Stéphane Mallarmé

Start Free Trial

The Poetry of Symbolism and Decadence

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

In the following essay, Scott contrasts approaches to theme, versification, and aesthetics in Symbolist and Decadent poetry.
SOURCE: Scott, Clive. “The Poetry of Symbolism and Decadence.” In Symbolism, Decadence, and the Fin de Siècle: French And European Perspectives, edited by Patrick McGuinness, pp. 57-71. Exeter, England: University of Exeter Press, 2000.

The purpose of this [essay] is to trace, with a broad brush, the pursuit by Symbolist and Decadent poets—or Symbolist and Decadent aspects of the same poet—of a verse-art adequate to their metaphysical and existential perceptions, and to ask what these developments in verse-art can tell us about the difference between the two terms. The sense of a change in oral and aural needs was widely shared:

En quelques années, l'oreille française s'est transformée. Elle qui n'était accessible qu'aux rythmes solides, réguliers, frappés à intervalles égaux à l'infinie variété des repos périodiques,—elle se plaît maintenant à l'infinie variété des mesures possibles, à la délicatesse des rythmiques relâchées, à la diversité d'expression qu'entraîne le perpétuel déroulement des idées.1


[In the space of a few years, the French ear has been transformed. Where once it was only responsive to firm, regular rhythms, accentuated at intervals equal to the infinite variety of periodic pauses,—it now takes pleasure in the infinite variety of possible measures, in the delicacy of looser rhythmic configurations, in that diversity of expression produced by the perpetual unfolding of ideas.]

It was in particular the death in 1885 of Victor Hugo, who had seemed to be French verse personified, and had thus as if confiscated the right of others to speak, which instigated those reflections (1886-96) gathered together in Mallarmé's ‘Crise de vers’ [‘Crisis in Verse’]. And Émile Verhaeren, reviewing Heredia's funeral oration for Leconte de Lisle in 1894, expressed similar opinions, concluding that free verse was the only viable medium for the modern mentality:

[Le vers libre] se sent plus adéquat à l'âme contemporaine qui veut tant de souplesse, de nuances pour ses complications infinies, et a aussi besoin de tant de promptitude, de la promptitude d'improvisation des trouvères, pour exprimer ses agitations incessamment renouvelées et si étonnament passagères.2


[[Free verse] feels more suitable to the contemporary soul which needs so much flexibility, so many nuances, to express its infinite intricacies, needs, too, such speed of reponse, the improvisatory speed of the troubadours, to convey its turmoil, ever renewed and so incredibly fleeting.]

These particular quotations should put us on our guard against placing Symbolist aspirations outside time, despite Yeats' words (see note 1). It is true that the contemplative states cultivated by Symbolists often involve a deceleration of the metabolism, the transformation of the mind into a ‘centre de suspens vibratoire’ [‘centre of vibratory suspendedness’],3 oscillating between sound and sense, presence and absence, sleeping and waking, between different kinds of reality and different sensory experiences. But to see the Symbolist as primitive and mythomaniac, devoted to the perpetuation of the sonnet, while the Decadent, the modern streetwise dandy-dilettante, experiments with formal revolution, is, for one thing, to miss their shared acceptance of the new relativity. An unequivocal affirmation of the relative is to be found in Jules Laforgue's 1883 article on Impressionism,4 but for our purposes Pater's essay on Coleridge (1865, 1880) may be more suggestive:

To the modern spirit nothing is, or can be rightly known, except relatively and under conditions. The philosophical conception of the relative has been developed in modern times through the influence of the sciences of observation. Those sciences reveal types of life evanescing into each other by inexpressible refinements of change. Things pass into their opposites by accumulation of undefinable quantities.5

Inasmuch as Symbolism is concerned to activate the memories, associations and unconscious impulses of the individual, as well as of the culture (myth, legend, archetype), so relativity is necessarily central to it; as Mallarmé so simply puts it, describing his ‘poétique très nouvelle’: ‘Peindre, non la chose, mais l'effet qu'elle produit’ [‘To paint, not the thing, but the effect it produces’] (letter to Henri Cazalis of 30 October 1864).6 If the object is the sum of the effects it produces on the viewer, then in summing up the object, the viewer sums up himself (see Mallarmé's poem ‘Toute l'âme résumée’).

