Mallarmé is identified by some critics with the speaker, by others with the beggar; perhaps it is better to see both speaker and beggar as imaginative creations who draw their attributes from their creator.

The earliest surviving draft (1862?), entitled ‘A un mendiant’ (‘To a Beggar’), reads as follows:

Pauvre, voici cent sous … Longtemps tu cajolas

—Ce vice te manquait,—le songe d’être avare?

Ne les enterre pas pour qu’on te sonne un glas.

Évoque de l’Enfer un péché plus bizarre.

Tu peux ensanglanter tes brumeux horizons

D’un Rêve ayant l’éclair vermeil d’une fanfare:

Changeant en verts treillis les barreaux des prisons

Qu’illumine l’azur charmant d’une éclaircie,

Le tabac fait grimper de sveltes feuillaisons;

L’opium est à vendre en mainte pharmacie;

Veux-tu mordre au rabais quelque pâle catin

Et boire en sa salive un reste d’ambroisie?

T’attabler au café jusqu’à demain matin?

Les plafonds sont fardés de faunesses sans voiles,

Et l’on jette deux sous au garçon, l’œil hautain.

Puis quand tu sors, vieux dieu, grelottant sous tes toiles

D’emballage, l’aurore est un lac de vin d’or

Et tu jures avoir le gosier plein d’étoiles!

Tu peux aussi, pour bien gaspiller ton trésor,

Mettre une plume rouge à ta coiffe; à complies,

Brûler un cierge au saint à qui tu crois encor.

Ne t’imagine pas que je dis des folies:

Que le Diable ait ton corps si tu crêves de faim,

Je hais l’aumône utile, et veux que tu m’oublies;

Et, surtout, ne vas pas, drôle, acheter du pain!

[Here, have a coin, poor man … Did you pursue

your dream of greed (a vice you lacked) a long time?

Don’t bury it, lest they toll a knell for you.

Conjure from Hell something more strangely sinful;

you could bloody your hazy vistas by

means of a Dream blazing red like a fanfare:

tobacco makes slim tendrils ramify,

and transforms prison bars into green lattice

lit by a pretty patch of clear blue sky;

opium is on sale at any chemist’s;

   would you nibble at cheap rates some forlorn

whore, taste the honeyed dregs of her saliva,

or eat in cafés till tomorrow morn?

The snobs toss waiters twopence, and the ceilings

are rouged with she-fauns whom no veils adorn.

When you leave, old god shivering in your burlap,

a lake of golden wine is break of day

and you swear that the stars must fill your gullet!

To waste your treasure better still, you may

deck yourself with a red plume, burning at compline

a candle to the saint whom you still pray.

Do not imagine that my words are folly:

Devil take your body if you die unfed!

I hate all useful handouts; please forget me.

Above all, rascal, don’t go and buy bread!]

Gift of the Poem

Written October 1865; published in an untraced French magazine before 2 February 1867, when it was reprinted by L’Avant-Coureur in Louisiana. As its position in Mallarmé’s Poésies and its first line indicate, the poem acts as a dedication of ‘Herodias’. In a letter of 31 December 1865, its author described it as ‘a little poem composed after the nocturnal toil to which my spirit has grown accustomed … When the wicked dawn breaks, the poet is terrified by the funereal offspring that enraptured him during the illuminated night, and sees that it is lifeless; he feels a need to bring it to his wife, who will give life to it.’

1 an Idumaean night: a night spent working on the topic of Herodias, who was of Idumaean ancestry. Idumaea, in Hellenistic and Roman times, was a province south of Judaea; Mallarmé invests it with familiar Oriental attributes: gold, spices, palm trees (suggested by a well-known passage of Virgil, Georgics, iii. 12), Sibyls.

6 that relic: the poem.

9 your little daughter: Mallarmé’s daughter Geneviève was born on 19 November 1864, during the first phase of his work on ‘Herodias’.

