HERODIADE

Mallarme began Herodiade in 1864 at the age of twenty-two and continued working on it throughout his life. That the poem remained unfinished at his death is a testament to the struggle for purity and perfection that is one of its themes, and also to Valery's melancholy dictum that a poem is never completed but only abandoned. Of the three sections of Herodiade that have traditionally been included in editions of Mallarmes Poesies since 1898, only the second, the "Scene," was published during the poet's lifetime. The "Ouverture Ancienne" and the "Cantique de Saint Jean," the two other sections, present themselves as finished pieces and contain poetry of the highest quality, but it is unclear what their ultimate disposition in the completed work would have been, or whether indeed they would have been included at all. In a letter of April 1866, Mallarme writes to Cazalis: "I've written the musical overture, which is still almost completely in draft stage, but I can say in all modesty that it will create an unparalleled effect and that in comparison with these lines, the dramatic scene you know is like a mere vulgar scrawl compared with a canvas by Leonardo da Vinci" (Correspondance de Stephane Mallarme,1, 207; Selected Letters, 59—60). Later, however, he may have decided to substitute a "Prelude" for the "Ouverture Ancienne." Fragmentary drafts of this "Prelude," as well as a "Scene Intermediaire" and a "Finale," exist in manuscript and have been analyzed by Gardner Davies in Les Noces d'Herodiade, Mystere (1959), which is the title that Mallarme seems to have been working with at the end. The three sections of Herodiade that are included in the standard Pleiade edition constitute a kind of triptych and can be read (and translated) as a completed work; they are included in the present translation for that reason. The "Ouverture Ancienne" is spoken by the Nurse, the "Scene" is a Racinian dialogue between the Nurse and Herodiade, and the concluding "Cantique de Saint Jean" is spoken by the saint himself.

The germination and early composition of Herodiade coincides with the religious crisis (to which we have referred in the Introduction) that the poem itself dramatizes and with the development of aesthetic principles that we now associate with Mallarme and with the Symbolist Movement in general. Mallarme's letters during this period resemble no one's so much as Keats's, and make for equally exciting reading; for like Keats at the time the great odes were written, Mallarme was distilling a philosophy of poetic composition directly from his work on Herodiade in the middle 1860s. Thus, in the famous letter to Cazalis of October 1864, in which he refers to the poem for the first time, he writes:

Because words have meanings, poetry must always have a content; but on the principles enunciated above, poetic content becomes a pretext for its own transcendence. This is made clear in a letter to Villiers de L'Isle-Adam of December 1865. "In a word," writes Mallarme, "the subject of my work [he is referring both to Herodiade and to his poetry in general] is Beauty and its ostensible subject is merely a pretext for approaching Beauty [Ellel" (Selected Letters, 58). The capitalized pronoun, "Elle," in this passage, emphasizes the identification of Mallarme's heroine not only with the poem she names but also with Poetry itself, and indeed with Beauty.

The "ostensible subject" of the poem—the biblical story of Herodias, Salome, and John the Baptist (Mallarme seems to have collapsed Herodias and her daughter Salome into one figure: he gives Herodiade a father but no mother)—is merely a pretext for the real subject of the poem, Beauty. We can go further than this. The ostensible subject of the poem and its real subject are, in the case of Herodiade, incommensurate with each other and even in contradiction with each other. Indeed, this contradiction was precisely what Mallarme was aiming for in the poem, and this means that the ostensible subject of the poem was arrived at not in spite of the contradiction with its real subject but because of that contradiction. F. C. St. Aubyn reminds us of the many representations of the story in the art and literature of the period (see Stephane Mallarme, 38—41), and certainly, the Romantic-decadent overtones of the Salome story made it a subject ready-to-hand. But for Mallarme, in contrast to many of his contemporaries who revelled in the sadistic overtones of the story, what the "ostensible subject" provided was a vehicle for its own transcendence, and this means that the poem is ultimately an allegory of the poetic process itself.

The paradox of Herodiade is that Mallarme has chosen a subject deeply embedded in history precisely in order to overcome history, and hence to overcome language and "the subject" itself. This is made clear in his letter to Eugene Lefebure of February 1865:

As Robert Cohn notes, the tonal associations of "Herodiade" include heros, Eros, and rose (Toward the Poems of Mallarme, 53), and this is perhaps why the name can serve Mallarme as a metonym for Beauty. It originally appears in "Les Fleurs" as a species of rose ("And, like the flesh of woman, the cruel rose, / Herodiade blooming in the garden light, / She that from wild and radiant blood arose!"— literally: "She that a wild and radiant blood waters" ["Et, pareille la chair de la femme, la rose / Cruelle, Herodiade en fleur du jardin clair, / Celle qu'un sang farouche et radieux arrose!"]). Perhaps we can say, therefore, that Herodiade, Mallarmes strange allegorical creation, on which he was to labor for more than thirty years, constitutes his "Romance of the Rose." It is interesting that Mallarme associates the name "Herodiade" with a pomegranate because of the famous passage in "L'Apres-midi d'un Faune" in which the pomegranate appears as a figure of desire:

"You know, my passion, that, crimson with ripe seeds, / Pomegranates burst in a murmur of bees; /And that our blood, seized by each passing form, / Flows toward desire's everlasting swarm" ("Tu sais, ma passion, que, pourpre et deja mure, / Chaque grenade eclate et d'abeilles murmure; / Et notre sang, epris de qui le va saisir, / Coule pour tout l'essaim eternel du desir"). "Underneath all this related imagery," Cohn observes, "is the secret connection between sexual consummation and blood sacrifice" (53), and on the representational level there is certainly a sense in which this is so. But Herodiade's desire for purity, her rejection of life—which, as Michaud maintains, makes her the perfect symbol of Mallarme's poetry (Mallarme, 33)—is tantamount to the poem's at tempt to transcend the representational level through a process of distillation that aims at essentializing the rose itself, until all that is left is a name.

