Other Poems (‘Fan’, ‘Saint’, ‘Gift of the Poem’).

V. ‘Herodias’.

VI. ‘A Faun in the Afternoon’.

VII. ‘Funerary Toast’.

VIII. ‘Prose’.

IX. Last Sonnets (‘This virginal long-living lovely day …’, ‘When the shade threatened …’, ‘The fine suicide …’, ‘With her pure nails …’, ‘The Tomb of Edgar Allan Poe’, ‘Homage’ [‘Already mourning …’], ‘My old tomes closed …’, ‘What silk with balm …’, ‘Sonnet-Cycle’ [‘Does every Pride in the evening smoke …’, ‘Arisen from the rump and bound …’, ‘A lace vanishes utterly …’], ‘To introduce myself into your tale …’).

For the revised edition, prepared in 1894, Mallarmé omitted the headings but kept the same main sections: the early poems; the poems from the first (1866) series of Le Parnasse contemporain (an anthology that brought together the work of various younger poets reacting against the literary orthodoxy of the time); the four relatively long and ambitious poems ‘Herodias’, ‘A Faun’, ‘Funerary Toast’, and ‘Prose’; finally the later sonnets (first the tetralogy, then the poems of homage, then the others).

The 1894 arrangement differed in prefacing the collection with a dedicatory sonnet (‘Toast’), omitting ‘A negress …’, redistributing the ‘Other Poems’ (‘Fan’, plus eight other short occasional pieces, now formed a new section between ‘Prose’ and the late sonnets), and reshuffling somewhat the order of the ‘Last Sonnets’ (to which two recently composed poems were added). But these differences were relatively minor; as Mallarmé acknowledged in his bibliographical note at the end of the book, its basic structure had already been settled by 1887.

The volume prepared in 1894 was not actually published until 1899 (a year after Mallarmé’s death), when his daughter Geneviève inserted three further items. However, the present edition restores the 1894 arrangement, which is the last known to have been approved by the author himself.

In a letter to Verlaine on 16 November 1885, Mallarmé characterized the collection as ‘an album rather than a book’. Its design was not random, but its author did not claim for it the overall unity attempted in, for example, Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (1857) or Hugo’s Les Contemplations (1856) and La Légende des siècles (1859–83).

Poésies is a more formal word than poèmes, the term that Mallarmé applied to his prose poems. Our rendering ‘poetical works’ is an attempt to suggest something of the difference.

Toast [‘Nothing, this foam, this virgin verse …’]

Written January 1893; recited by Mallarmé at a literary banquet on 9 February, and published in La Plume on 15 February. The speaker addresses his colleagues, raising his glass and comparing its foam to the poem he is reciting.

6 with myself on the poop-deck now: the speaker presents himself as lagging behind the younger and more adventurous writers in his audience.

12 solitude, star, or rocky coast: the syntax is characteristically ambiguous and double-edged; the three items could be either literary goals (‘things … deserving of our sail’s white preoccupation’) or dangers that might oppose the attainment of those goals.

Ill Fortune

Written early 1862, and partly published 15 March 1862 in L’Artiste; substantially revised in 1887. A sardonic reply to Baudelaire’s poem of the same title; it suggests that the effects of ‘Ill Fortune’ are often less glamorous and more pedestrian than the older poet had claimed.

The illustrious writers of ll. 1–19, who see misfortune as something noble (‘A mighty angel’) and draw sustenance from it (‘They suck Sorrow’s teat’—an image used by Baudelaire in ‘Le Cygne’), are contrasted with their numerous ill-starred ‘brothers’, who suffer wretchedly in the pursuit of art, mocked (ll. 52–60) by those who have sold out to please the public. In 1862 Baudelaire might well have seemed to belong in the first category; he was still in excellent health and had just issued the successful revised edition of Les Fleurs du mal. In the second class Mallarmé was evidently thinking of Gérard de Nerval (whose body was found hanging from a streetlamp in 1855)—and also of himself. ‘Remember my poem “Ill Fortune”? I, alas, am in the second class’, he wrote to his friend Henri Cazalis on 4 June 1862. In both form and content, the poem is particularly indebted to Théophile Gautier’s 1837 ‘Ténèbres’.

25 Prometheus with no vulture: in Classical mythology, Prometheus stole fire from heaven and brought it to humanity; as a punishment, the gods bound him to a mountain with a vulture devouring his entrails. These poets do Promethean deeds but suffer less illustrious punishments.

Apparition

Written mid-1863; published 24 November 1883 in Verlaine’s essay on Mallarmé in Lutèce. The apparition of a dreamlike female figure, intangible and unidentifiable, transforms the evening scene: the poem starts with a sad moon, and ends with showers of ‘scented stars’.

Futile Petition

Written early 1862 for Anne-Marie Gaillard (Nina de Villard, 1843–84), an active supporter of the young ‘Parnassian’ poets; published 25 February 1862 in Le Papillon, and substantially revised in 1887. In a letter of 24 May 1862 Mallarmé described it as ‘a Louis XV style sonnet’—that is, an eighteenth-century pastiche of a kind fashionable during the 1850s and 1860s, which will be most familiar to present-day readers from Verlaine’s Fêtes galantes (1869). The beloved, surrounded by stock rococo accessories (lapdog, lozenge, fan, abbé in attendance) and portrayed as both princess and shepherdess, is raising to her lips a cup of Sèvres porcelain decorated with a naked figure of Hebe (the Classical goddess of youth and cupbearer to the gods).

