍遥游第一》

北冥有鱼，其名为鲲。鲲之大，不知其几千里也。化而为鸟，其名
为鹏。鹏之背，不知其几千里也。怒而飞，其翼若垂天之云。是鸟也
，海运则将徙于南冥。南冥者，天池也。


在想象力的世界里，数字无关紧要，方向感很重要，庄子虽不知道有所谓的 “南半球” ，他的灵感还是好的 -
信天翁，南极大鹏也，兜风专家也，一个成年人张开双臂只有它的单只翅膀宽，刚学会飞的，少则一年半载，
多则四年五年不下地


On the Wings of the Albatross
By Carl Safina Published: December 2007


An albatross is the grandest living flying machine on Earth. An albatross is bone, feathers, muscle, and the wind. An albatross is its own taut longbow, the breeze its bowstring, propelling its projectile body. An albatross is an art deco bird, striking of pattern, clean of line, epic in travels, heroically faithful. A parent albatross may fly more than 10,000 miles (16,000 kilometers) to deliver one meal to its chick. Wielding the longest wings in nature—up to eleven and a half feet (3.5 meters)—albatrosses can glide hundreds of miles without flapping, crossing ocean basins, circumnavigating the globe. A 50-year-old albatross has flown, at least, 3.7 million miles (6 million kilometers).

If people know the albatross at all, most harbor vague impressions of an ungainly, burdensome creature, derived from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 1798 poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Turns out, Coleridge never saw an albatross. Also turns out, most people haven't read the poem. In the poem, the albatross benevolently fills the ship's sails with wind and aids its progress. When the mariner impulsively kills the albatross, horror grips the crew; they punish the mariner by making him wear the great corpse around his neck.

But let's not burden albatrosses with our metaphors. Doing so, we fail to see the real birds, which connect us to what's happening in the seas in ways many of us can scarcely imagine.

If you could travel millions of miles fueled by clean, self-renewing, zero-emissions energy, you'd be an albatross. Strictly speaking, albatrosses are mediocre fliers—but excellent gliders. They can lock their wings in the open position like switchblades, the bird merely piloting the glider it inhabits. Catching the wind in their wings and sailing upward, then harnessing gravity while planing seaward, they travel in long undulations. Most birds struggle to overcome wind; albatrosses exploit it.

What differentiates an albatross from, say, a gull, is not just architecture but also state of mind, a brain that is master navigator of so exquisite a body. Swap the software, install a gull brain at the helm of an albatross, and the great vital sailing craft would never dream of daring the distances that an albatross routinely conquers. Gulls hug the shores and proclaim themselves monarchs of dock pilings. Albatrosses cross oceans for breakfast and deign to touch shore only when it involves sex. Land is an inconvenient necessity for breeding.

Granted, on land—where they seldom are—albatrosses walk with a spatula-footed, head-wagging waddle. Walking isn't their thing; no one will ever film March of the Albatrosses. But oh, when they unfurl those wings and leave gravity to the rest of us, they become magnificent beyond the reach of words.


Graceful as angels and tough as leather, all albatrosses—about two dozen species—spend months and sometimes years beyond sight of land, able to take the most hellacious punishment the ocean can hurl. While living in the windiest regions on Earth, they seem to inhabit another plane of existence. Writing home from the South Atlantic to his new wife, Grace, in 1912, American ornithologist Robert Cushman Murphy exulted, "I now belong to a higher cult of mortals, for I have seen the albatross!"

The places of albatrosses are beyond the inhabited limits of humanity, on spare, elemental islands that feel like the center of a waterbound planet. Yet humans touch them in all their haunts. As a result, almost all albatross populations have declined significantly in recent decades. I sought out the densest, most populous remaining albatross colonies in the world. Everywhere, I encountered threats to the birds, but also people working to blunt those threats. To restore their numbers, we need to offer albatrosses a new truce. Otherwise, they'll have to find another world, and even albatross wings can't get them there.