Pater speaks of change as an unbroken continuum, a sequence of adjustments which maintain their cohesiveness, a set of modulations which may ultimately lead into their opposite:

Mais langoureusement longe
Comme de blanc linge ôté
Tel fugace oiseau si plonge
Exultatrice à côté
Dans l'onde toi devenue
Ta jubilation nue.

[but some fleeting bird coasts languorously like white linen taken off if there plunge exultantly beside it in the wave yourself become your naked jubilation7]

In the sestet of this heptasyllabic sonnet, /a/ modulates to /s/, and then to /e/, with /a/ interposed (‘blanc’), all prefaced by /l/. Thereafter, /s/ is what survives (‘plonge’, ‘onde’, ‘jubilation’), with the /l/ still in attendance. At the same time, /g/, which follows the nasal vowel, softens to /ȝ/ (‘longe’) and this play between the two sounds continues (‘linge’, ‘fugace’, ‘plonge’, ‘exultatrice’), until resolved in a final /ȝ/, now expressed by the grapheme j (‘jubilation’). The ‘jubilation nue’, in which the naïad-like bather, discarded linen and coasting bird converge, is also the culminating point of the three sounds /y/, /i/, and /a/ which first appeared with the bird (‘fugace oiseau si’) and then in the pivotal ‘Exultatrice’, before saturating the final line, where each sound appears twice. We have, then, the sense that sounds both survive as elements of a continuity and also turn into their opposite: nasal shifts to non-nasal, back shifts to front, rounded shifts to unrounded. There is also a process of reversal in the sense that the absent but named swan of line 2, ‘Sans le cygne ni le quai’ [With neither swan nor bank] becomes the present but unnamed ‘fugace oiseau’, while the absent but named ‘quai’ becomes present, but only by implication, as the missing object of the transitive ‘longe’.

But if the moments of Symbolist relativity are enchained in seamless transition, so that, to use Mallarmé's phrase, words ‘s'allument de reflets réciproques comme une virtuelle traînée de feux sur des pierreries’ [‘light one another up with mutual reflections like a virtual trail of fire upon precious stones’] (‘Crise de vers’),8 the Decadent moment is more like the one described by Pater in the ‘Conclusion’ to his studies in the Renaissance: ‘To such a tremulous wisp constantly reforming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down’.9 Moments like this are isolated, discontinuous, permeated by a sense of loss, by a sense of life shrinking, being ever more colonized by the profanum vulgus. The enjoyment of Paterian moments or Wildean sensations may be accompanied by a certain febrility, a certain sense of hurried theft. Instead of the expanding consciousness of Baudelaire's ‘Élévation’—

Et, comme un bon nageur qui se pâme dans l'onde,
Tu sillonnes gaiement l'immensité profonde

[And as a strong swimmer swoons on the wavy sea, gaily you cleave the unfathomable vastness10]

—we find the cultivation of the miniature:

Les fleurs palustres sur ses paupières meurtries
Poseront le dictame adoré du sommeil,
Dans les jardins de nacre au sol de pierreries.(11)

[The paludal flowers will lay on her bruised eyelids the hallowed balm of sleep in the gardens of nacre with their gem-laden soil.]

