The Albatross by Baudelaire: Full Text and a Stanza-by-Stanza Reading
Looking for the text of L'Albatros? Here is Baudelaire's poem in full, in its original French, followed by a simple stanza-by-stanza reading: what happens on the deck of that ship, and why this albatross became the most famous portrait of the poet ever written.
The PoemL'Albatros, the Complete Original Text
The poem appears in Les Fleurs du mal, in the section Spleen et Idéal. We quote it here in the original French.
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, Les Fleurs du mal.
What the Poem Is About
Sailors sometimes caught albatrosses for fun during long crossings. Baudelaire starts from that real scene: a magnificent sea bird, king of the open sky, becomes clumsy and ridiculous the moment it is set down on the deck. The crew laughs, teases its beak with a pipe, mimics its limping walk.
The last stanza turns the anecdote into a self-portrait: the Poet is that bird. Made for vast skies and storms, he becomes awkward and mocked as soon as he has to walk among the crowd. The very thing that makes him great is what makes him unfit for ordinary life.
A Stanza-by-Stanza Reading
Four quatrains in alexandrines, with alternating rhymes: the structure is classical, the movement is a slow fall from sky to deck.
Stanzas 1 and 2: The Capture
The first stanza glides like the bird itself: long sentences, calm rhythm, the albatross as an indolent travel companion above bitter depths. The second stanza breaks the flight. On the boards of the deck, the kings of the azure become ashamed, and those great white wings, made to master the wind, drag beside them like oars. The image of oars is cruel and precise: on the ground, wings are just dead weight.
Stanza 3: The Mockery
The third stanza is made of exclamations: gauche, veule, comique, laid. The fallen bird is no longer described, it is heckled. Two sailors appear, one teasing its beak, the other miming the cripple who used to fly. The crowd never understands the fall of what once flew higher than it.
Stanza 4: The Poet
The comparison arrives, explicit: the Poet is like this prince of the clouds. At home in the storm, laughing at the archer, but exiled on the ground, booed, hindered by his own giant wings. The last line is one of the most quoted in French poetry, because everyone who has ever felt out of place recognizes themselves in it.
Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées, ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher. L'Albatros, final stanza
Why This Poem Still Speaks to Everyone
You do not need to be a poet to know the feeling: brilliant somewhere, clumsy elsewhere. The student who shines on paper and freezes in front of the class, the artist ill at ease in meetings, anyone whose inner life is larger than their social ease. L'Albatros gives that experience an image so clear that it has never aged.
The Poem on Your Wall
At Heure d'été we set the full text of L'Albatros as a typographic art print, composed like the page of an old edition: the poem, the poet's name, nothing else. Printed to order on 170 g/m² matte paper, it works beautifully in a reading corner, above a desk, or inside a gallery wall of literary prints.
There is a quiet pleasure in living with French literature in the original. The poem keeps the language it was written in, and with it the sound the writer chose, which no translation quite carries over. On an English-speaking wall it stops being decoration and becomes something with a little cachet: a piece of France you can read on your way past, every morning.
A poem you love on a wall is a text you reread. That is the whole idea.
The Last Word
L'Albatros is the portrait of every soul too large for the room it stands in. Read it, reread it, and if it is one of yours, give it a place where you can see it every day.
Poems as Art Prints
The great French poems set as typographic prints, printed to order on 170 g/m² matte paper.
See the full collection →
Frequently Asked Questions
Which collection is L'Albatros from?
L'Albatros is a poem by Charles Baudelaire from Les Fleurs du mal, where it appears in the section Spleen et Idéal, just after the opening poems of the collection.
What is the main idea of L'Albatros?
The poem compares the poet to an albatross: majestic in the sky but ridiculous on the deck of a ship, just as the poet is sublime in his art but awkward and mocked in everyday social life.
How is the poem structured?
L'Albatros is made of four quatrains of alexandrines with alternating rhymes. The first three stanzas tell the scene of the captured bird, and the fourth delivers the comparison with the Poet.