At the same time, however, Herodiade is a poem that remains deeply enmeshed in history. This is true on a number of levels. First of all, it could he argued that the attempt on the part of a poet such as Mallarme' to transcend history is itself constitutive of a particular historical milieu, and this is essentially the argument that Sartre puts forward in his revealing though ultimately reductionary study of Mallarme, The Poet of Nothingness. But more importantly, at the same time that it aims at the transcendence of history, Herodiade contains within itself a historical vision that verges on the apocalyptic and that points ambiguously to the transformation of one historical epoch into another. This is where the salience of the biblical story line comes into play. At the end of the "Scene," for example, Herodiade is left waiting for "une chose inconnue," and clearly this has something to do with her fatal meeting with John the Baptist. But, as always, the poet's meaning remains shrouded in mystery. Although the text evokes the coming of Christianity on the level of drama or plot, could it be that it points to something else entirely—indeed, to something entirely opposite? Or, to frame the question more explicitly: "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?"

D'HERODIADE / ANCIENT OVERTURE

OF HERODIADE

Unfortunately, in the course of quarrying out the lines to this extent, I've come across two abysses, which fill me with despair. One is the Void ["le Ne'ant"], which I've reached without any knowledge of Buddhism, and I'm still too distraught to be able to believe even in my poetry and get back to work, which this crushing awareness ["pensee"] has made me abandon.

Yes, I know, we are merely empty forms of matter, but we are indeed sublime in having invented God and our soul. So sublime, my friend, that I want to gaze upon matter, fully conscious that it exists, and yet launching itself madly into Dream, despite its knowl edge that Dream has no existence, extolling the Soul and all the divine impressions of that kind which have collected within us from the beginning of time and proclaiming, in the face of the Void which is truth, these glorious lies! ["mensonges"]. (Selected Letters, 60)

The syntactical complexity of the last sentence is akin to what we begin to find in the "Ouverture Ancienne." In that sentence, empty matter, hurling itself into the Dream, sings praises of a nonexistent soul, which in turn proclaims the "glorious lies" it has woven around itself. The Real and the Ideal comprehend each other as in a mirror.

Mallarme composed the "Ouverture Ancienne" mainly during the period from 1865 to 1866, but the poem never appeared in print during his lifetime and he may have continued to work on it in later years. The manuscript, which is housed in the Collection Mine. Edmond Bonniot in the Bibliotheque Litteraire Jacques Doucet in Paris, contains many variants, and since Mallarme never authorized its publication, we are not in possession of anything even approaching a definitive text. The poem appeared for the first time in 1926, in the Nouvelle Revue Francraise, as edited by Edmond Bonniot. It has been included in all subsequent editions of the Poesies, including the standard Pleiade editions of 1945 and 1951. There are discrepancies between the Bonniot and Pleiade versions, however, and, as Gardner Davie's editing of the Herodiade manuscripts has shown (see Les Noces d'Herodiade, Mystere [1959]), the Pleiade text of the "Ouverture" contains a number of inaccuracies. A definitive text of the poem will probably continue to elude scholars because, as the manuscript shows, in certain lines of the poem Mallarme was hesitating between variants (see Les Noces d'Herodiade, 143— 164); moreover, even if this were not the case, the poet may very well have returned to older solutions or may have arrived at entirely new ones if he had actually prepared the work for publication. The version of the "Ouverture" that is included by Mallarme's most recent editors, Carl Paul Barbier and Charles Gordon Millan, in their critical edition of the Poe'sies OEuvres Completes, 1983), was prepared on the basis of what seem to have been Mallarme's latest emendations, but, in several cases at least, this version strikes me as poetically inferior to the Pleiade text. In preparing the French text of the "Ouverture," I have consulted all of the sources mentioned above and have made extensive use of Professor Davies's work to correct the Pleiade edition.

An incantation is the chanting of a magical spell or formula for the purpose of evoking something, and in the nurse's incantation it is Herodiade herself who is being evoked. On the dramatic level, she has fled from her bed, but the opening word of the poem, "abolie," which is repeated in the second line, suggests that what she represents has been abolished or nullified and therefore requires to be evoked by the incantation of poetry. The metaphorical connection between poetry and magic occurs several times in the Poesies, most notably, in "Prose," where the "grimoire" (grammary of magic spells) appears in line 3, just as it does in line 61 of the "Ouverture." "Abolie" occurs in the same sentence as "tour," and this conjunction reminds us of one of the most famous lines in French poetry, "Le Prince d'Aquitaine a la tour abolie," from Gerard de Nerval's sonnet, "El Desdichado."

What is being both evoked and invoked in the opening lines of the "Ouverture" is a lost beauty that, on one level, existed in the past but, on another, never existed and could never exist, corresponding as it does to the Ideal. This conception of beauty is evoked metaphorically—but ambiguously and ambivalently—as a Dawn whose wing like rays are mirrored in a pool of water. The capitalized Dawn (Aurora) with heraldic wings of line 4 may or may not be the lowercased dawn "au vain plumage noir" of line 7, into which the "bel oiseau" of line 6 flees, but the orthography of the manuscript seems clear on this point, and, although the transformation from capitalized to lowercase "aurore" is difficult to parse, per haps we can see in it an allegory of beauty struggling to materialize itself and being thrust back into the night of oblivion and nonexistence. In any event, the bird/dawn motif (which is carried over from "Don du Poeme") is then connected to the "plume" and the swan of lines 10 and 11; and like the swan of Mallarme's famous sonnet, "Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui," the swan of the "Ouverture" is in turn connected to the stars. The "plume" is simultaneously the feather in which the swan buries its head in death and the poet's pen (hence my "quill" in line 10). The mournful water of the pool is no longer visited either by the swan or by the pen, and thus whatever beauty it contains is lost or held in abeyance. That beauty, we may say, has fled from the tower, the tomb, and the pyre, in connection with which beauty is habitually sacrificed. It is difficult to say, however, whether the bird that has fled from the sacrificial tower/tomb exists on the same symbolic plane as the swan, not only because the latter, like the swan in the sonnet, finds a tomb within its own feathers, but because in death it is unwillingly frozen in the eternity of its own constellation, Cygnus. If the bird is a univocal symbol, it seeks to escape simultaneously from a death-in-life and a life-in-death.