These lines may sound slow and overcharged, but they are a stanza in a poem of terza rima and have the driven transience of the form; the last two lines of the stanza may be solid tetrametric alexandrines, but the first line is a curiously unstable trimetric structure (4+5+3); the stanza has a main verb, but its effect is that of a series of images telegraphically presented. This is not so much a cumulative sequence as an additive one, noun phrases strung together by prepositions, each supplying a new sensation, but consecutively. The Decadent unweaves and strings out those moments that the Symbolist weaves together. The Impressionist dynamism of particles, incessantly melting into each other,12 is replaced by the mosaic of juxtaposed local effects. Mallarmé warns François Coppée: ‘je crois que quelquefois vos mots vivent un peu trop de leur propre vie comme les pierreries d'une mosaïque de joyaux’ [‘I think that, sometimes, your words live a little too much a life of their own, like the gemstones in a mosaic of jewels’].13

If the Decadent and Symbolist moments differ, so does the nature of the temporal medium in which they are embedded. If the Symbolist poem is envisaged as verbal matter constantly being transformed into verbal energy by the thought of the reader, so that the signifier, far from becoming a conventional signified, becomes instead a group of semantic elements creating constellations of potential meaning with other signifiers, then the reading experience can only be accommodated by a time which is more elastic, more modalized, more qualitative and continuous, a version, in short, of Bergsonian durée. What the Decadent undergoes is an extrusion from this inner time; Des Esseintes's ‘expulsion’ from his house at Fontenay-aux-Roses, a house designed to his own idiosyncratic specifications, in Huysmans's A Rebours (1884), is a condemnation to external, so-called chronometric time, homogeneous, quantitative, discontinuous, the time of Baudelaire's ‘L'Horloge’, the corrosive time of spleen, of spiritual paralysis, in which all epiphanies are only temporary victories. Des Esseintes's expulsion coincides with the disempowerment of language: ‘[…] mais les mots résonnaient dans son esprit comme des sons privés de sens; son ennui les désagrégeait, leur ôtait toute signification, toute vigueur effective et douce’ [‘[…] but the words echoed in his mind like meaningless noises, his weariness of spirit breaking them up, stripping them of all significance, all effective and soothing force’].14

We may suspect that a similar extrusion from inner to outer time, with the same linguistic consequences, frequently occurred in Rimbaud's experience. The prose poem was Rimbaud's gamble. The prose poem promises the new because it predicts nothing; it has ‘des rythmes instinctifs’ [‘instinctive rhythms’] (‘Délires II: Alchimie du verbe’); it has no conventions of reading; its language is unmediated by form, has more raw power, more capriciousness, compromises less. But prose is also without mnemonicity; it does not ask to be accumulated in the mind, in relational patterns; it stakes its money on instantaneousness, it flirts constantly with the self-superseding. Inasmuch as Symbolism has a teleology, is as destinational as it is multiform, the prose poem is dangerously without formal guarantees, without those structures that make utterance self-retaining. Often Rimbaldian prose poems will end destinationally (e.g. ‘Promontoire’, ‘H’, ‘Fête d'hiver’, ‘Fleurs’), but there are those which end in erasure (e.g.‘Nocturne vulgaire’, ‘Les Ponts’) and those which end in withdrawal from a climax already reached (e.g. ‘Aube’, ‘Royauté’). It is the sonnet, as described, for example, by Paul Valéry, which is peculiarly able to dam up meaning for some final release:

un sonnet […] sera une véritable quintessence, un osmazôme, […] réduit à quatorze vers, soigneusement composé en vue d'un effet final et foudroyant. Ici, l'adjectif sera impermutable, la sonorité des mètres sagement graduée, la pensée souvent parée d'un Symbole, voile qui se déchirera à la fin …15


[a sonnet […] will be a true quintessence, a distillation, […] reduced to fourteen lines, carefully composed with a final overwhelming effect in mind. Here, the adjective will be impermutable, the sonority of the measures properly graduated, the thought often adorned with a Symbol, a veil to be rent in the last lines …]

It is not difficult to lay these Decadent ‘failures’ at the door of irony, of that vigilant consciousness which inhibits self-surrender and uncovers the self-delusion in visions of universal analogy. Irony separates, isolates and sees the solipsism in relativity.16 But if we can understand how, in Baudelaire's peremptory ‘Deux qualités littéraires fondamentales: surnaturalisme et ironie’17 [‘Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony’], irony works, it is less clear what he means by ‘surnaturalisme’:

Le surnaturel comprend la couleur générale et l'accent, c'est-à-dire intensité, sonorité, limpidité, vibrativité, profondeur et retentissement dans l'espace et dans le temps. […] Dans certains états de l'âme presque surnaturels, la profondeur de la vie se révèle tout entière dans le spectacle, si ordinaire qu'il soit, qu'on a sous les yeux. Il en devient le symbole.18


[The supernatural comprises general colour and accent, that is to say intensity, sonority, limpidity, vibrativity, depth and repercussion in space and time. […] In certain almost supernatural spiritual states, the profundity of life is revealed, in all its fullness, in the thing one is looking at, however banal it is. It becomes the symbol of that profundity.]

This state, in which our perception of the world is enlarged, in which our sense of the presence of reality is more vivid, more full of repercussion, in which the mind is freed to traverse space and time, uses the corridor of ‘profondeur’ to pass between the physical and the spiritual. Before reaching ‘profondeur’, Baudelaire's string of nouns are imbricated by their shared ‘-ité’ suffix, a suffix frequently used, as here, to nominalize adjectives, that is to say, to make quality substance, to suspend psycho-physiological experience in an encompassing sensory medium. And the combination of /i/—peculiarly insistent in the culminating noun of the string (‘vibrativité’)—and /e/, is the combination of unrounded high and high-mid front vowels, produced with the lips spread, projected out and as if up. This suffix also conceptualizes the sensory, and is different from the ‘-ement’ suffix of ‘retentissement’ in more than gender: the ‘-(e)ment’ ending is associated with verbal forms, making actions more durative, more gradual perhaps, more diffused, its nasal vowel /a/ still unrounded, but now low and back. If we concentrate on these features, it is because grammatical and syntactic transformations are central to the alchemical processes of the symbolist poem, whereby objects are transfigured by the reader's ability endlessly to rethink them, and because the repotentiation of language, its ‘essentialization’, derives from our sense of its being maximally motivated. It is not just that the poet, and verse form, reinvest language with its sacred and originating power; it is also the mystery of language which is recovered, our sense of its having sources both transcendent and immanent, coming to us both from afar and from the seat of our being.19 The Decadent ‘extremes’ of this linguistic sensitivity are inverted and hypertrophied forms: either ‘slumming it’ in the colloquialisms of a Verlaine, a Laforgue, or a Jean Lorrain (Modernités, 1885), or pushing the esoteric to the limits of flaunted excess. The dictionary of this latter trend is the Petit Glossaire pour servir à l'intelligence des auteurs décadents et symbolistes (1888) of Jacques Plowert (Paul Adam), which draws its examples from poets as diverse as Gustave Kahn, Henri de Régnier, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Francis Poictevin, Laforgue, Jean Moréas and Adam himself.

One further phrase from Baudelaire's definition deserves some comment: ‘tout entière’. This is the title of a poem in which Baudelaire depicts the Devil's (Irony's) attempt to make the poet prefer the fragmented and differentiated; the poet resists in the name of a wholeness which, however, is inaccessible to analysis:

Et l'harmonie est trop exquise,
Qui gouverne tout son beau corps,
Pour que l'impuissante analyse
En note les nombreux accords.

[and the unison that governs all her beautiful form is too exquisite for sterile analysis to detail its countless harmonies20]

The subject of the exchange between the Devil and the poet is the beloved. The Symbolist/Decadent femme fatale is more important for us, perhaps, as an image of the work than as the reflection of male anxieties about the New Woman. The work disempowers the artist, the work is the object of desire which requires the suicide of the artist, the work evades all possession, the work is the dancing Salomé and Pater's all-knowing Mona Lisa.21 And what is at stake is that transcendence of ‘sexual’ difference in a higher reconciliation, after the necessary decapitation/emasculation, of the kind we find in Gustave Moreau's Thracian Girl Carrying the Head of Orpheus (1865), or Yeats' ‘The Cap and Bells’ (The Wind Among the Reeds, 1899) or A Full Moon in March (1935). French verse's ability to exploit gender expressively, in its rhymes, is, as we shall see, very pertinent to this Symbolist metaphor.