At 51° south latitude, the bare shoulders of the Falklands' Steeple Jason Island shrug gracefully toward a coast wreathed with emerald, head-high tussock grass. Walk around the island's north end and behold a living spectacle: Black-browed albatrosses so crowd the ledges and shoreline, the birds are the shoreline. This main colony runs two and a half miles (four kilometers).

The birds' softball-size heads are slashed with signature black brow stripes above dark eyes. Their four-inch (100 millimeters) bills are airbrushed tones from pastel mustard to translucent pink to a rosy blush at the hooked tip. Dusky-billed adolescents that have lived at sea four or five years are back on solid land for the first time. It's the season for courtship. The youngest ones are trying out moves, like 14-year-olds at the mall. Long-term relationships appear unlikely. But valuable social skills accrue. Like Kabuki dancers, they show off in exaggerated movements, turning preening into choreography, fanning tails, cooing, mutually extending their necks and laying bills together. They accentuate flawless wings, healthy plumage, and attentive grooming the way young teenagers accentuate skin and vigor, displaying precisely those body parts that indicate fertility.

Many of the adolescents seem decidedly undecided about which they fancy. But fickleness is actually a critical assessment for a momentous decision: A bird's choice of mate largely determines whether its chick survives. Raising a chick requires both parents, so courtship often spans two years. Those in advanced courtship sit long intervals in close contact, tenderly preening each other's heads and necks. This reinforces reliability and mutual care. Thus they begin a lifelong bond that will keep the wheel of life in motion.

Each sweep of vision takes in hundreds of commuting birds—but scarcely a flapping wing. Wind powers this mass-transit system. Many hurtle downwind; those going upwind weave into the air currents, catching the crosswind and sailing upward with their bellies windward, then turning downward into the breeze. Masterfully playing these two great forces of wind and gravity, they make near-effortless progress.



The same engine of air that motorizes the birds delivers weather systems ashore in great passions of glorious sunshine, stinging hail squalls, and snow-laced gales. You might see blue sky to the horizon and in a few minutes be enveloped in horizontally driven rain under a drop curtain of blue-gray cloud that seems infinite—until a few minutes later when the sun again bursts through. Whirling williwaws blast sheets of water off the ocean, sending shattered shards of spray. Fifty-mile-an-hour (80 kilometers) gusts take your breath away. The birds experience it with a stoicism unavailable to humans; they have no cover and must find refuge within themselves.

But strong as they are, Falklands albatrosses run into trouble with fishing boats off Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil. Knowledge of their decline shadows the rhapsody I feel. In the softening light on my last Steeple Jason evening, I slowly perch next to a bird. It bows as if we're to start courting. I extend my hand. It reaches out, gently nibbling my finger. Mimicking what I'd seen courting birds do, I slide my finger alongside its bill and stroke its cheek.

Albatrosses live on thin margins. Working hard to wrest a living from the sea, they cannot amass enough energy to lay more than one egg in a breeding season. Royal albatrosses require a year to raise a chick, an effort that leaves adults so depleted they skip a year of breeding to molt and regain weight.

Campbell Island, where the southern royal albatross nests, lies 400 miles (600 kilometers) south of New Zealand, a place of mountainous waves and monstrous birds. New Zealand is Albatross Central, and over the crests and troughs sail white-capped, Salvin's, Buller's, royal, and wandering albatrosses, plus giant petrels, shearwaters, and companionable pintado petrels, whose markings make them look like flying dominoes. High cliffs and explosive surf guard Campbell Island's loneliness. A chilly wind blows perpetually. The list of species breeding here underscores New Zealand's albatross primacy: the Campbell albatross (found only here), grey-headed and light-mantled sooty albatrosses, a few antipodean wanderers and black-brows.

Campbell Island has no vehicles. Time and distance shift to the rhythm of your legs. The most direct route to the birds entails a 45-minute walk over a 500-foot (150 meters) ridge. Peter Moore, a biologist at New Zealand's Department of Conservation, and I find the great birds in a broad valley. Across the wide distance, my mind undercalibrates their size, until one swoops close and Moore is suddenly dwarfed by a bird whose wings are far longer than the tallest person on Earth. No bird has longer wings than a southern royal albatross. At eleven and a half feet (3.5 meters) tip-to-tip, they shred the air around them, whooshing like small jets. On the ground the birds look like huge porcelain statues.