Beauty, in the opening stanza of the "Ouverture is either in danger of being lost amid terror and inquisition (to paraphrase Eliot in "Gerontion") or, to adopt a still more sinister possibility, is actually predicated on terror and inquisition. In like manner whatever sense of the sacred is projected by the poem is bound up with the horror of sacrifice. Thus, in lines 17—19 (which, following the Flammarion text, we give as a separate stanza [Barbier and Millan, oEuvres Completes, 2081), a stained-glass window ("vitrail"), anachronistically evoking the imminence of Christianity, gives out on a scene of imagined horror. Both Nature and Art are implicated in this horror, as the colors of the Dawn, evoking ritual sacrifice, are mirrored in the pool and blended with the colors in the stained glass itself.

We then move to an interior framed by the window, as in a still life. There is a lovely ambiguity in line 22, on which the temporal existence of the ambiance being evoked is hinged: either the room has always had an ancient snow-white tint or its former colors have faded ("ancienne" can mean both ancient and former). The tapestry has folds or creases ("plis") that will be echoed by the "yellow folds of thought" (line 41), which in turn will be likened to the folds of a cloth covering holy relics and to the folds of a shroud, and further echoed in the final stanza by the folds of the sheets on which Herodiade had lain, the folds of the grammary, or ancient book of magic spells, and the folds of the imagination or reverie. The folds of the tapestry are uselessly closed to the viewer ("inutile"), much as the book with vellum pages (lines 5940) is uselessly closed to the reader, "cloistered" from sight ("claustral"): whatever meaning or beauty they contain is lost or at least hidden away. But the folds of the tapestry contain the buried, or downcast, eyes of sibyls, who extend withered fingernails to Mages. St. Aubyn insightfully suggests that the sibyls, belonging to the pre-Christian or pagan world, are not only pointing to the Christian era but passing along their prophetic function to the Magi of the gospel story; he also notes that the word ongle" ("fingernail") derives from the Greek onyx (Stephane Mallarme, 43-44)—and this reminds us of the first line of the famous "Sonnet-en-yx" ("Ses purs ongles tres haut dediant leur onyx" ["Her pure nails on high displaying their onyx"]), which in turn suggests that the nails of the sibyls, raised in prophecy to the stars, are like the stars. At the end of the poem, the sky will be reflected in the fingernail, as in a mirror (lines 82—84).

The milk of the mother nursing her child in "Don du Poeme" had been described as "sibylline," and in that context the mother/nurse had been linked to the poet, as engenderer of the poem—a poem entitled Herodiade, the name of a princess, and hence evocative, by the magic of naming, of her being. The connection in the "Ouverture" between the sibyls on the tapestry and the incantatory Nurse, who thus stands for the poet, is solidified through a very strange gesture. One of the sibyls, "avec un passe de ramages"—with a past, or embroidery, of flowering vines—seems literally to fly out of the tapestry (and out of the past) to become the Nurse: her past is embroidered on the Nurse's dress. Davies's collation of the manuscripts indicates that, at one point, Mallarme was working with the possibility of "Une, qui s'en detache, avec un passe de ramages" ("One, who detaches herself... "—that is, from the tapestry [Les Noces d'Herodiade, Mystere, 1461), and Barbier and Millan have interpreted the manuscript as read ing "Je m'en detache" at this point ('OEuvres Completes, 208), although this makes the syntax that follows ungrammatical. In any event, the Nurse's gown is embroidered with birds, and the sibyl, having risen as a birdlike phantom from the tapestry, now enters into the ordinary objects of the room, endowing them with a sibylline quality of mystery: the roses, the snuffed-out candle (which shrouds the empty bed from which Herodiade, birdlike herself, has flown), and the vase, in which the flowers drench their stems— which returns us to the poem's opening image.

Hence the apostrophe that opens the ensuing stanza: "Ombre magicienne aux symboliques charmes!" (line 38). The opening phrase (both words are feminine nouns, to match the "sibylle") can be translated either as "Magical shadow" or as "Shadowy magician." The Nurse hears a voice that is a distant evocation of the past, or of a past that never was, and it turns out to be her own, "prepared for incantation." The whole poem, however, is the Nurse's incantation, and thus, in a profoundly Keatsian moment, the magical shadow takes on substance in a moment of time that blots Out time.