The Symbol, then, and the work as Symbol, is the sublimate of ‘sexual’ confrontation, where ‘sexual’ means any elements which attract each other, or evoke each other, in order to ‘établir les identités secrètes par un deux à deux qui ronge et use les objets au nom d'une centrale pureté’22 [‘establish secret identities by a two-by-two which gnaws at objects and wears them away, in the name of a central purity’]; or as Émile Verhaeren puts it: ‘Le Symbole s'épure donc toujours, à travers une évocation, en idée: il est un sublimé de perceptions et de sensations’23 [‘The Symbol, then, always purifies itself, through an evocation, into an Idea: it is a sublimate of perceptions and sensations’]. Baudelaire's ‘surnaturalisme’, Rimbaud's ‘voyance’, Mallarmé's preoccupation with the book as multidimensional semantic theatre, and with the silent poem, are all expressions of the desire to become ‘une aptitude qu'a l'Univers Spirituel à se voir et à se développer, à travers ce qui fut moi’24 [‘an aptitude which the Spiritual Universe has to perceive and develop itself through what was me’]. Mallarmé's words remind us that the Symbolist enterprise entails the death of the poet as personality in order to assure his life as medium or mediator. Baudelaire speaks of this process as the ‘vaporisation of the Self’,25 as a ‘sacred prostitution of the soul’ (‘Les Foules’), and, as experienced by the taker of hashish, he describes it thus:

Il arrive quelquefois que la personnalité disparaît et que l'objectivité, qui est le propre des poètes panthéistes, se développe en vous si anormalement, que la contemplation des objets extérieurs vous fait oublier votre propre existence, et que vous vous confondez bientôt avec eux.26


[Sometimes it happens that personality disappears and that objectivity, which is the distinguishing mark of pantheistic poets, develops so abnormally in you, that the contemplation of external objects makes you forget your own existence and you soon merge with them.]

The Decadent, or Decadent persona of the Symbolist, remains imprisoned in personality, either as a defensive strategy, or as part of an ethos of self-cultivation (dandyism), or as inability to escape ironic self-consciousness. The cult of personality involves the Decadent in questions of morality and behaviour which never assail the Symbolist. Personality ties the Decadent into the social, and delivers him to the determinisms of Naturalistic heredity. Symbolism, which implies ‘la disparition élocutoire du poète’ [‘the elocutory disappearance of the poet’],27 wants the communion of the reader with the text to remain undisturbed by voice. Personality pushes the Decadent poet towards open dialogue with the reader, a dialogue which must entail the sacrifice of Symbolist intentions, a dialogue into which the moral and didactic are likely to insinuate themselves, a dialogue likely to be informed by derision, aggression, the desire to shock. Baudelaire's ‘Au lecteur’, no less than Rimbaud's taunting challenge ‘Qu'est mon néant, auprès de la stupeur qui vous attend?’ [‘What is my nothingness compared with the stupor which awaits you?’],28 or Laforgue's arch asides, may redefine the writer/reader contract and set the agenda for modernism, but they are antipathetic to symbol-making.