At the moment, they're incubating eggs. Most doze upon grassy nests, their heads tucked into snowy underwings, the dense feathers on their backs blowing in the wind.



Moore checks leg bands and applies new ones so gently that each bird remains sitting tight on its egg. The birds nibble his fingers with their sharp-hooked bills. The birds impart to these lonely slopes a magic disproportionate to the facts of the grass, the distant ocean, and a few big birds.

Despite Campbell's isolation, rats arrived with seal hunters in the 1800s; would-be farmers arrived around 1900. Everything they brought—grasses, sheep, cattle, fires, dogs—was bad for albatrosses. They called albatross eggs "good to eat too, bigger than a goose egg." When the settlers left, around 1930, perhaps as few as 650 pairs of royals remained. Rats devastated nearly everything else. Since the Department of Conservation's 2001 rat eradication, smaller seabirds, snipes, Campbell Island teal, insects, and flowering herbs are returning from offshore islets. Southern royal albatross numbers rose to about 13,000 breeding pairs by the mid-1990s. But something has held them to that level. In a lovely nest an abandoned one-pound egg indicates a lost partner, plus a mate forced by hunger to abandon its effort. Cause unknown.

Albatrosses' siren-like beauty has tempted me to some of the loveliest and loneliest places on the planet—and today into a punishing gale. Its gusts threaten our planned six-hour hike to the island's north end and its dense colonies of Campbell and grey-headed albatrosses. In these latitudes, wind can sweep right around the bottom of the world, then come in body blows to punch you off your feet. Gusts repeatedly flatten us. Against one blast I plant my walking stick yet am catapulted right over it. Never has hiking left me so beat up. But albatrosses love wind, and I love albatrosses, so. . . .

When we reach the north cliffs under skies thickened with clouds, thousands of large birds glide through sun shafts between the low-crouching heavens and the pewter sea. The air carries their raucous braying and the not-unpleasant scent of guano. Mud-pedestal nests packed pecking-distance apart are topped by month-old chicks that sit upright like foot-tall snowmen. I watch as adults arrive to feed them. Parent albatrosses convert food into high-density oil with a caloric content that's been compared to diesel fuel. When a parent arrives, it and the chick excitedly position their bills crosswise. Then the adult squirts a stream of oil as if filling a tank. An adult may spend 15 minutes ashore feeding its youngster a meal that's a third the chick's body weight, then leave again for another trek of several weeks and thousands of miles. Between feedings, the chick converts oil into bone, flesh, and feathers. The chick grows so much between visits that adults recognize them not by sight, but by voice or scent.

I linger for hours, drinking in the action and spectacle, knowing that while the scene seems eternal, my own wanderings urge me onward. I too have miles to go across the deep.



It's graduation day at Midway Atoll, near the northwestern end of the Hawaiian archipelago. With only 2.3 square miles (6 square kilometers) of land, Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge hosts the world's largest albatross colony—nearly half a million pairs. (In 1909, responding to Japanese plume hunters killing albatrosses by the tens of thousands, President Theodore Roosevelt declared many of the surrounding islands a bird reservation—enforced by gunship—and saved North Pacific albatrosses from extinction.) Some islands still lie silent of albatross voice. But at Midway, now refuge headquarters, it's albatrosses, albatrosses everywhere: under the trees, all over the lawns, in doorways, on steps, at the dining hall doors.

First light unveils a shore thronged with hundreds of thousands of young albatrosses poised momentously between hatchlinghood and their flying lives. At this critical transition, many are on the knife-edge of life and death. Corpses of goose-size chicks litter the island. A few have wing deformities, likely from eating lead paint flaked from buildings. Hideously, the body cavities of many dead chicks contain cigarette lighters and other discarded plastic their parents swallowed at sea and fed to them. Some have starved. Others succumbed to heat.