In the fourth stanza of Keats's "Nightingale" ode, the poet realizes that he is "already with" the Nightingale, that is, already in the presence of Poetry, because, although he had been lamenting his estrangement, he is already in the ode, already composing it. A similar moment occurs at this point in the "Ouverture," just as other moments of this kind will occur in the "Scene" and in "L'Apres-midi d'un Faune." The sibyl, the voice of prophecy, rises from the past, from the aged—hence yellow—folds of thought itself, woven as in a tapestry. The participle "trainant" (line 42) is extremely interesting at this point because it connects the "ombre magicienne" (and hence the sibyl) to the Aurora dragging her wings in the basin's tears. But the larger issue at hand is whether there will be a resurrection of the ancient powers of poetry and prophecy that have now been evoked but that are still lingering and unexhumed. (Mallarme's "Ouverture," it turns out, is an ode, in the manner of Blake, to the ancient power of pro phetic poetry: "How have you left the antient love / That bards of old enjoy'd in you! / The languid strings do scarcely move! / The sound is forc'd, the notes are few!" ["To the Muses"].) The prophetic voice has been smothered but is not entirely extinguished; the metaphor the poet gives is of a shroud, or sacramental cloth covering holy relics, which nevertheless allows "the old veiled brightness" ("le vieil eclat voile" —line 46) to break free. The question that is then asked of that prophetic—indeed, apocalyptic—voice is whether it will be able to achieve a final, ultimate splendor ("derniere" has the force of both meanings), an idea that is expressed through one of Mallarme's favorite metaphors, the golden shower ("Jettera-t-il son or par dernieres splendeurs" [line 51]), returning us to the opening images of the poem and hence to the possibility of a new dawn taking shape against the blackness of the night. Will that voice, the poet seems to ask—even in its death agony, even insofar as it expresses the "swan song" of European, Christian civilization, and even as it turns into the past from which it arose—be able to serve as a new psalm of petition ("l'antienne aux versets demandeurs"—literally: "the antiphon to petition ary verses")? A great deal is at stake in these lines; indeed, not less than everything is at stake: "For all are alike in being brought to perdition / By the power of old silence and deepening gloom" (lines 54—55). Recall the sentence from the letter quoted at the beginning of the discussion of the "Ouverture":

"Yes, I know, we are merely empty forms of matter, but we are indeed sublime in having invented God and our soul."

The prophetic voice of poetry that has been evoked from the past by the incantatory Nurse is, of course, Herodiade herself, whose dawn flight from her bed can be taken to symbolize the loss or absence of beauty, of poetry, now considered as the object rather than from the standpoint of the subject. In the opening lines of the concluding stanza, as the word "grimoire" in line 61 indicates, Mallarme begins to develop a conception that he will take up again more rigorously in "Prose (pour des Esseintes)," and this has to do with the very nature of the poetic process. To Mallarme, as to the Greeks before him and to poets such as Yeats after him, poetry comes from the outside. The problem, however, is that in the moment of inspiration the poet is bombarded, as it were, by sense impressions that do not order themselves in a logically extended fashion but are instead con tamed in a moment of time. Thus, if Herodiade's song is "incoherent" (line 58), this is not because poetry is meaningless but rather, as Paul de Man has written with reference to Mallarme, because it contains so much meaning. Or, as Mallarme will express the matter in "Prose," the vision of Beauty simply transcends the power of Reason to encapsulate it.

"Everything in the world," wrote Mallarme in a passage quoted earlier, "exists in order to culminate in a book" (see above, p. xiv). The wordplay in lines 59 and 60 on "velin" and "le lin" (the vellum sheets of a book and the linen sheets of a bed) connects Herodiade's absence from her bed with her absence from the book, and therefore underlines the sense in which she corresponds to a beauty that has been lost to the ravages of time. And from here the poem modulates to lines on time that are among the most lovely that Mallarme ever wrote. The crescent moon, visible at "wicked evening" (line 68), is Time's scythe slicing apart the pomegranates. The pomegranate, as we noted earlier, is a figure of desire in Mallarme, and in the present context, as St. Aubyn observes, "is the red of the sun and the day that night effectively eliminates" (Stephane Mallarme, 46); but we should also recall the letter to Lefebure quoted earlier in which Mallarme speaks of Herodiade's name as being "dark and red as an open pomegranate" (see p. 170). As the moon traverses the heavens, it is also a pendulum on the iron clock face of night, anchored on Lucifer, the morning star. Time is the evil, and, as the scythe wounds the hours, each one wanders, a shade of its former self, unaccompanied by any angel and wept over only by the clepsydra, the water clock. In lines 7 1—72, because of the repetition of "pas" as the end-rhyme, and also because of the sparse punctuation, we are presented with an angel who is then negated when the syntax becomes clear. The anguish in these lines is Pascalian: it is in relation to a dark, impersonal, meaningless nature against which man posits his conceptions.

There is no stanza break in the manuscript after line 74, but this point marks the denouement of the poem. The ensuing lines on Herodiade's father, with his arms of steel, are perhaps motivated by the wounding scythe of the crescent moon. Whatever this bellicose father/king ultimately represents, the Nurse tells us that she is under his jurisdiction and that the breasts with which she formerly nursed the princess are now dry. On an allegorical level, the aging of the Nurse and the absence of the princess are one and the same fact. The Nurse asks, rhetorically, whether the father will ever return from the Cisalpines—that is, from the side of the Alps nearest Rome—and her prophetic answer is that this will occur soon enough. If the king represents a pagan past, then the Nurse's prophecy amounts to something like Nietzsche's cyclical conception of history, the idea of the Eternal Return. Again, if, on the most immediate level, the poem represents the coming of Christianity, at the same time, through a kind of Hegelian play of opposites, and with specific reference to Mallarme's own historical situation, it also represents the demise of Christianity.

Thus, the fingernail, which had previously been connected to the sibyls in the tapestry, is raised prophetically amid the stained glass, where it mirrors the apocalyptic burning of the old sky. By a typically Mallarmean association, the finger turns into a Christian candle, which, however, is melted by the sinking sun. The "Ouverture" had opened with the redness of a frightful dawn, and the apocalyptic meaning of that dawn is now fully grasped for the first time, almost in the manner of Revelations. The tears of the Nurse's prophecy fall on the child, who, insofar as she represents Beauty, is once again a Beauty unattamable. Exiled to her own proud heart, to the poem named after her, she is again compared to the swan that at death turns into its own constellation.

