The Structure and Form of ‘Evening Twilight’

This poem is interesting in regards to form because it deviates from regular patterns ever so slightly in certain places in order to achieve very specific effects.

Note first of all the rhythm of the piece; while there is a regular beat, it cannot be defined in a regular metrical foot because this keeps changing throughout, between iambic and trochaic meter and between pentameter, hexameter and even heptameter sometimes. What this achieves is a sense of uneasiness, a wariness that makes something feel out of place – the beats are so regular, you would expect the rhythm to be the same but it is not. This wariness mirrors the emotions of the speaker, who is clearly not comfortable passing through such surroundings. It can also be argued that this sense of uneasiness reflects Baudelaire’s feelings about how the class divide is so significant and how common the situation of him poem is; an affluent man passing through a poor part of town and, rather than feeling desperate to help the people he encounters, thinks only of himself and his own safety and well being.

The rhyme scheme again appears to be regular and predictable, arguably mirroring the predictable and unavoidable problem of poverty. The rhyme changes, however, at line 21 where it loses it precision and slips into half-rhyme and para-rhyme. This seems to reflect the speaker’s weariness and tiredness; he has spent too long in this area and only wishes to be home, he’s seen too much poverty and depravity that he has almost become desensitized to it and so it has lost it’s sharpness.

What is the most important formal feature of this poem, I believe, is the use of the dash in line 34: ‘the hospital fills with their sighs. – Many a one’. It is interesting to note that the dash is immediately preceded by a full stop which actually negates the grammatical need for a dash, implying that it is there for a reason different from grammatical correctness. Instead, the dash seems to signify a change in place and time; the speaker is now at home (perhaps has been for a long time) and is reflecting on what he has seen. This stands out even more because it makes the change back to full rhyme, distinguishing it further from the rest of the poem. The dash separates this final quatrain from the bulk of the poem to highlight that, just as the final couplet in a Shakespearean sonnet concludes the problems arisen earlier in the poem, this is the main message Baudelaire wants to drive home.