13 Sibylline: arcane or esoteric.

Herodias: Scene

Written 1865; published November 1871 in Le Parnasse contemporain. Herodias, in Mallarmé’s writings, is the girl who danced before Herod the tetrarch and asked for the head of John the Baptist as her reward. None of the Scripture narratives mentions her name; Josephus (not the most reliable of historians) calls her Salome, but as Mallarmé pointed out in a February 1865 letter to Eugène Lefébure, some later sources give her the same name as her mother—Herodias. (English readers will be familiar with this tradition from Browning, ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, ll. 196–7: ‘Herodias … who went and danced and got men’s heads cut off.’) In the same letter Mallarmé also declared: ‘What little inspiration I’ve had, I owe to that name; I think that even if my heroine had been called Salomé, I’d have invented the word Hérodiade, dark and red as an open pomegranate. Anyhow, I mean to make her a creature of sheer fantasy, utterly independent of history.’

On this topic Mallarmé planned an extended cycle of poems, which was begun in October 1864 and continued to occupy him intermittently till his death; however, only one of the projected poems—the present one—was completed to his satisfaction. As presented in this ‘Scene’, Herodias is fiercely committed to virginity, like her ‘sister’ the moon (the Diana of Classical mythology); she draws back even from the Nurse’s touch, and still more from the idea that her ‘secrets’ are being ‘reserved’ for some as yet unknown male (‘he’); by the end of the poem she is withdrawing into a state of total separation from the world. Yet the very intensity of her commitment contains the seeds of its own destruction: as she herself is more than half aware, her lips are ‘speaking a lie’.

Mallarmé is quoted as saying that the final lines of the ‘Scene’ anticipate ‘the future violation of the mystery of her being by a glance from John, who will look at her and pay for that sacrilege by his death—because the untamed virgin can never again feel herself intact, fully restored, and whole, until she holds in her hands the severed head that still dares to preserve the memory of the glimpsed virgin’ (Robert de Montesquiou, Diptyque de Flandre, Triptyque de France (Paris, 1921), 235). But that explanation is concerned mainly with the poem’s relation to other, uncompleted (and largely unwritten) pieces of the Herodias cycle, not with its sense in the separate state ultimately published by Mallarmé.

2 some unknown era: the Nurse perceives Herodias as out of touch with the present.

17-19 I strip away … the pale lilies within me: Herodias is seeking to rid herself of what is ‘natural’ and living.

22 lions: Mallarmé’s feminine noun bêtes does not accord with the masculine épris in l. 17; it was therefore posthumously altered in proof (the handwriting is probably his daughter Genevievé’s) to lions. We have preserved the original reading in the French text, but adopted the rendering ‘lions’ in translation.

30 funereal: the liquid is ‘funereal’ because it is ‘made from the death of roses’ (‘faite avec la mort des roses’), as an early (April 1868) manuscript draft reveals.

35-7 these hairs of mine … are not flowers … but gold: not soft and living, but hard and inanimate.

86 for myself alone I bloom: Herodias’s quest for self-sufficiency is a prototype of the poet’s.

96 Sibylline: arcane or esoteric.

125 Venus: (a) the evening star, (b) the Roman goddess of love, to whom virginity is hateful.

129 You are speaking a lie: the Nurse has now departed, and Herodias, left alone, addresses the final lines to her own lips.

A Faun in the Afternoon

Written June-July 1865; after radical revision, published April 1876 in booklet form. It was originally part of a longer poem-cycle in dialogue form, but as in the case of Herodias, only one of the projected poems finally met its author’s approval and was published. The faun of late Graeco-Roman mythology is both perennially lustful (especially in pursuit of nymphs) and a quintessential artist (since he plays the panpipe); in the former respect he contrasts with Herodias, in the latter he resembles her (she too is a dreamer). Mallarmé’s use of ‘v’ for ‘u’ in the printed title gives it the look of an ancient Latin inscription.

1 those nymphs: their identity is revealed gradually as the poem progresses. The nymphs were disturbed by the faun’s flute-playing (ll. 26–32); he caught two of them asleep and tried to make love to them, but they slipped away (ll. 63–92); the whole episode may have been merely his own fantasy (ll. 3–9).

2 incarnate: both ‘flesh colour’ and ‘carnality’.

4 My doubt … ends: ‘ends’ is ambiguous; perhaps the doubt is dispelled, yet perhaps it is completed. The faun believes that he met the nymphs in these forests, and the forests are ‘true’ (l. 5), which may support the reality of the whole story—or else may show by contrast that the rest of the story was not true. What the faun took for nymphs, for instance, may have been merely ‘roses’ (l. 7).

