Toast Funèbre: Mallarmé has constructed an elaborate
sarcophagus...
Mallarmé has constructed an elaborate sarcophagus for
Gautier, who serves here as the archetype of the poet, "le
fatal emblème". The lines are stately and sonorous, with
rich rhyme and plastic imagery giving a sculptural quality quite
in keeping with the Parnassian ideal. Each division is spanned by
a rhyme, a device which gives a kind of architectonic unity and
which also reserves the complete resolution of thought, rhythm
and rhyme until the very last line ---which is a masterpiece in
itself. At once we are informed that the man himself is dead,
Yet from his cremation we see something ideal, the glory of
craftsmanship, returning to the absolute purity of the sun by
some window, which as we have already seen is the symbolic
passageway art makes between the world of the actual and the
world of the absolute. Death in itself, "l’heure
commune et vile", is of no importance ---everyone must
undergo it; but death for the poet transforms him into his
absolute nature, abolishing the merely personal characteristics
which the false pride of men projects into the idea of
immortality. Mallarmé denounces this idea and presents the
personal aspects of Gautier as being swallowed up in the gulf of
the Néant. That is the "Homme aboli"; next we are
presented with the absolute character of the poet whom we have
seen as the "vierge héros" and now see as the
"Maître". He walks in the Eden of the ideal world and
bestows "le mystère d’un nom" upon the rose and
the lily. This is seen as an eternal process in the line.
Le splendide génie éternel n’a pas d’ombre.
To name and order experience according to the world of the
absolute ---this is the ideal duty of the poet alive in earthly
gardens. The flowers thus fixed by his words (which are,
paradoxically, only an agitation of the air, less substantial
materially than the flowers themselves) will never fade, but are
picked out and held forever by the "regard diaphane".
Tombeau
de Bert Laub| Next Poem