Yet survivors dominate. They're big youngsters sporting downy remnants around their heads like lion's manes or Mohawks. Whenever a breeze sweeps through, these juveniles begin flapping. If it's very windy, entire fields of albatrosses wave their wings in the air, testing them. Eventually the birds will begin running the beaches until the slap, slap, slap sound of running feet ends with hard-earned airborne silence. Initial flights are short. Above the laboring juveniles sail adults whose effortless speed and grace indicate a concept perfected.

Yet today there's not a bee's buzz of breeze to loft them. Well, if the wind won't take them, their feet will. Hungering for the horizon, the birds simply walk into the water, wings hoisted like sails, paddling across the lagoon. For hours, more venture across the turquoise calm until an albatross armada stretches out of sight.

Each breathless dawn sees wave after wave of young albatrosses step out of the vegetation and paddle away. About 13,000 are leaving daily. It is March of the Albatrosses!

Where are they going? Biologist John Klavitter pilots our boat over the lagoon. Scanning with binoculars, we realize that at the point where the lagoon's mirror breaks into a million shimmering shards of sunlight sit albatrosses by the tens of thousands. The water is soupy with birds. While thousands sit bobbing, hundreds are trying the sea breeze. Their youthful excitement is infectious. But most of the birds seem afraid to cross the surf. Some fly straight at the ocean, then U-turn over the breakers and veer back into the lagoon.

It's high drama in slow motion. If they stay, they starve. Doldrums are costly. All the paddling and flapping has debited their energy accounts. But enough young albatrosses are flying outside the reef, over the deep cobalt swells, to show that birds are slowly suffusing into the open North Pacific, their true home. They've earned their wings.



For the next couple of months, the crucial task is finding food enough to survive. Studies in the Indian Ocean suggest young albatrosses suffer about 40 percent mortality in the first two months post-fledging. How they learn to forage—do they watch experienced older birds?—no one knows. We do know that while albatrosses eat mostly squid, they often gather around fishing boats, waiting for food in the form of scraps, guts—and baited hooks.

If you kill an albatross you are not forced to wear it, nor will it doom your ship. But nowadays every albatross has humanity around its neck. "There are optimists and there are worriers," says Beth Flint, a biologist at the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. "My job is to worry about albatrosses. A hundred thousand drown in fishing gear every year. They're the world's most threatened family of birds."

The Falklands' black-browed albatrosses have lost about 38,000 pairs in the past decade. Nic Huin, a soft-spoken, heavy-smoking French scientist with Falklands Conservation, calculates they've been declining one percent annually. Among the throngs, that one percent doesn't seem like much—until you realize 38,000 pairs is nearly one adult bird every two hours. One percent is like a giant invisible eraser that could, over time, wipe away every bird in view.

In 1988, Australian conservation biologist Nigel Brothers first linked fishing boats with the albatross declines scientists were reporting. The birds trail boats deploying longlines—up to 50 or so miles (80 kilometers) long—with thousands of baited hooks. If hooked while trying to steal the bait before the line sinks, they drown. Albatrosses also crowd behind vessels dragging trawl nets, where slicing cables can strike their long wings. Free lunch it isn't; albatrosses get killed faster than they can breed.

Brothers has worked on the problem with fishermen, surviving fire at sea and a vessel sinking. "Fishing is hard, monotonous work; thousands of hooks baited, deployed, and hauled per day," he says. "If fishermen have to do something extra to save a bird or a turtle—if they don't have an easy option that costs nothing—it won't happen. You have to make conservation easy." They have. Brothers and Eric Gilman, of the Blue Ocean Institute, are collaborating with fishermen to simply add weight to the lines and set them from the side of the boat instead of from the back. With side-setting, baits sink beneath the hull, out of birds' reach. Other measures include dyeing bait dark blue and setting lines at night.

The result: Over the past ten years the Hawaiian fleet's kill of all seabirds dropped 97 percent. "But Hawaii's efforts won't be enough," Brothers says. He's seeking worldwide standards for longlines. Weighting lines would probably fix 80 percent of the problem.