 

II. SCENE/SCENE

Mallarme originally conceived of Herodiade as a drama, partly along Racinian lines, and the first section of the poem to be composed, the "Scene" between Herodiade and the Nurse, is reminiscent in many ways of dialogues in Phidre. The poem has a classical polish and brilliance that critics have often associated with Byzantine art. To Albert Thibaudet, for example, it "takes on the aspect of a Byzantine mosaic, recalling the Theodora of Ravenna. The brightness of its colors is blended with the coldness of precious stones. The words.., are juxtaposed like jewels lit up by their own fires" (La Poesie de Stephane Mallarme, 389). The conception of art that Yeats develops in his "Byzantium" poems may well have been influenced by Herodiade.

The "Scene" was begun in October 1864, shortly before the birth of Mallarme's daughter, Genevieve, in November. In his letters of that period, the poet playfully refers to Herodiade and Genevieve as his "two daughters," and sometimes complains that the cries of the latter make it impossible for him to attend to the former. He worked on Herodiade throughout the winter of 1865 and then put it aside in the spring of that year in order to concentrate on a new poem, "L'Apres-midi d'un Faune." He had originally hoped to have Herodiade produced by the Theatre Francais and had been encouraged in this hope by Theodore de Banville, whose own Diane au Bois (which may have influenced both Herodiade and "L'Apres-midi") had been performed at the Odeon in October 1863 (CC, 1441). In a letter of 31 March 1865, Banville urges Mallarme to "try to bring out the dramatic interest, along with the poetry, for you will do more for our cause by composing your work in a manner that will make it well received and acted than by making it more poetic and less actable" (CC, 1441; translation mine). Predictably, when Mallarme resumed working on Herodiade in the fall it was no longer as a drama. Indeed, one might observe that the transformation of dramatic action into pure lyricism is not only an aspect of the texture of Mallarme's style but, in Herodiade and particularly in the "Scene," has assumed thematic proportions. "The failure of 'Herodiade' to be an histoire," writes Richard Goodkin, "is based on a double rejection of normative temporality: its heroine's refusal to instigate a love story by accepting a lover or husband, and Mallarme's refusal to make his tragic poem into a 'story"' (Around Proust, 50).

Nevertheless, the "Scene" does hover around a series of dramatic actions, albeit in a manner that is at once operatic and lyrical. Mallarme was deeply influenced by Wagner (although he never actually witnessed a performance of one of the composer's op eras), and the slow pacing of the "Scene" may have been influenced as much by Wagnerian opera as by Racinian drama. (Debussy's great opera, Pelleas et Melisande [1902], may, in turn, have been influenced not only by Wagner but by Mallarme as well.) In operatic fashion, the "Ouverture" is interrupted by the Nurse's expression of astonishment at Herodiade's return, and with that the "Scene" begins. As St. Aubyn notes, the dramatic movement of the "Scene" is punctuated by three actions on the part of the Nurse and three reactions on the part of Herodiade:

when the Nurse offers to kiss the princess's hand, when she offers perfume, and when she attempts to replace a fallen lock of hair, Herodiade recoils violently (Stephane Mallarme, 49). Herodiade's desire to remain "inviolate to the touch" (line 106), her desire to maintain a self-enclosed purity, clearly has a broad chain of symbolic implications, concretizing as it does the poet's meditation on the religious nature of art. There is a deep ambiguity here, however, which emerges at the outset of the "Scene," and this concerns the relationship between Beauty and Death. In one sense, Beauty achieves immortality by cordoning itself off from Life, which is to say, from Death; but in another sense, by doing so, Beauty is Death. Thus, "A kiss would kill me, woman, / If beauty were not death" (lines 7—8).

Art, for Mallarme, and for the Symbolist imagination in general, is a mirror not of the external world but of the Ideal. In lines 45—51 of the "Scene," when Herodiade asks the Nurse to hold up a looking glass, there is an echo of I Corinthians 13.12: "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." Mallarme reverses the Pauline metaphor, such that the mirror of art can focus the otherwise scattered Dream and allow for a glimpse into the Ideal. Thus, Herodiade says: "I've glimpsed the Ideal in all its nakedness!" ("J'ai de mon reve epars connu la nudite!" [line 51], or more literally:

"I've understood the scattered fragments of my dream in its nakedness").

As the Nurse intuits, however, the religion of art carries very definite risks, and the "Scene" as a whole is permeated by ambivalence and terror. In gazing at herself in the mirror, Herodiade is an avatar of Narcissus, and to see the Dream in its nakedness is also to gaze into nothingness. According to the Nurse, Herodiade feels no more than the shadow she contemplates in a state of anomie ("atonie" in the French—line 77); and she herself refers to the country she inhabits as single-toned or monotonous ("monotone"—line 113). Clearly, Mallarme has thought through the negative as well as the positive implications of a religion of art in which the figures on the urn "pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone." In de scribing herself as an object of worship, Herodiade does not hesitate to use the word "idolatry" (line 114).

There is tremendous pathos, however, in Herodiade's long aria, "Oui, c'est pour moi, pour moi, que je fleuris, deserte!" (line 86), a pathos stemming from our sense that Beauty must always flourish in isolation. The word "deserte," in the context of line 86, can mean both "deserted" or "in this desert," and the whole passage, with its flower and gem imagery, descends from a famous stanza in Gray's Elegy:

Herodiade invoking the precious stones that lie buried is, herself, a buried precious stone, and thus the aria rises to a moment of Keatsian transcendence in which desire and fulfillment are made one in the poetic utterance itself. This occurs at the point at which Herodiade invokes the Moon: "And your solitary sister, 0 mine forever now, / My dream shall

rise toward you: already such" ("Et ta sceur solitaire, 6 ma sceur eternelle / Mon reve montera vers toi: telle deja—lines 110—111). Just as, in the "Ouverture Ancienne," the Nurse discovers that the prophetic voice she has been hearing is her own, so now the phrase "telle deja" indicates that the princess is already at one with her desire. But as the ensuing lines indicate, this "final enchantment" (line 117) is purchased at very great cost.

