For Mallarmé’s choice of this name, see the notes on Herodias: ‘Scene’ (p. 242 below).

22 blooms to sway phials: the swaying corollas of toxic flowers are depicted as phials containing poison.

Renewal

Written May-June 1862; published 12 May 1866 in Le Parnasse contemporain. Sending the poem to Cazalis on 4 June 1862, Mallarmé wrote of ‘a curious barrenness that springtime had imposed within me. I am rid of it at last, after three months of impotence, and my first sonnet is devoted to a description—i.e. a curse—of it. This is poetry of a new kind, in which material results (those of the blood and nerves) are examined and combined with mental results (those of the mind and soul). It could be termed “springtime depression” [spleen printanier].’

12 though: the French (cependant) suggests both concomitance (‘while’) and contrast (‘though’).

Anguish

Written early 1864; published 12 May 1866 in Le Parnasse contemporain. In 1864 the title was ‘To a Whore’, and in 1866 ‘To One who is Calm’—a Baudelairean phrase befitting the poem’s Baudelairean subject and approach. As usual with Mallarmé, the poem reveals more of its author’s inner life than of his external circumstances: it was composed within six or seven months of his marriage.

14 dying: an early (1864?) draft read penser (‘thinking’).

[‘Weary of bitter rest…’]

Written 1864; published 12 May 1866 in Le Parnasse contemporain, with the title ‘Epilogue’ (it was Mallarmé’s final poem in that booklet). The speaker, unable to create—he feels his brain to be merely an ‘immense cemetery’ (ll. 5–6 and the first draft of ll. 9–10 make clear that this is the sense intended)—seeks to turn his back on the ‘ravenous Art’ that his ‘antiquated’ world prefers. Instead, he wants to imitate Chinese art—an aspiration that has been interpreted very differently by different critics (is he lowering his sights, for instance, or is he striving for loftier goals than ever?). It may be crucial to note that the Chinese art described by the speaker is an alien, elusive thing (like the lines in which he describes it), painting what cannot be painted (not a flower, but ‘the end of a flower’)—in which case any attempt to reduce it to critical paraphrase may be doomed to failure.

The Bell-Ringer

Written early 1862, around the same time as ‘Ill Fortune’ (compare their last lines); published 15 March 1862 in L’Artiste.

4 Ave: in traditional Roman Catholic ritual, a prayer offered when the Angelus bell is rung in the morning.

5 enlightened: in the 1862 text the light is stated to come from ‘a pale candle’; this information disappeared when Mallarmé revised the sonnet in 1866.

7 secular: hundred-year-old; but the context encourages the reader to think also of séculier, ‘lacking any religious significance’.

Summer Sadness

Written 1862; after substantial revision, published 30 June 1866 in Le Parnasse contemporain. In 1862 the sonnet was grouped with ‘Renewal’ under the general heading ‘Unwholesome Suns’: summer, like spring, is traditionally depicted by poets in positive terms, but in these poems both seasons are blighted and blighting. ‘Summer Sadness’ may date from the time when Mallarmé began to court his future wife, but any temptation to see it as simple autobiography should be resisted: the pallid, insubstantial creature addressed in this poem, stereotypically gold-haired and unresponsive, is as much a fantasy construct created for the purposes of a specific poem as the prostitute of ‘Anguish’.

The earliest surviving draft (1862?) reads as follows:

Le Soleil, sur la mousse où tu t’es endormie,

A chauffé comme un bain tes cheveux ténébreux,

Et, dans l’air sans oiseaux et sans brise ennemie,

Évaporé ton fard en parfums dangereux.

De ce blanc flamboiement l’immuable accalmie

Me fait haïr la vie et notre amour fiévreux,

Et tout mon être implore un sommeil de momie

Morne comme le sable et les palmiers poudreux!

Ta chevelure, est-elle une rivière tiède

Où noyer sans frissons mon âme qui m’obsède

Et jouir du Néant où l’on ne pense pas?

Je veux boire le fard qui fond sous tes paupières

Si ce poison promet au cœur que tu frappas

L’insensibilité de l’azur et des pierres!

[The Sun, like a bath, has warmed your shadowy hair

upon the moss where you lie somnolent,

evaporating your rouge, in the birdless air

without a hostile breeze, to dangerous scent.

The never-varied calm of this white gleam

makes me hate life and our hot passion, and

my very being craves a mummy’s dream

bleak as the dusty palm trees and the sand!

Your hair—is it a tepid river to

drown undisturbed the soul obsessing me

and tease the Void where thought is all unknown?

Let me sup kohl drawn from your eyes, and see

if that bane gives this heart stricken by you

the impassivity of sky and stone.]

The Blue

Written by early January 1864; published 12 May 1866 in Le Parnasse contemporain. Shortly after the poem’s composition, Mallarmé sent a detailed analysis of it to Cazalis. ‘To take a broader view at the outset, and deepen the whole work, I myself don’t appear in the first stanza. The blue torments the impotent in general. The second stanza raises a suspicion that I suffer from this cruel disease because of my flight before the possessive sky. In this stanza too I start to develop, with the blasphemous boast “And what wild night”, the strange notion of summoning up the fogs. The prayer to “dear Tedium” confirms my impotence. In the third stanza, I am as frantic as a man who sees a desperate appeal granted. The fourth stanza [in all known drafts, it is the sixth stanza] begins with a freed schoolboy’s grotesque exclamation: “The Sky has died!” And instantly, armed with that admirable assurance, I appeal to Matter. Verily, behold the joy of the Impotent! Weary of the illness that ravages me, I long to taste the common happiness of the multitude, and to await an obscure death … I say “I long”. But the enemy is a ghost, the sky returns from the dead, and I hear it singing in the blue bells. It goes past, lazy and victorious, without being sullied by the mist, and it simply runs me through. At which I (being full of pride, and not seeing that it’s a just punishment for my cowardice) howl that I am suffering immense “torment”. I long to flee once more, but I recognize my error and acknowledge that I am “haunted” … For those who seek something more than word-music in poetry, there is a real drama here.’

Sea Breeze

Written May 1865; published 12 May 1866 in Le Parnasse contemporain. In a letter of 8 February 1866, Mallarmé summarized the subject as ‘the inexplicable desire that sometimes grips us—to leave those who are dear to us, and depart!’

13-15 mast … no mast: the awkward syntax of these lines enacts the chaotic shipwreck in which the mast disappears.

Sigh

Written by April 1864; published 12 May 1866 in Le Parnasse contemporain. An ‘autumn reverie’ (Mallarmé’s description in a letter of 8 February 1868), to be compared with the prose poem ‘Autumn Lament’.

Alms

Written 1862; after substantial revision, published 12 May 1866 in Le Parnasse contemporain; further revised in 1887. The speaker gives alms to a beggar, sardonically urging him to lavish it on ‘some immense strange sin’ rather than hoarding it stingily or spending it on necessities.