There's progress elsewhere, too. In Falklands waters, a single boat might kill as many as 140 birds in one day—until recently. Now long-liners and trawl netters must use bird-avoidance measures such as "streamer lines" and "bird curtains," which dangle from the boat and prevent birds from getting at baited hooks or colliding with net cables. Over the past few years, bird kills there dropped 99 percent for long-liners. In much of the vast circumpolar Southern Ocean, longline bird kills in areas managed under the 24-nation Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) declined from 6,589 in 1997 to just two in 2006.

These numbers don't account for many boats fishing illegally, or in areas not covered under CCAMLR. Albatrosses circumnavigating the world still interact with many boats unconcerned about birds or law. Some fishermen have even been known to catch albatrosses for food.

What the successes do show is what's now possible. Groups such as Southern Seabird Solutions, BirdLife International, and Brazil's Projeto Albatroz are also working hard with fishermen to close the gaps.

But fishermen aren't the only ones who can improve things. Seafood lovers' choices decide what fish will get caught and what fishing methods will find market favor. Consumers can help by being selective. For instance, because Patagonian toothfish ("Chilean sea bass") is heavily fished and some is caught illegally, most conservation groups recommend avoiding this fish, since it's hard to tell where it's coming from. But South Georgia's Chilean sea bass fishery is well managed, and the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) now rates it as sustainable after managers there tackled the seabird problem. (In the U.S. you can find it at Whole Foods Market and elsewhere—just be sure you see the MSC logo on the package.)

Sean Martin, whose Honolulu company Pacific Ocean Producers operates and services fishing vessels, says, "If environmentalists publicize a problem, the whole industry gets a bad reputation. So if we develop a way of keeping birds off our bait and we're doing it profitably, other countries take note. We can go to a fisheries conference and say, 'Look folks, we're doing all this stuff and we're still making money, and keeping the environmentalists' heat off us all.' "

Albatrosses helped save Ernest Shackleton during his heroic lifeboat trek to South Georgia Island to summon rescue for his stranded crew. The first thing they did upon landing was to stew some fledglings. Albatrosses now need us to save them. Albatrosses can wander to the ends of the Earth. Each of us can help ensure they never go farther than that.



(編輯記錄)

Thanks! Good article. I've always been fascinated by these birds. I hope someday I will see one of them with my own eyes.

L'albatros
Charles Baudelaire




L'Albatros

Souvent, pour s'amuser, les hommes d'équipage
Prennent des albatros, vastes oiseaux des mers,
Qui suivent, indolents compagnons de voyage,
Le navire glissant sur les gouffres amers.

À peine les ont-ils déposés sur les planches,
Que ces rois de l'azur, maladroits et honteux,
Laissent piteusement leurs grandes ailes blanches
Comme des avirons traîner à côté d'eux.

Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule!
Lui, naguère si beau, qu'il est comique et laid!
L'un agace son bec avec un brûle-gueule,
L'autre mime, en boitant, l'infirme qui volait!

Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées
Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l'archer;
Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,
Ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher.

— Charles Baudelaire

The Albatross

Often, to amuse themselves, the men of a crew
Catch albatrosses, those vast sea birds
That indolently follow a ship
As it glides over the deep, briny sea.

Scarcely have they placed them on the deck
Than these kings of the sky, clumsy, ashamed,
Pathetically let their great white wings
Drag beside them like oars.

That winged voyager, how weak and gauche he is,
So beautiful before, now comic and ugly!
One man worries his beak with a stubby clay pipe;
Another limps, mimics the cripple who once flew!

The poet resembles this prince of cloud and sky
Who frequents the tempest and laughs at the bowman;
When exiled on the earth, the butt of hoots and jeers,
His giant wings prevent him from walking.

— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)

The Albatross

Sometimes for sport the men of loafing crews
Snare the great albatrosses of the deep,
The indolent companions of their cruise
As through the bitter vastitudes they sweep.

Scarce have they fished aboard these airy kings
When helpless on such unaccustomed floors,
They piteously droop their huge white wings
And trail them at their sides like drifting oars.

How comical, how ugly, and how meek
Appears this soarer of celestial snows!
One, with his pipe, teases the golden beak,
One, limping, mocks the cripple as he goes.