7 failing: both ‘guilt’ and ‘failure to exist’.

11-12 the chaster one … the other: here and elsewhere in the poem, one of the nymphs pursued by the faun seems to be more ‘spiritual’ (associated with whiteness, intangibility, and innocence), the other more ‘carnal’ (associated with darkness, passion, and cruelty).

15-17 sound of water … stir of air: i.e. the only sounds and breezes are those produced by the faun’s own flute. Perhaps the ‘chaster’ nymph was an ‘illusion’ generated by the watery sound, and the ‘other’ by the breeze—in which case neither would have any existence outside his art.

21 artificial: both ‘unnatural’ and ‘created by art’.

23 mere in Sicily: Sicilian swamps are a traditional home of fauns.

26-7 made tame by talent: the reeds are ‘tamed’ by the artisan’s talent when they are shaped into a panpipe.

31 naiads: water-nymphs.

32 fulvid: both ‘tawny’ and ‘wild’.

34 nuptial excess: ‘excess’, apparently, because of the faun’s desire to possess both nymphs.

34-5 A natural: the note customarily played to tune orchestral instruments.

37 lilies: both a phallic symbol and a traditional emblem of chastity; the faun is ‘one among’ the lilies, because the failure to consummate his passion has left him ‘erect, alone’ (l. 36).

38 sweet nothing: the kiss is ‘nothing’ (a) because it is not the consummation the faun seeks, and (b) because it may be imaginary.

44 diverting … for its own end: the panpipe transforms the artist’s ‘disturbances’ into art.

45 it dreams: two different syntactic constructions hang from this one verb: the panpipe ‘dreams … that we have seduced the beauties round about us’ (ll. 45–7), and it ‘dreams of … evacuating … a sonorous, monotonous and empty line’ (ll. 48–51) from the ‘commonplace illusion’ of the faun’s sexual fantasies.

52 flights: a triple allusion: (a) the flight of the nymph Syrinx, who was transformed into a reed to escape the pursuit of Pan; (b) the recent nymphs’ flight from the speaker; (c) the flights of artistic fancy involved in playing the instrument.

53 syrinx: panpipe made from a series of hollow reeds cut to various lengths.

57 the gleam: both the glossy substance of the grapes, and the drunken illumination induced by them.

62 expand: the previous italicized narrative (ll. 26–32) was offered as a mere retelling (‘proclaim …’); here an element of artistic elaboration becomes explicit.

64 immortal throats: the throats of the nymphs, as they cool themselves in the water.

69 this pain of being two: the nymphs, though ‘linked’, suffer because they are two separate creatures, as the faun himself suffers because he is separated from them.

70 careless: both ‘heedless’ and ‘haphazard’.

72 hated by the frivolous shade: the thicket is in full sunlight, shunned by the ‘frivolous’ (unstable as well as unserious) shadows.

74 squandered like the light: their love-play is to run parallel with the afternoon sunlight.

77-8 as a lightning-sheet quivers: the syntax is ambiguous; the quivering sheet of lightning is placed in apposition both to the faun’s ‘burning lips’ and to the ‘secret terror’ of the nymphs’ (and the faun’s?) flesh.

90 untwined by some vague perishings: the faun, involved with the more ‘carnal’ nymph, is too weak to retain his hold on the more ‘spiritual’ one.

99-100 at times when the forest glows with gold and ashen tints: at evening (now approaching).

101 Etna: Sicilian volcano, where Venus went in the evening to visit her husband Vulcan.

103 when sad slumbers are sounding: Venus arrives, not during the eruption (‘the flame’), but in the melancholy quiescence afterwards.

104 the queen: Venus, whom the faun sees as already in his possession.

110 the shadow: both ‘the illusion’ and ‘the mystery’ (with a reference back to l. 56, where the female genitals were seen as a realm of ‘shadows’).

[‘The hair flight of a flame …’]

Written by July 1887; published 12 August 1887 (embedded in the prose poem ‘The Announcement at the Fair’, p. 109) in L’Art et la mode.