Indeed, as Herodiade's "marriage" to John the Baptist indicates, the cost is something akin to Pauline dualism. The evening star, Venus, whom Herodiade hates, is the morning star, to which Christianity will give the name of Lucifer—and thus, the lines on Venus in the "Scene" resonate with those on Lucifer in the "Ouverture." The next logical step in this progression—before the pendulum shifts in the op posite direction, to the pagan revitalization of "L'Apres-midi d'un Faune"—is the little canticle spoken by the saint himself.

III. CANTIQUE DE SAINT JEAN / CANTICLE OF SAINT JOHN

The "Cantique de Saint Jean" was not published until the 1913 edition of the Poesies. The editors of the Peliade edition believe that it was composed around the same time as the "Scene" (CC, 1446), but this is not certain and internal evidence would seem to connect the "Cantique" even more strongly to the "Ouverture Ancienne." The poem is written in a four-line stanza that is unusual for Mallarme and that he may have borrowed from Banvile; the first three lines of each stanza contain six syllables, and the last line four. The very short lines, together with the rhymed couplets, produce an effect of condensation and immediacy, especially after the drawn-out alexandrines of the "Ouverture" and the "Scene."

The speaker of the "Cantique" is Saint John him self—at the very moment of his beheading. The feast of Saint John occurs on June 24, around the time of the summer solstice, and the moment at which the severed head is at its highest point before falling to earth coincides with the moment at which the sun is at its highest point in the sky at the solstice. In metaphysical terms, this point is outside of time, or marks the cessation of time, and thus the natural is raised (or "exalted") to the supernatural. The de capitating scythe ("faux") that exalts the saint and the metaphysical notion of time standing still have both been prepared by the "Ouverture": by the image of the crescent moon wounding the hours and by the apocalyptic conclusion.

There has been a tendency among critics to interpret the "Cantique" reductively. Thus, Mauron has argued that the poem should be understood in terms of castration anxiety (Introduction to the Psycho analysis of Mallarme, 123—128), and Michaud, that the death and transfiguration of the saint should be understood as the death and transfiguration of the poet (Mallarme, 151). Michaud's argument at least has the virtue of allowing us to see the "Cantique" in connection with such poems as the sonnet on the death of Poe, but there is no need to see the saint as symbolizing the poet, or vice versa: instead, the saint and the poet should be seen as existing on the same symbolic plane, since in both cases a similar set of dualisms is being played out. The line concluding the "Cantique," "Penche un salut," means both "ex tends a salutation" (the saint doffs his head rather than a cap) and "offers salvation." "Salut," as we have already seen in connection with the poem that opens the Poesies, has both a secular and a sacred meaning, and whatever Mallarme's ultimate intentions in regard to Herodiade may have been, it is fitting that the poem should end on this ambiguity. Richard Goodkin suggests that by ending the "Cantique" on this note, Mallarme offers a subtle intertextual "salute" to Racine, whose first name was "Jean-Baptiste" (see Around Proust, 5 1—56).

PROSE (POUR DES ESSEINTES) / PROSE
(FOR DES ESSEINTES)

"Prose," which was first published in La Revue Independante in January 1885, is one of Mallarme's most extraordinarily difficult poems and one that has elicited perhaps a greater amount of commentary than any other in the Poesies. The poem is dedicated to des Esseintes, the hero of J.-K. Huysmans's novel of 1884 entitled A Rebours (usually translated as Against the Grain), and the dedication has often been read as part of the title—with the correlative assumption that "Prose" was conceived directly in response to the novel. However, recently discovered manuscripts, including a partial autograph version of the poem that Henri Mondor published in 1954, indicate that "Prose" probably originated during the 1870s and, as Marshall C. Olds observes, that only its dedication is occasional (Desire Seeking Expression, 16—17). This possibility is interesting because, as we shall have occasion to note, "Prose" resonates in important ways with "Toast Funebre," the elegy to Gautier of 1873 that it immediately follows in the Poesies. "Prose" is written in octosyllahic quatrains of alternating rhymes, rather than in the alexan drines of "Toast Funebre," but both poems contain fifty-six lines.

In Chapter 14 of A Rebours, des Esseintes medi tates for some eight pages on the poetry of Mallarme:

"[H]e loved the works of this poet who, in an age of democracy devoted to lucre, lived his solitary and literary life sheltered by his disdain from the encompassing stupidity, delighting, far from society, in the surprises of the intellect, in cerebral visions, refining on subtle ideas, grafting Byzantine delicacies upon them, perpetuating them in suggestions lightly connected by an imperceptible thread" (Against the

Grain, trans. John Howard [New York: Boni, 1924], 294—295). Huysmans's novel became notorious as a touchstone of decadence, and, ironically, it was largely responsible—along with Verlaine's Poetes Maudits—for lifting (or rather, dragging) Mallarme out of the obscurity in which he had long labored (CC, 1472).

To the extent that Mallarme epitomizes the modern lyric poet, the poet in whose work theory and practice, the intellectual and the sensual, are ultimately one and the same, "Prose" stands not only as Mallarme's ars poetica, not only as the poem in which his theory of poetry is most fully elaborated, but, at the same time, as the quintessential modern lyric. The poem is its own allegory of the poetic process, and its own explanation for why it—and lyric poetry in general—is so difficult to interpret.

