Dear readers, having presented the basic formulations of the thought of this great renovator of universal poetry and founder of modern poetics, who is Mallarmé, I offer you a brief tour of his work. Thank you for your patient reading. Happy Christmas!

Examples of his work

We will go only to brief examples of three of his most important poetic pieces.

First of all from Herodias (1864), a long poem with the character of a dramatic work, in which her protagonist, Hérodiade, young princess (inspired by the biblical Salome, daughter of Herodias) shares with her wet nurse her reflections on herself in front of a mirror.

And you, lonely sister, O my eternal sister
My dream will rise towards you: so already
rare limpidity of a heart that thought so,
I believe myself alone in my monotonous homeland
And everything around me lives in idolatry
of a mirror that reflects in its sleeping calm
Hero, with a clear diamond look...
Oh last charm, yes, sorry, I'm alone.

Poem full of plastic images (diamonds, metals, marbles, crystals) of an overwhelming beauty, where aspects very typical of Mallarmé are revealed, such as isolation from the world, loneliness and self-contemplation.

The Nap of a Faun (1865-1876), a poem (its first edition was illustrated by the creator of Impressionism, Edouard Manet) that involves us in the surprise and tribulation of a faun after the two nymphs he would have kidnapped escape, and asks if that experience was real; such a feature -the doubt between the real and the unreal- is very much associated with the author. It is a poem marked by sensitivity and passion.

_{Frontispiece by Édouard Manet (1832-1883) for the poem L'après-midi d'un faune by Stéphane Mallarmé Source}

These nymphs, I want to perpetuate.
So clear,
its light incarnate, fluttering in the air
drowsy of leafy dreams
Did I love a dream?
(…)

You know, my passion, what, purple and already mature
every grenade explodes and bee murmurs;
and our blood in love with the one who's going to grab it,
runs through all the eternal swarm of desire.

Finally, A coup of dice will never abolish chance (1897), Mallarmé's most daring, strange and outstanding poem, in which he "takes further his claim to transcend traditional poetic practice, and create a language, a new expressive system that gives an account (...) of his revolutionary conception in poetry" (Todó).

In approximately 20 pages (depending on the edition), we are witnesses to a surprising poem, where its words are presented, alone or together with others, in different letters and of different size, forming lines (it challenges the separation between "verse" and "prose"), dispensing with the strophe, without any kind of rhyme, distributed on the page in a peculiar way (centred, aligned to the right or to the left) and creating blank spaces. This inaugurates a plastic and architectural vision of the poem, which has remained in much of the later poetry. Scholars have spoken of "constellations" to refer to this visual presentation, but also syntactic, rhythmic and semantic.

A coup of dice is a cryptic work, reluctant to be explained, a similar pretension to that of explaining a work of abstract painting. This has led some critics to consider it an "anti-poem". There are certain poetic phrases in the body of the work that could bring us closer to a possible interpretation, such as the one that gives the poem its title, presented in the largest letter: "A roll of the dice will never abolish chance", a phrase that is already ironic; or another one like this: "Every thought emits a roll of the dice", or that other one: "Nothing will have taken place but the place (...)". This allows Balakian to dare to postulate as a possible theme "the destiny of thought as a weak light of a distant constellation", and to affirm that "it represents the challenge of man to the void". The writer André Gide would say that A roll of the dice was "the extreme point to which the human spirit has ventured". And Todó: "When reading Mallarmé we must renounce to understand in the usual way, and be satisfied with an intuitive or doubtful approach".

I leave you with the photographs of the first two pages of the poem (after the title which would actually be the first page) and the last one, in the English edition.

_{Photos of the edition of Un golpe de dados in English Source}

_{(If you are interested, you can access the original version in French at this link and in Spanish here)}

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