The Poet, like this monarch of the clouds,
Despising archers, rides the storm elate.
But, stranded on the earth to jeering crowds,
The great wings of the giant baulk his gait.

— Roy Campbell, Poems of Baudelaire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952)

The Albatross

Sometimes, to entertain themselves, the men of the crew
Lure upon deck an unlucky albatross, one of those vast
Birds of the sea that follow unwearied the voyage through,
Flying in slow and elegant circles above the mast.

No sooner have they disentangled him from their nets
Than this aerial colossus, shorn of his pride,
Goes hobbling pitiably across the planks and lets
His great wings hang like heavy, useless oars at his side.

How droll is the poor floundering creature, how limp and weak —
He, but a moment past so lordly, flying in state!
They tease him: One of them tries to stick a pipe in his beak;
Another mimics with laughter his odd lurching gait.

The Poet is like that wild inheritor of the cloud,
A rider of storms, above the range of arrows and slings;
Exiled on earth, at bay amid the jeering crowd,
He cannot walk for his unmanageable wings.

— George Dillon, Flowers of Evil (NY: Harper and Brothers, 1936)

Albatrosses

Often our sailors, for an hour of fun,
Catch albatrosses on the after breeze
Through which these trail the ship from sun to sun
As it skims down the deep and briny seas.

Scarce have these birds been set upon the poop,
Than, awkward now, they, the sky's emperors,
Piteous and shamed, let their great white wings droop
Beside them like a pair of idle oars.

These wingèd voyagers, how gauche their gait!
Once noble, now how ludicrous to view!
One sailor bums them with his pipe, his mate
Limps, mimicking these cripples who once flew.

Poets are like these lords of sky and cloud,
Who ride the storm and mock the bow's taut strings,
Exiled on earth amid a jeering crowd,
Prisoned and palsied by their giant wings.

— Jacques LeClercq, Flowers of Evil (Mt Vernon, NY: Peter Pauper Press, 1958)

The Albatross

Often, to amuse themselves, the men of the crew
Catch those great birds of the seas, the albatrosses,
lazy companions of the voyage, who follow
The ship that slips through bitter gulfs.

Hardly have they put them on the deck,
Than these kings of the skies, awkward and ashamed,
Piteously let their great white wings
Draggle like oars beside them.

This winged traveler, how weak he becomes and slack!
He who of late was so beautiful, how comical and ugly!
Someone teases his beak with a branding iron,
Another mimics, limping, the crippled flyer!

The Poet is like the prince of the clouds,
Haunting the tempest and laughing at the archer;
Exiled on earth amongst the shouting people,
His giant's wings hinder him from walking.

— Geoffrey Wagner, Selected Poems of Charles Baudelaire (NY: Grove Press, 1974)
        


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賞析與介紹：
[source: http://bacfrancais.chez.com/albatros-baud.htm]

Introduction :

Ce poème est extrait de "Spleen et idéal", la deuxième partie du recueil Les Fleurs du mal. Cette partie évoque l'homme déchiré entre l'aspiration à l'élévation et l'attirance pour la chute, déchirement à l'origine de l'envie nommé spleen, indissociable de la condition humaine et qui finit par triompher. L'albatros traduit chez Baudelaire la conscience d'être différent des autres. Baudelaire a recours à une image très suggestive pour dépeindre sa propre condition dans une société qui l'ignore complètement. L'image de l'albatros capturé évoque l'idée d'un être totalement étranger au monde qui l'entoure. Baudelaire faisait partie de la génération des poètes maudits, c'est-à-dire non compris par les gens de son époque. Les trois premières strophes concernent l'albatros tandis que la dernière est dédiée au poète.

Lecture du texte

Souvent, pour s'amuser, les hommes d'équipage
Prennent des albatros, vastes oiseaux des mers,
Qui suivent, indolents compagnons de voyage,
Le navire glissant sur les gouffres amers.

A peine les ont-ils déposés sur les planches,
Que ces rois de l'azur, maladroits et honteux,
Laissent piteusement leurs grandes ailes blanches
Comme des avirons traîner à côté d'eux.

Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule!
Lui, naguère si beau, qu'il est comique et laid!
L'un agace son bec avec un brûle-gueule,
L'autre mime, en boitant, l'infirme qui volait!

Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées
Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l'archer;
Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,
Ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher.



Problématique : Il s'agira de découvrir la signification allégorique du poète.

Etude méthodique

I- La parabole du poète oiseau

A- Une double analogie
---- Une double comparaison
Ce poème est fondé sur une double comparaison. L'albatros est personnifié étant donné que le poète est comparé à l'oiseau. Grâce à un réseau de personnification, les trois premières strophes comparent l'albatros à un roi déchu (" roi " vers 6), à un voyageur ailé tombé du ciel. La quatrième strophe explicite le symbole en faisant du poète, par une comparaison et une métaphore hyperbolique, un " prince des nuées " (vers 13) aux " ailes de géant " (vers 16). Exilé parmi les hommes, la vie de l'albatros apparaît donc comme une parabole qui définit l'existence du poète. Le poète et l'albatros sont associés dans la dernière strophe et cette association oblige à une réinterprétation : le voyageur ailé devient le poète, les hommes d'équipage : la foule et les planches : le théâtre social.

B- L'élévation
-----Les thèmes du poète
- La verticalité, l'aspect aérien. L'albatros est évoqué dans toute sa grandeur comme le confirme l'enjambement des vers 1 et 2 qui suggère l'immensité des espaces que l'albatros a à parcourir. Cette notion de grands espaces est renforcée par l'hypallage du vers 2 (" vaste oiseau des mers " = oiseau des vastes mers).
- L'aspect sublime : Au-dessus de l'horizontalité médiocre (la société), l'oiseau donne une impression de majesté, fait de fluidité, comme l'eau sur laquelle vogue le navire mis en relief par l'harmonie suggestive du vers 4 en " v ", " s " et " f ".
- L'isolement, la solitude : Il y a le monde d'en haut et le monde d'en bas et la communication entre les deux est difficile, voire impossible.
- La situation de la victime : l'albatros mais en même temps, le poète est agressé par les moqueries des marins (vers 11 et 12) puis par l'archer et les nuées (vers 14 15).


II- Un univers soumis à de fortes tensions

A- Le jeu des antithèses
-----Le jeu des antithèses
Le poème de Baudelaire donne de l'albatros deux visions radicalement opposées : autant l'oiseau en vol est un oiseau majestueux à l'allure souveraine désigné par la périphrase du vers 16 : " les rois de l'azur ", autant lorsqu'il se pose il paraît ridicule : - les " ailes " du vers 7 qualifiés des deux épithètes " grandes " et " blanches " ? " les avirons (vers 8) ; - la beauté du vers 10 ? la laideur du vers 10 ; - du vol royal (vers 3), on passe au boitement de l'infirme (vers 12). Ces oppositions sont soulignées par des antithèses : - " roi " (vers 6) ? " maladroit " et " honteux " (vers 6) ; - le " voyageur ailé " (vers 9) ? "gauche " et " veule " (vers 9) ; - " naguère si beau " (vers 10) ? " comique " et " laid " (vers 10) de plus, ici, la rime intérieure croisée associe encore à l'idée de l'albatros celle d'un animal ayant perdu son rang et son titre de " roi " ; - " infirme " ? " volait " (vers 12).

B- Le jeu sur les sonorités
---- Les sonorités
Le jeu sur les sonorités renforce le contraste. La majesté de l'oiseau en vol est rendue par l'assonance en " en " (vers 1, 2, 4, 13, 14, 16) et l'allitération en "v" (vers1, 2, 3, 4). La déchéance de l'albatros se traduit sur le plan phonétique par une sorte de dégradation et l'assonance en "en" est désormais associée à des mots dont le sens ou les connotations sont négatives ou péjoratives. Le destin funeste de l'oiseau est prédit par l'allitération en "s" du vers 4 : "gouffres amers". La troisième strophe accumule des sonorités qui produisent un effet désagréable avec l'assonance en "e", assonance déjà présente dans la strophe précédente avec "eu" de "honteux" au vers 6, "piteusement" au vers 7, "à coté d'eux" au vers 8 et l'allitération en "c" et en "gu" comme "gauche" au vers 9 et la cacophonie " comique et laid " du vers 10. Ainsi, le jeu des sonorités accentue la différence de l'animal au fur et à mesure du poème ce qui est renforcé par la disposition en chiasme des sonorités du vers 11.

