The speaker contemplates ‘the fire ever within’ a woman’s flame-coloured hair, even when it is settled and tidied rather than unlaced and flying; physical contact with a lover could only ‘degrade’ the beauty of the Ideal.

The woman is presumably based on Méry Laurent (1849–1900), with whom Mallarmé shared a relationship too complex and individual to be labelled by any English word (‘friendship’ desexualizes it, ‘love affair’ over-sexualizes it); she is thus making her first appearance in the collected Poésies, and will be met again in ‘The fine suicide fled victoriously …’, and perhaps ‘To introduce myself into your tale …’ and the 1880s revision of ‘What silk with balm from advancing days …’, as well as various uncollected pieces. Pierre Citron, in the Imprimerie Nationale edition of Mallarmé’s Poésies (Paris, 1986), 12, 262, sees the reality of the relationship as being particularly close to the situation described in ‘The hair flight of a flame …’: it clearly involved a strong erotic attraction, yet it was not expressed in overt sexual activity. (As Citron points out, Méry later denied that she had ever been Mallarmé’s mistress; since she made no secret of her liaisons with other public figures, there is no reason to doubt this statement—which fits well with everything that we know of the poet’s complex psychology.) Similarly rich and subtle tensions may be detected in several of Mallarmé’s other poems addressed to her. Nevertheless, ‘The hair flight of a flame …’ is a poem, not a piece of autobiography; Mallarmé designed it to be read in its own right, without recourse to private biographical data, and he would no doubt have rewritten the ‘facts’ of everyday life or jettisoned them altogether, if the needs of the poem had demanded it. His Méry, like his Herodias, need not greatly resemble the historical person of the same name.

13 scorch: (a) scratch (a rare sense in English, but the usual meaning of écorche in French); (b) burn (an Anglicism, suggested here by ‘torch’ in the next line).

Saint

Written December 1865; published 24 November 1883 in Verlaine’s essay on Mallarmé in Lutèce. Cecilia, the patron saint of music, is seen in an emphatically ancient stained-glass window. The earliest surviving draft has the fuller title ‘Saint Cecilia Playing on a Cherub’s Wing’.

2 viol voiding gold: either the gilt of the viol (an aptly antiquated musical instrument, and imagined rather than seen, since the window ‘veils’ it) is peeling with age, or the golden sunset (which used to illuminate it) is now fading.

6 the Magnificat: Mary’s hymn ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord …’, as sung in the Roman Catholic liturgy.

7-8 compline or vespersong: religious rites of evening; in nineteenth-century Roman Catholic ritual, the Magnificat was traditionally sung at vespers.

9 this ostensory pane: the illuminated window is compared to a monstrance or ostensory (a vessel for displaying holy relics).

10 a harp: the angel’s flight makes his wing look like a harp, and from the viewer’s perspective, the saint’s fingertips appear to be almost in contact with it.

13 she: the saint, not the angel (who is male).

Funerary Toast

Written by September 1873; published December 1873 in the memorial volume Le Tombeau de Théophile Gautier. Théophile Gautier (1811–72), poet, novelist, critic, and journalist, had been a tireless supporter of his fellow writers, and his death elicited commemorative tributes from many of them. At the start of 1873, in a letter to François Coppée, Mallarmé described the plan of his poem as follows: ‘I want to praise one of Gautier’s most glorious strengths: “The mystic gift of seeing with the eyes” (delete “mystic”). I shall praise the seer who, set down in this world, looked at it—which people simply don’t do.’ The dead Gautier is not to be mourned (‘I scorn the lucid horror of a tear’); he is an emblem of the ‘happiness’ that awaits all poets: the happiness of ‘enduring’, even after death, by means of ‘radiant eternal genius’.

51 when he rests in pride: ‘he’ is perhaps death, perhaps the poet.

Prose

Written probably by 1876; published January 1885 in La Revue indépendante, when the dedication to des Esseintes (the fictitious protagonist of Huysmans’ 1884 novel A rebours, which had paid generous tribute to Mallarmé) was added. The title is of course an act of playful self-deprecation after the composition of a particularly ambitious poem (compare ‘A Few Sonnets’), but it also reflects the specialized use of the term ‘prose’ for liturgical compositions in rhymed verse (a use employed by Mallarmé himself in ‘Autumn Lament’). The speaker remembers a summer walk with his ‘sister’ on an island rich in flowers. The island, like so many other entities in Mallarmé poems, is situated in a no-man’s-land between fact or fantasy: ll. 37–44 can be read as asserting either its reality, ‘the truth is not (as the shore fraudulently weeps) that there was never such a land’, or its unreality, ‘the truth is not as the shore fraudulently weeps; there was never such a land’. The identity of the ‘sister’ is one of the most disputed points in Mallarmé studies; she has been interpreted as the poet’s beloved sister Maria (who died in 1857), his wife, his daughter Geneviève, one of his friends (e.g. Méry Laurent or Harriet Smyth), an archetypal lover (the beloved is addressed as ‘sister’ in the Song of Songs and in Baudelaire’s ‘L’Invitation au voyage’), the Eternal Feminine, his Muse, his disciple, his reader, a fictional heroine, his childhood self, knowledge, reason, inspiration, memory, and the technique of ‘hyperbole’ that is invoked at the start of the poem. Thus the speaker may be recalling his past relations with a specific individual, or probing an abstract concept (art or beauty or the existence of the Ideal), or working out a poetic strategy to be employed in the future. The playful title, jaunty manner, and virtuoso rhymes have also led to suggestions that the poem is largely a game—that its sense is determined partly by its choice of rhymes (as in the lighter works of many poets; we might compare Rimbaud’s ‘Ce qu’on dit au Poète à propos des fleurs’) and should not be analysed too minutely. This, however, is doubtful: Mallarmé is never more playful than when he is most in earnest.