If Decadence is something, whatever its aggressive ironies, permeated by a sense of loss, present or imminent, then a peculiar poignancy attaches to the way this sense of loss combines with a sense of surfeit, so that verse has that ‘air exténué d'avoir fait le tour de tous les rêves’29 [‘wearied look from having explored all available dreams’]. Rodenbach's comment refers to Verlaine's cultivation of the vers impair (line with an odd number of syllables). The impair is a verse form which hangs equivocally between Decadent and Symbolist functions. As a potential ‘vers boiteux’ or ‘vers faux’ (line without the required number of syllables), it serves Decadent impulses both as a symptom of careless world-weariness and as an aural irritant, a line designed to leave the reader uneasy, teased, bereft of metrical guidelines. But this lack of metrical pedigree also gives the impair an expressive space of its own, a territory as uncharted generically and temperamentally as it is metrically. The impair is regarded as volatile, nervous, mercurial, after Verlaine's enneasyllabic ‘Art poétique’:

De la musique avant toute chose,
Et pour cela préfère l'Impair
Plus vague et plus soluble dans l'air,
Sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose.

[Music before everything, and for that reason, prefer lines of an uneven number of syllables, vaguer and dissolving better into air, with nothing in them that is weighty or comes to a stop.]30

This may, from the point of view of metrical fact, be only a collection of metaphors. But there can be no doubt that, culturally, the impair represented scumbled outlines, evaporating shapes, elusive proportions.

As verse underwent its metrical crisis, rhyme's values also became radically polarized. In a sense, rhyme was an ideal Symbolist instrument. Rhyme is the language from elsewhere, not from the common language, but from the rhyming dictionary, a grimoire. It is a language which belongs as much to the stanza as to the line (that is to say that it is already line-transcendent) and in partnership with the ‘pieuse majuscule’31 [‘pious capital letter’] at the beginning of the line is able to transform the line into a new word: ‘Le vers qui de plusieurs vocables refait un mot total, neuf, étranger à la langue et comme incantatoire, achève cet isolement de la parole’ [‘The line of verse which from several vocables recomposes a total word, new, foreign to the language and as if incantatory, perfects this isolation of the word’].32 This new total word is, in many senses, the equivalent of a proper noun: it is a complex, compound word, made up of many associations, a history, and is thus almost infinitely semanticizable, always in the process of having its meanings made and remade, a word which has the power to designate without defining. It is fitting that rhyme should be the privileged site of the proper noun, from which position it can both assimilate its acoustic kin and suffuse the rest of the poem with its own peculiarly associative semanticity: ‘Dis-moi, ton cœur parfois s'envole-t-il, Agathe’ (Baudelaire, ‘Mœsta et errabunda’) [Tell me, does your heart sometimes fly away, Agathe]. ‘Où son nom de blancheur était gravé “Stéphane”’ (Samain, ‘Keepsake’) [Where his name all of whiteness was engravedStéphane”]. But this is also the place in which the common noun, the accidental and contingent, is transformed into its essential self: ‘Que vêt parmi l'exil inutile le Cygne’ (Mallarmé, ‘Le vierge, le vivace …’) [Worn in his useless exile by the Swan]33 or where the abstract noun: ‘—Est-ce en ces nuits sans fonds que tu dors et t'exiles / Million d'oiseaux d'or, ô future Vigueur?’—(Rimbaud, ‘Le Bateau ivre’) [—Do you sleep, are you exiled in those bottomless nights, O million golden birds, Life Force of the future?34] is no longer didactic personification, the instrument of argument and demonstration, but a power or feeling which has assumed independent activity and influence. The risk run, of course, is that the process reverses itself, that the common bleeds the proper of its semantic range and fixes it, wriggling on the pin of its semantic vulnerability. This, too, is a Decadent falling from grace:

Tu t'en vas et tu nous quittes,
Tu nous quittes et tu t'en vas!
Couvent gris, chœurs de Sulamites,
Sur nos seins nuls croisons nos bras.