C- Le mouvement des phrases
---- Le mouvement des phrases
Il prend une valeur descriptive. On notera en particulier :
- Une ample phrase, bien balancée pour présenter l'oiseau en vol dans la première strophe ;
- Une nouvelle phrase dans la deuxième strophe très ample mais cette fois avec une nuance d'ironie pour présenter l'oiseau posé sur les planches ;
- Dans la troisième strophe, une série de trois phrases exclamatives plus courtes, au rythme plus haché pour traduire la souffrance de l'albatros ;
- Dans la quatrième strophe, une phrase en deux parties qui explique la dimension symbolique de la comparaison avec l'oiseau, il récapitule l'opposition.


III - Les symboles d'une chute

A- Une image symbolique
---- L'image de la chute
A prendre au sens physique et au sens moral du terme, la chute du poète oiseau est suggérée par des images symboliques : perdant la liberté dont il jouit quand il " hante la tempête " (vers 14). C'est une métonymie du climat pour désigner le lieu, il est désormais prisonnier des " planches " au vers 5, synecdoque pour désigner le pont du navire. On note le caractère ridicule de l'oiseau lorsqu'il est en dehors de son élément car un roi sur une planche, ce n'est pas sa place. L'anacoluthe des deux derniers vers (" exilé " est au masculin singulier, on attend donc un sujet au masculin singulier mais on a " ses ailes " qui est au féminin pluriel) accentue le déchirement du poète entre ses deux vies : celle de la réalité et celle de l'idéal. L'art est pour Baudelaire une affaire personnelle : le poète ne se mêle pas au public vulgaire. Leurs cultures sont trop éloignées. Le poète doit donc s'exiler, être seul et cette singularité s'est cristallisée dans le symbole de l'albatros.

B- La portée des images
---- La portée des images
L'albatros est désigné par les expressions suivantes : des périphrases au x vers 2, 3, 6, 9, 13, 19 qui ont toutes une valeur emphatique : de périphrase en périphrase, c'est tout l'aspect majestueux et souverain qui est déployé. La dernière strophe développe la comparaison entre le poète et l'albatros. C'est la même souveraineté dans la solitude mais c'est la même déchéance lorsqu'il redescend au niveau de l'humanité vulgaire. La comparaison entre l'oiseau et le poète permet de dégager la signification allégorique du poème : comme l'albatros, le poète est victime de la cruauté des hommes ordinaires comme les hommes d'équipage au vers 1 qui ne sont pas es " indolents compagnons " (vers9). De plus, les " nuées " du vers 13 ? " huées " du vers 15. Les marins du vers 11 agacent et provoquent l'animal. Le poète est donc déchiré entre le monde sublime (la poésie) et la vulgarité dégradante de la société. Bien plus, l'agressivité des hommes qui se manifeste par les huées de la foule va jusqu'à une volonté de meurtre symbolisée par l'archer du vers 14. On n'hésitera pas à mettre à mort le poète symboliquement mais il reste un homme incompris. L'albatros poète se moque des flèches qui ne peuvent l'atteindre. Il est exilé, c'est-à-dire étranger du milieu dans lequel il vit et est très mal vu et ses ailes, c'est-à-dire le génie, le gênent.


Conclusion :

Selon Baudelaire, la place du poète dans la société est comparée à un albatros : majestueux dans le ciel, son élément mais ridicule sur terre et au contact des hommes. De même, le poète se situe au-dessus du commun des hommes pour ses poèmes, mais mêlé à la foule, il n'est rien et devient ridicule. Baudelaire faisait ainsi partie de la génération des poètes maudits, c'est-à-dire non compris par les gens de son époque.



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