We begin with the ambiguous title, an example of Empson's seventh and final type, in which meanings that are antithetical to one another come together. In the first place—but this will not be obvious to most readers—the word "prose" refers to a hymn that is sung during the Mass. A prosa is a Latin hymn, such as the Dies Irae, that is sung between the gradual and the reading from the Gospels (Desire Seeking Expression, 18); but Mallarme's use of the term may also refer to the hymnes chretiens of the Byzantine Church, and the significance of Byzantium to the poem will emerge later. This sense of the title word serves, incidentally, to set the poem's dedication to des Esseintes in relief, since the latter is a connoisseur of late Latin literature and of the early Christian theologians, including those associated with the Byzantine Church. But more importantly, as Georges Poulet notes, the title word indicates that Mallarme's purpose in the poem, at least in part, will be "to create something equivalent to the ancient religious hymn . . . tantamount to what Mallarme calls elsewhere 'liturgical remembrances' [in his essay "Catholicisme," CC, 3941. Like the medieval prose, Mallarme's poem will be an incantation directed toward a transcendence" (The Metamorp hoses of the Circle, 290).

But if "Prose" is a hymn (to Beauty? to Poetry itself?), it is simultaneously an inquiry into the nature of lyric poetry. Thus, in addition to the associations listed above, Mallarme's title has all of the connotations that we ordinarily associate with the word in English or French: prose as the opposite of verse, as the opposite of poetry, as the vehicle of the analytic rather than the rhapsodic, and so forth. These ordinary connotations of "prose" are further complicated by the fact that they have both an ironic sense and a nonironic sense in the poem. They are ironic in the sense that the poem contains a polemic against the "prosaic world," but they also convey a straightforward, non ironic sense (although this itself is ironic in the context of a poem) of the importance, for modern poetry, of incorporating intellectual analysis, or that which has traditionally been construed as foreign to poetry, within the confines of the poem itself.

The poem begins with an apostrophe, which, by calling attention to the outlandishness of apostrophe, is simultaneously an analysis of apostrophe. The trope of apostrophe is central to Romantic poetics, as recent criticism has informed us, because it poses the very question of our embarrassment in the face of poetry, an embarrassment mandated by the prosaic world. Apostrophe, as Paul de Man observes, is related to prosopopoeia, or personification, the root meaning of which is "to give a face to" ("Lyrical Voice in Contemporary Theory," 57). In the modern world, personification, and hence Poetry itself, is embarrassing; to give a face to the dehumanized faceless world of our prosaic science is to "lose face"

And the poem immediately insists upon its modernity: the placement of "aujourd'hui" in line 3 allows it to mean both that memory should arise today and that the "grammary" ("grimoire"; Mallarme had previously employed this metaphor in the "Ouverture Ancienne") should be a modern one. The Greek word from which "hyperbole" is derived means "to throw beyond the mark"; and thus, the act of invoking Hyperbole is a profoundly ambivalent, not to say paradoxical, one; for at the same time that it calls up what from the standpoint of the prosaic world, the world that does not believe in poetry, is an unbridgeable gulf between Prose and Poetry, by the very act of calling, it manages to bridge that gulf. The meta physical boundary separating the prosaic world from the realm of Poetry will be allegorized in "Prose" as a symbolic journey to a magical island—the island, of course, representing Poetry, and the mainland, Prose.

Apostrophe is central above all to the ode, and with the apostrophe to Hyperbole we have a situation that is once again reminiscent of Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale." In the latter poem, as so often in the ode tradition, the poet begins in a state of depression and unbelief, a state in which poetry seems very remote. The act of calling, however, even in the face of what the prosaic world regards as inadmissible hyperbole, lifts him out of his spiritual torpor. Thus, in the fourth stanza of the Nightingale ode, at the point at which the poet determines to join the Nightingale, "Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, / But on the viewless wings of Poesy," he suddenly realizes that he is already there, that, as far as Poetry is concerned, imagination and reality are one, and that the act of invoking brings what is invoked into existence. The "Already with thee!" of Keats's ode is a moment that we have seen matched in a number of poems from the Poesies, in the "Ouverture Ancienne," "L 'Apres-midi d'un Faune," and "Toast Funebre." Similarly, but perhaps more ambivalently, in "Prose," the act of calling upon an other—even though both the act itself and what is called upon are seen, from the standpoint of the prosaic world, as hyperbole—immediately (magically) bridges the gulf between the mainland and the island on which the poet and his "sister" will sojourn. The trope of apostrophe, though comprehended as hyperbolic, thus functions for modernity like the magic spell of an epoch that had not yet experienced the crisis of modernity: the magic is all the more powerful in that its effect is not dependent upon belief; like Proust's madeleine, the act of calling sets memory into action, as if of its own accord.

The question of whether "Prose" is a hymn, as its title ambivalently asserts, or whether it should not rather be regarded as an ode, is one that is worth considering because, in a sense, it is raised by the poem itself. Comparing the two genres, Paul Fry notes that "like the hymn, the ode . . . longs for participation in the divine, but. . . never participates communally, never willingly supplies the congregation with common prayer because it is bent on recovering a priestly role that is not pastoral but hermetic" (The Poet's Calling, 7). While there could hardly be a more hermetic poem in any language than "Prose, it maybe that in this poem the hymn/ode dialectic has evolved yet another turn, and that the ode, having come into existence as a result of the disappearance of the possibility of establishing poetic communion in a congregational or public setting, had become a hymn once again—as if the self, driven into the exile of its own solitude, had now disappeared into the otherness, not of God but of the Poem itself.

