As such, this sonnet can be read as an occasional toast in honour of his younger poet friends: ‘We all, my various friends, we sail | with myself on the poop-deck now | while you as the majestic prow | cleave wintry seas of blast and gale.’ He has retired to the poop-deck to oversee the younger generation, who are now leading poetry through hostile waters. ‘I stand and offer you this toast | solitude, star, or rocky coast | to things of any kind deserving | of our sail’s white preoccupation.’ Mallarmé toasts these things worthy of the poet’s attention, naming verse metaphorically as the sail of the poetry ship. The metaphor for the poet and poetry, then, grows out of the occasion: the champagne foaming in the cup suggests the foam whipped up by the sea, from which comes the image of the sirens; the white tablecloth of the banquet hall suggests the sail. The verse itself is the foam, is produced out of a ‘Nothing’, an insignificant toast: ‘this foam, this virgin verse | designating the cup, no more.’ In spite of the drunken pitching and tossing of the boat, the poet heroically stands firm to toast the poetic act. Mallarmé paints himself with a delicate blend of self-irony, wit, and seriousness. He is ‘spurred by a fine intoxication’, but steadfastly ‘fearless’. This is pure frivolity based on nothing (but) foam; but it is a frivolity that produces lasting poetry saluting the heroism of the artist.

Mallarmé put this poem first in italic type as a kind of epigraph. He stressed its ambiguity by changing its title from ‘Toast’ (the same in French as in English) to ‘Salut’, a pun on the French greeting ‘Hello there’ and noun ‘Salvation’. In this new role the poem has the added dimensions of note to the reader, an au lecteur and dedication. It invites the reader to make a precarious, but perhaps redemptive, voyage through the collection, while ‘Nothingness’, lurking everywhere behind, is dedicated as a treacherous sea—a sea that will appear in other poems, such as ‘Stilled beneath the oppressive cloud …’ and ‘For the sole task of travelling …’. The nautical image will reach its climax in A Dice Throw, where the risk that ‘NOTHING | WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE | OTHER THAN THE PLACE’ is terrifyingly dramatized.

Mallarmé’s work is remarkable for its sheer variety and degree of experimentation. ‘A Faun in the Afternoon’ is an early and radical example. An extraordinary hymn to the undefinable, unlocatable moment of intense eroticism, it lingers and hovers on the edge of illusion. We cannot be sure whether or not the scene takes place: the faun muses, ‘Did I love a dream?’ Syntactic patterns are left incomplete (‘Let me reflect …’), creating sudden breaks in sense that dramatize the ebb and flow of doubt and certainty, of the struggle to rekindle memories of intoxicating desire. Such incomplete propositions throw up unresolved possibilities that resonate and hover in the blank spaces on the page; italic type is used to suggest a shift in mood or tone of voice. Both these techniques foreshadow the orchestration of the acoustic drama in the yet more innovative A Dice Throw. Faun creates unprecedented rhythmical asymmetry and new possibilities of sound, which may be what attracted Debussy to base his tone poem on it.

Broken syntax and semantic discontinuity occur throughout Mallarmé’s poems, of course, but within the constraints laid down by sonnet form and, in most cases, punctuation. (Poems that appear later in the volume, such as ‘To introduce myself into your tale …’ and ‘Stilled beneath the oppressive cloud …’, abandon punctuation.) From the grammatical ambiguities produced by the syntactical interruptions a whole host of possible senses and connections arises. The reader is stripped of the usual guidelines for reading; she cannot follow the expected thread of continuous syntax. Line phrases are interrupted by parenthetical propositions or by phrases whose grammatical status cannot be established until several lines later. Add to this the pushes and pulls created by the conflicting frameworks of metre and rhyme and one can sense the enormous complexity. The process of reading injects intellectual doubt into traditional poetic structures. In ‘Little Ditty I’, for example, the ruptured texture prevents us ever quite knowing where to start or how to get a grip on the poem. The Shakespearean sonnet form draws attention immediately to the final couplet, which stands summatively alone: ‘your naked bliss should plumb | the wave that you become.’ It asserts the prospect of an imminent dramatic climax and forms a focal point towards which the poem should progress. The rhyme scheme is rich and symmetrical (solitude/desuetude; pier/here // high/sky; hold/gold; and so on). But from the very first instant the reader’s progress is hindered by the textual forces exerted.

But this is not to say that the experience of reading Mallarmé is one of feeling perpetually lost, or that no meaning can be reached, leaving us with nothing much more than superior nonsense. There are poems in which there is a coherent set of concerns; in which uncertainties can form a kind of simplicity, though they draw attention to their own frailty. And the poetry demands of the reader an active participation. The structured hesitation and mobile stasis in the texts initiate a self-conscious signifying and interpretative practice. Some texts yield to pressure: from some of the multiple available meanings, the sense of a goal is strong enough for other meanings to be discarded or to linger in the background. But the poems vary in difficulty, intensity, and open-endedness. Some sonnets have difficulty at their very heart and never settle into any one pattern; the questions they pose are left unresolved. To try to constrain them is seriously to reduce their intellectual subtlety. One such is ‘Prose (For des Esseintes)’, linguistically and conceptually a most taxing poem: it constantly opens out, proposing change and new directions.

Yet faced with the semantic and phonetic overloading of such a difficult poem it is easy to want to fix an interpretation. For ‘This virginal long-living lovely day’, many commentators have done so using the allegory of its swan.