“The Wine of the Murderer” is the third poem in a five poem long section of Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil titled “Wine,” which stands between the sections “Parisian Scenes” (dealing with urban life) and “Flowers of Evil” (dealing with sex)—an apt placement, considering how the city runs on alcohol and how alcohol leads towards “intercourse.” Like poetry, wine energizes and inspires, and indeed one of the motives driving the composition of this section is the desire to (soberly) distill the effects of chemical intoxication and then deploy them in the service of poetic alchemy.

“The Wine of the Murderer”, not too surprisingly, is written in the voice of a murderer who’s drunk on wine. He’s just killed his wife. Poor to begin with, he’s spent whatever savings she’d kept from him on a last binge. He’s a criminal, but he’s not stupid; he planned the murder carefully, disposed of the body efficiently, and looks, as far as the reader can tell, to have gotten away with it. (That, or the police don’t care.) No one’s coming after him; all he has to live with is himself, and, assuming he’s unable to do away with them, his memories.

The poem, both in its French original and in my translation, is written in 13 quatrains, each with a rhyme scheme of abba. Each line is 8 syllables long. The vocabulary is fairly plain, as befits the “state” of the speaker, but manages, emotionally speaking, to rise to a certain disturbing grandeur.

For years Baudelaire played with the idea of writing a verse play about a drunkard who kills his wife. He never got around to it, but I’d like to think that it’s less because he failed than because, in these 52 lines, he’d already managed to tell the tale in full.