As noted in the Introduction, the religious crisis of the nineteenth century had deep-seated effects on poetry, not only on poetic content or poetic form but on the very existence of poetry as a form. If Poetry becomes more hermetic, if it becomes more resistant to popular appropriation, this, paradoxically, is be cause, having stepped into the breach of the sacred, it has now become more important. Poetry is no longer merely the vehicle of spiritual experience (as it is in the hymn) but the container and even the locus of the spiritual; consequently, the question of poetic technique—which in "Prose" encompasses both "magic" and "science"—takes on increasing complexity. The mystical burden of Poetry, for Mallarme, is that of containing the uncontainable, of expressing not only the ineffable but the inexpressibility of the ineffable. We see this even in Mallarme's astonishingly radical use of rhyme in "Prose," where, as noted in the Introduction, polysyllabic homonym chains ex tending beyond word boundaries—such as "desir Idees" and "des iriddes," in lines 29 and 31, or "par chemins" and "parchemins," in lines 50 and 52 (far beyond the capacities of the translator, of course)— make it seem as if sound is not an echo to the sense but sense to the sound, or as if, in the hands of the Master, words had taken on the magical properties attributed to the Irises that are glimpsed on the island. "The pure work of poetry," wrote Mallarme in one of his most famous pronouncements, "involves the elocutionary disappearance of the poet, who cedes the initiative to words" (CC, 366; translation mine); and the very title of the essay from which this statement is drawn, "Crise de Vers," suggests that for Mallarme the problem of poetic technique assumes a larger existential or religious dimension. Indeed, the problem of poetic technique that is raised in and by "Prose" is by no means merely formal: it is associated with the paradoxes of experience and duration that Proust was later to analyze in his own way in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, and, as such, is figurally inscribed in Mallarme's allegory.

When "Prose" was first published in La Revue Independante, the first two stanzas were separated from the rest of the poem as a kind of prologue; for it is after these stanzas that we reach the heart of the epiphanic experience the poem develops. The problem that is posed by the poem is as follows. Suppose that somehow we manage to arrive at the Island of Poetry, whether prompted by "magic," by "inspiration," by the "Muse," or by any other agency that the modern mind feels compelled to set in inverted commas. We have contrived to evade the pseudo- authoritative judgments of the prosaic scoffers— those still living in an "era of authority" (line 13; "age of certainty" in the translation), which has clearly broken down—and we have been vouchsafed a vision of the magic Irises (lines 17—32). I say "we" because the self, having "fallen" (as in Blake's cosmogony), is now divided, in Mallarme's traditional metaphor, into a percipient "feminine" component and a rational "masculine" component. On that is land, vision (in the mystical or transcendental sense) is simply sight, that which "ordinarily" occurs. (We recall that Mallarme's conception of Gautier, which he was concerned to develop in "Toast Funebre," was as a man "with the mysterious gift of seeing with the eyes.") The problem, however, is that your "sister" has no intention of informing you of what she has experienced; her wisdom remains inscrutable. You are thus left with the problem of translating (here a raft of paradoxes associated with the translation process are raised) her experience into a form that will not be evanescent but will somehow be lasting, and that therefore will provide you with a bridge to get back to the Island of Poetry when you are again stranded on the prosaic mainland, as you know you will surely be. (Here, the connection to the English Romantic tradition would be to "Tintern Abbey" and the "Ode to the West Wind," where memory and poetry itself are consciously viewed as vehicles of the creative transformation of conscious ness.) In order to comprehend her, you have to cultivate your ancient skill (lines 35—36).

If the problem of poetic technique can be essentialized, it is that the epiphanic vision (of God, of Beauty—however one wants to label it) simply transcends the power of Reason to encompass or encapsulate it. Those living on the "shore" (line 41)—which includes everyone, at least most of the time—do not believe that "this country" ever existed (line 48; the syntax of lines 4 1—48 is particularly difficult, but the passage opens up if we set invisible parentheses from the beginning of line 42 to the end of line 47). Nevertheless, they have the illusion that the poet can simply spill out the plenitude he has experienced in "profuse strains of unpremeditated art"—and, as it happens, the poets themselves help to foster this illusion, perhaps because they want to become like the Skylark or Nightingale, or like Mallarme's "sister" in "Prose" or Wordsworth's sister in "Tintern Abbey"; but the paradox, as Shelley enunciates it in the West Wind ode, and Keats in the Nightingale ode, is that if poets could simply do that, Poetry would not exist. Thus, the discipline imposed on the poet is to sublimate his ecstasy and, through the patient labor of prosody, to translate—that is, to carry across or bring back—that ecstasy in the form of poetry. In Mallarme's allegorical representation of this process, the sister and the brother, the child and the adult, are one and the same: "L'enfant abdique son extase." The child abdicates from her ecstasy in order to become a master of the ways (lines 49—5 0), for the lucid vision of the Irises, of the Ideal, has imposed this duty ("devoir") upon her (lines 25—32). By the same token, in "Toast Funebre," the Master calms "the unquiet marvels _of Eden's wild delights" (line 33) before vanishing "into the ideal / Duty we are given by the gardens" (lines 40—41). Poetry thus represents a species of resurrection—and "Anastasius," the name that the child utters in the penultimate quatrain (line 51), is the Byzantine Greek word for "resurrection." The "ancestor" ("aieul") of Beauty ("Pulcherie"—pulcheria in the Latin) in the final quatrain is, of course, Death. As Wallace Stevens tells us in "Sunday Morning," it is Death that is the mother of Beauty, the awareness of Death that spurs the poet to create Beauty. ("Avant" in line 53 has consistently been mistranslated as "before," thus rendering the final stanza unintelligible, but if it is translated as "lest" the meaning becomes clear.) For if the poet refused to defer his ecstasy through the sublimation of form, Beauty would be swallowed up by Death—Death would bear the sacred name of Beauty; the poem as an articulation of the moumental would be swallowed up by the phenomenal realm— "Hidden by the too large lily flower."