“Rubbing the parched roadway with his webbed feet, he went trailing his white wings on the rough ground. Beside a dried-up gutter the poor creature, with gaping beak, was frantically bathing his wings in the dust, and with his heart full of longing for his native land, cried out….” (The Swan – Charles Baudelaire)

What would you fo if you saw a swan flapping helplessly on a building site. Presumably you’d try and help it. Also, probably, you might take a photo with your phone. Why would you do this? I think it would be to do with the incongruity of such a graceful bird in a concrete desert.
Charles Baudelaire did just that in Paris in the 1850s. Only of course, he didn’t take a photo; he wrote a poem – Le Cygne, perhaps his best known poem in the collection “Les Fleurs du Mal”. The swan had escaped from a menagerie near the Louvre and wandered onto the huge building site that was central Paris at that time as it was being transformed into the Paris we know today. With his Realist roots Baudelaire couldn’t fail to record what he saw.
But Baudelaire also wrote on the cusp of the Symbolist movement. The swan represented us, dislocated, alienated by the changing modern city. Huge numbers of prople were uprooted by the rebuilding of Paris and relocated to the suburbs, uprooted psychologically as well as physically. Soon sociologists would give this a name – anomie – the kind of alienation that leads to despair, something not unknown in the suburbs of Paris today.
But more than this, Baudelaire also saw a mysterious kind of beauty in the strange placing of a swan in the rubble – a flower, indeed, among the evil. It’s what modern urban photographers look for today, strange but eye-catching juxtapositions amongst the decay. But Baudelaire did it first. Over 150 years ago. Without a phone.