The earliest surviving draft (1862), entitled simply ‘Placet’ (‘Petition’), reads as follows:

J’ai longtemps rêvé d’être, ô duchesse, l’Hébé

Qui rit sur votre tasse au baiser de tes lèvres,

Mais je suis un poète, un peu moins qu’un abbé,

Et n’ai point jusqu’ici figuré sur le Sèvres.

Puisque je ne suis pas ton bichon embarbé,

Ni tes bonbons, ni ton carmin, ni les Jeux mièvres

Et que sur moi pourtant ton regard est tombé,

Blonde, dont les coiffeurs divins sont des orfèvres,

Nommez-nous …—vous de qui les souris framboisés

Sont un troupeau poudré d’agneaux apprivoisés

Qui vont broutant les cœurs et bêlant aux délires,—

Nommez-nous …—et Boucher sur un rose éventail

Me peindra, flûte aux mains, endormant ce bercail,

Duchesse, nommez-nous berger de vos sourires.

[Duchess, I have long wished to be the Hebe who

is smiling on the Sèvres cup which your lips kiss,

but I am a mere poet—less than an abbé, this!—

and on that cup I never was placed hitherto.

Because I am not your bewhiskered lapdog, nor

your lipstick, your sweets, or coquettish Revelries

and since you nonetheless yielded to me, therefore,

O blonde whose hair is dressed by goldsmith deities,

appoint us—you whose many teasing brambled wiles

form a powder-wigged flock of little tame pet sheep

nibbling at every heart, bleating with no restraint,—

appoint us—and Boucher on a pink fan will paint

me, flute in my hand, as I lull the lambs to sleep,

dear Duchess, do appoint us shepherd of your smiles.]

François Boucher (1703–70) was a well-known painter of rococo pastoral scenes for the eighteenth-century aristocracy.

A Punishment for the Clown

Written by March 1864; after radical revision, published October 1887 in the Revue indépendante edition of Mallarmé’s Poésies. The speaker is not only a poet writing with a pen by lamplight, but also a plume-hatted actor, a ‘bad Hamlet’ before the footlights. Yearning to break out of this world, he plunges into the lakes of someone’s eyes (in the 1864 draft, his beloved’s; but the 1887 text is less specific) and is washed pure from his greasepaint—only to find himself in a sterile, glacial realm: without the ‘base’ props of the stage, he no longer has his ‘genius’ (1864 text), his ‘consecration’ (1887 text). The poem was suggested by Théodore de Banville’s virtuoso showpiece ‘Le Saut du tremplin’ (from Odes funambulesques, 1857), in which a leaping circus clown bursts through the tent and soars up into the stars.

The earliest surviving draft (1864) reads as follows:

Pour ses yeux,—pour nager dans ces lacs, dont les quais

Sont plantés de beaux cils qu’un matin bleu pénètre,

J’ai, Muse,—moi, ton pitre,—enjambé la fenêtre

Et fui notre baraque où fument tes quinquets,

Et d’herbes enivré, j’ai plongé comme un traître

Dans ces lacs défendus, et, quand tu m’appelais,

Baigné mes membres nus dans l’onde aux blancs galets,

Oubliant mon habit de pitre au tronc d’un hêtre.

Le soleil du matin séchait mon corps nouveau

Et je sentais fraîchir loin de ta tyrannie

La neige des glaciers dans ma chair assainie,

Ne sachant pas, hélas! quand s’en allait sur l’eau

Le suif de mes cheveux et le fard de ma peau,

Muse, que cette crasse était tout le génie!

[For her eyes—just to swim within those lakes, whose edge

is sown with fair eyelashes through which a blue dawn broke,

I—I, your clown, Muse—leapt over the window-ledge

and fled from our booth where your footlights shed their smoke,

and I, ravished with grass, dived like a traitor down

in those forbidden lakes, and, while you summoned me,

on the trunk of a beech I shunned my jester’s gown,

bathing my naked limbs in the white-shingled sea.

Within the morning sunlight my new body dried

and I could feel the glaciers’ snow grow cool and fresh

far from your tyranny in my now-wholesome flesh,

not knowing, alas, when the greasepaint and the grime

from my skin and my hair slipped away on the tide,

O Muse, that all the genius was that slime!]

The Windows

Written May 1863; published 12 May 1866 in Le Parnasse contemporain. On 3 June 1863 Mallarmé sent it to Cazalis with the prefatory remarks: ‘Drink deeply of the Ideal. The happiness of the world below is base—your hands have to be very calloused to seize it. The statement “I am happy” means “I am a coward”—and very often “I am a fool,” because either you can’t see the heaven of the Ideal above this ceiling of happiness, or else you must be wilfully shutting your eyes to it. On this theme I’ve written a little poem, “The Windows”, which I’m sending you.’ The speaker, like a sick man in hospital, longs to escape from the drab world around him and die, passing through ‘mysticism or art’ into the heaven of the Ideal. But there is a danger in that process: the ‘angel’ that he becomes may well be a fallen one, eternally condemned.

that monster: the Inane.

The Flowers

Written March 1864; published 12 May 1866 in Le Parnasse contemporain. Nature, Mother and Lady, is addressed; the poem contemplates her generative power in creating both life (the opening lines echo the creation scene of Hugo’s 1859 ‘Le Sacre de la femme’ in La Légende des siècles) and death.

11 Herodias: the girl who danced before Herod the tetrarch and asked for the head of the prophet John the Baptist as her reward.