Indeed, the swan is rich with imagery and a standard symbol of the Parnassian aesthetic. Baudelaire’s swan signifies his view of himself as artist, impersonal, exiled, a stranger to the world. In the Mallarmé poem we could read an extended metaphor of the swan as poet: his body is trapped in the ice as he reaches for the sky (the artist’s sense of impotence), the new day offers the chance of longed-for inspiration, and so on. But if we allow the allegory to take hold, many paradoxical elements have to be overlooked. For example, the swan’s relationship to the ‘horror of earth that traps his wings’ is rather ambivalent. The ‘lost hard lake’ beneath the ice is haunted by ‘ice-flights’. The swan has a close affinity with his holder: flights that have not been flown, turned to ice. Similarly, the dawning day that might release the swan is in some way co-substantial with him: it is expected to act like a swan, ‘with a wing’s wild blow’. This question of coexistence, of separation from and identification with the surroundings, is unsolved in the poem. Then, the swan’s attitude towards his captivity can be read in two conflicting ways. Does he struggle against his winter entrapment but then become resigned to his failure to sing? Or is he magnificent and defiant in a splendid prison that allows him to achieve purity far from the practical world? With these concurrent but opposing positions, we do not know whether the ‘futile things’ to which the swan-poet is condemned in the last line are empty and lifeless or a happy release. Playing with the apparent completion and stillness of the allegory is a conflicting set of contradictory suggestions.

Much Mallarmé criticism has been dogged by an erroneous belief that such completion is recoverable. But the richness of the poems lies in allowing Mallarmé’s carefully engineered discontinuities to breathe. And these ‘rhythms between the relations’, or reflections of the Idea, do not become a loose, nonsensical haze: the reader is guided by a strong framework of oppositions, reflections, and analogies that helps to impose an order—or many orders. All the same, there are never grounds for saying what the poem is ‘really’ about. In disappointing our familiar notions of intelligibility, Mallarmé opens up a performance and exploration of awesome, intractable metaphysical dilemmas.

‘A Dice Throw At Any Time Never Will Abolish Chance’: The Musical Score

In ‘A Dice Throw’ now-familiar themes—terrible Nothingness, the contingency of knowledge, the frailty of language—are writ large at a sharply experiential level. Written towards the end of Mallarmé’s life and published in 1897, it is arguably his culminating work, the ultimate dramatic expression of his ideas and techniques. It tests our most fundamental notions of intelligibility. At the poem’s centre is metaphysical crisis, the constant threat of collapse into incoherence. It is a thoroughgoing investigation of chance as an aesthetic principle; its tension resides in the enactment of the principal statement, ‘A Dice Throw At Any Time Never Will Abolish Chance’.

Mallarmé had experimented with the removal of normal punctuation in some earlier sonnets. Here it is again abandoned in favour of what might be called a spatialized variety. Unusually large blank spaces interrupt the phrases across the double page, at times threatening to engulf it completely. The drama occurs between the instant and the space that reabsorbs it; the extremely mobile text has a fluctuating, rubato-driven reading tempo. In a preface to the poem’s first publication, Mallarmé writes that the spatially separated groups of words are akin to a musical score:

Let me add that, for anyone who would read it aloud, a musical score results from this stripped-down form of thought (with retreats, prolongations, flights) or from its very layout. The difference in type-face between the principal theme, a secondary one, and adjacent ones, dictates the level of importance when uttered orally, and the position on the stave, intermediate, high or low on the page, will indicate how the intonation rises and falls.24

It is the irregular rhythm, at once fluid and restrained, of sonorous and semantic traits interwoven with silence, leading and deflecting potential connections and meanings, that gives the poem its musical qualities. The layout is a new verse form, the shape assumed by the mixture of ‘free verse’ and the prose poem expanded in time and space, akin to symphonic structure. The result is what Mallarmé describes as ‘a simultaneous vision of the Page’, organized around the principal sentence that runs through the text in large uppercase letters as a reminder that every statement is provisional. The different typefaces construct an acoustic presentation of simultaneous events running at intervals through the multi-layered text.

The reader is given certain structural clues that can then be applied elsewhere in the poem. But even as she develops these keys, they dissolve, to be replaced by a different possibility. Just as a glimmer of sense is offered, it retreats from her grasp again. For example, as the dice land in the final line they seem to offer a certainty (‘Every Thought emits a Dice Throw’), but the niggling doubt that ‘NOTHING | WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE | OTHER THAN THE PLACE’ hovers from the preceding page. The descent to the final line appears balanced by ‘A CONSTELLATION’, an immobile cluster on the middle right of the eleventh double page; but that is offset by the downwards pull of ‘keeping watch | wondering | rolling on’ and the vast blank space on the left-hand side. And the last line provides not a point of repose but only a brief staging post: together with the principal statement, it provides an overarching framework for the poem as a whole, an ‘all-at-once’ perception rather than a real-time encounter. The text plunges back into the hypothetical. ‘A Dice Throw’ does not follow a single course.