The Theme of the nostalgie de la pureté in the Fleurs du mal

Baudelaire re-echoes dying Phèdre's last word, pureté, throughout his Fleurs du mal. Images such as the flight of thought divorced from the body, the warmth of the sun, and the azur reveal his thirst for a purity that will reflect childhood innocence. In the anguish of banal, worldly pleasures, as in the search for beauty and love, and in his expectations of art, a spiritual element is always lacking. Only suffering, concomitant with the poet's resignation, offers a vision of future purity ("Recueillement";) but the acceptance of suffering renders the poet an exile, an ange déchu, whose most profound aspiration is to be consumed in this life by a nostalgie de la pureté. (FSH)