Recreating this trajectory of love and frustrated desire, the sonnet transforms the "fugitive beauty" into the addressee of the poem and the soul mate with whom the poet communicates beyond distance and death. Portraying himself as an "extravagant" wanderer searching for love and his own identity, the peripatetic poet feels in seconds the intense shock and quasi-death inflicted by love at first/last sight and his own rebirth after the majestic, grieving woman has moved on. The lyrical poet who experiences the city’s ephemeral gift of love links his writing of the poem to a process of loss (prefigured by the woman’s mourning attire), particularly the poignant loss of love. While the crowd - represented here by the street that imprisons the poet in its deafening roar - magically offers the woman passerby to the poet’s vision, it immediately reclaims her. The urban setting deeply alters the traditional figure of the woman as muse. In this sonnet, love at first sight is also love at "last sight," in Walter Benjamin’s apt expression, an impossible love born out of a fugitive encounter. With "To a Woman Passing By" (1859), Charles Baudelaire created a modern myth of lasting depth and melancholy, a powerful miniature drama that intertwines old myths with present urban conditions.
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