24 at no word that we could recite: (a) the outspread flowers were not merely invented by our utterance; (b) the outspread flowers struck us dumb.

31 the irid family: the Iridaceae, the family that includes irises (l. 18) and gladioli (l. 56); sometimes placed in the same family as lilies (l. 39) by nineteenth-century botanists.

41 the shore: the people who have been left behind on the shore, and have failed to reach the island.

51 ‘Anastasius!’: ‘Resurrection’ (Greek).

55 ‘Pulcheria!’: ‘Beauty’ (Greek).

Fan (Belonging to Madame Mallarmé)

Written December 1890, and inscribed on a fan as a New Year’s gift to the poet’s wife; published 1 June 1891 in La Conque. The fluttering of the fan is a creative act, like the composition of a poem.

4 its precious dwelling-place: the owner’s hand.

11 scattered dust: the specks of matter that necessarily contaminate the ideal beauty of any creative act.

13 like this: with ‘its wing low’.

Another Fan (Belonging to Mademoiselle Mallarmé)

Written early 1884, and inscribed on a fan presented to the poet’s daughter Geneviève; published 6 April 1884 in La Revue critique. The speaker is the fan itself, addressing its owner; in the initial stanzas she is beating it, in the final stanzas she has closed it. As in the preceding poem, the wielding of the fan parallels the composition of a poem; the addressee, like the poet, is a ‘dreamer’.

Album Leaf

Written July 1890 for the album of Thérèse Roumanille, the daughter of a Provençal poet; published first in an unidentified magazine, then (September-December 1892) in La Wallonie. The speaker presents himself as an ancient faun who has been asked to play the flute; the true value of his performance comes only at its end, when he looks up and sees the beauty of his addressee, which his own art is unable to match.

Remembering Belgian Friends

Written early 1893; published July 1893 in Excelsior 1883–1893, an anniversary volume compiled by the Excelsior Club, a literary group at Bruges. The poet recalls his visit to Belgium in February 1890, when he lectured to the Excelsior Club on the subject of the recently deceased writer Villiers de l’Isle-Adam.

3-4 as I feel … visibly: the two lines form a dependent clause; the principal clause of the sentence runs ‘all the almost incense-hued antiquity … floats or seems…’.

8 we immemorial few who feel so calm: this clause is placed in parentheses in the 1893 edition.

Cheap Songs

Written 1888, to accompany an illustration by Jean-François Raffaëlli; published March 1889 in Les Types de Paris. In ‘The Cobbler’, the speaker complains that his shoes are being repaired only too well: his ‘urge to be passing through’ with ‘heels unclad’ is suppressed by the cobbler’s nails. In ‘The Seller of Scented Herbs’, the speaker comments that, instead of being used to embellish some purchaser’s lavatory and disguise the existence of his bowels, the lavender should be used to embellish its seller and disguise the existence of her lice.

[‘The Cobbler’]

6 places most convenient: the poet slyly embroiders the standard euphemism ‘conveniences’ (lieux d’aisance).

14 firstfruits: under the law of Moses, the Israelites were commanded to bring the Lord an offering from the firstfruits of their harvest (Leviticus 23: 10).

Note

Written early November 1890; published 15 November 1890 in The Whirlwind. What kind of a whirlwind is this magazine? Not a gale blowing hats in the ‘broad highway’, says the poet, but the breeze stirred up by a ballerina dancing in defiance of ‘every well-trodden thing’. The poem was written in response to a request from the American painter and wit James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), a personal friend; in a letter to him, Mallarmé described it as ‘a little sonnet of good wishes, rhyming on your name—Ha, ha, ha!’

2 the broad highway: the rue in nineteenth-century French poetry is the public realm, the sphere of common social and political action.

9 (enraptured, witty, yet inert): the adjectives describe the girl.

11 beyond it: beyond (a) the skirt, (b) the whirlwind.

13 in gay dismissal: perhaps an unacceptably free rendering of the French rieur (‘laughingly’); but we felt that the Whistlerian outrageousness of the final rhyme (puisse l’air—Whistler in the original) was too central to the poem’s effect to be ignored.

Little Ditty I

Written 1894; published November 1894 in L’Epreuve. The speaker, contemplating an unfrequented lake or stream at sunset, sees (at least in imagination) a woman undress and dive into the water.