[You go away and leave us, you leave us and you go! Grey nunneries, choirs of Shulamites, over our non-existent breasts let us cross our arms35]

In this polyvocal poem, whose voices are mutually corrosive, Laforgue explores the discrepancies between the romantic hopes and realistic expectations of bourgeois girls. The chanson of the stanza's first two lines, in impair heptasyllables, rubs against the cantique, in octosyllables, of its last two lines. ‘Sulamites’ refers to the loving and beloved Shulamite of the ‘Song of Songs’, and the erotic charge of this biblical text collides with the ‘couvent gris’, and is as if denied by the ‘seins nuls’. In the stanza's final line, a further intertext contributes its pennyworth: Verlaine's ‘En sourdine’, a poem exhorting the beloved to join the lover in self-surrender to the ecstasy and despair expressed in nature, contains the line: ‘Croise ton bras sur ton sein’ [Lay your arm across your breast]. We now see that the ‘Sulamites’ achieve octosyllabicity, escape the heptasyllable's lack of respectability, by adding a syllable—‘nuls’—which ‘rhymes’ with the first syllable of ‘Sulamites’ and at the same time mischievously erases their sexuality. Rhyme helps to bind these girls into destinies which vulgarize and banalize the longed-for beatitude. The ideal is locked by rhyme into the recurrent refrain of a popular song, which casts that ideal as a behavioural reflex, biologically driven. Symbolist aspiration is undermined by Darwinian principle; in Decadent mode, the poem multiplies persona, both liberates the poet into, and imprisons him in, the fluctuations of personality and attitude, the pity and mockery, the envy and disdain.

In free verse, on the other hand, rhyme serves very different purposes. As an occasional resource, it might operate as the motor of improvization and association, might act as the agent of the aleatory or, alternatively, might be called upon to insinuate an ironic self-consciousness into the verse, or sharpen a satirical sally, or engineer a change of register. By mixing rhyme with rhymelessness, repetition and half-rhyme, by varying the interval between rhymes, and by casting into question what is partnered by what, the poet can ‘psychologize’ verse structure, can begin to explore the whole gamut between the subliminal, the liminal and the fully conscious, can layer kinds and degrees of readerly response, can activate participatory reading.

If it is easy to imagine how free verse might suit either a Decadent sensibility playing its hide-and-seek with the reader, or a Symbolism increasingly situating itself in the psychological, in the multiplicity of the self rather than in the multiplicity of the object, it might be more difficult to envisage free verse combining comfortably with Symbolism's mythological or legendary topics. If we turn, however, to Pierre Louÿs's depiction of the Nereid ‘Glaucé’ (Astarté, 1891), to the third stanza:

Son fin buste émerge de l'eau 3+5/3+2+3
Comme un nénuphar chevelu d'or rouge 5+3+2
Ses yeux sont comme deux flammes sur l'eau 2+5+3
Vertes étoiles ses yeux doux d'Asie 5′+3+2/4+4+2
Mais sa bouche est un coquillage de pourpre 3+5+3
Et sa chevelure est sur sa bouche 5+4
Sa chevelure cramoisie. 4+4

[Her shapely head emerges from the water / Like a water-lily with hair of ruddy gold / Her eyes are like two flames upon the water / Green stars her soft oriental eyes / But her mouth is a purple shell / And her hair lies across her mouth / Her crimson hair.]

We can see how free verse relativizes, ‘modernizes’, a paratactic syntax, whose function here is precisely to mythicize, to restore an image of a primordial innocence unaware of its power to enthral. The end-of-line music consists not only of full rhyme (‘Asie/cramoisie’), but also of repetition (‘l'eau’) and assonance (‘rouge/pourpre/bouche’), so that the image remains mobile, shifting between the focused and unfocused, as the spectator's eye runs back and forth across the features, a prey to the imperious associations of simile and metaphor. Freed from the constraint of alternating masculine and feminine rhymes, the stanza gathers the mutably feminine around the immutably masculine (‘eau’ is grammatically feminine but a masculine rhyme), which is, however, the element of the feminine. And although the stanza rounds off the circle with an octosyllable and the stability of a noun phrase, and although the lines connected with Glaucé's hair and eyes create a momentary sequence of decasyllables, her mouth attracts two impair lines, a hendecasyllable and an enneasyllable, a loss of syllabic steadiness, a sensory disarray, announced by ‘Mais’.

But in speaking of the second, third and fourth lines as decasyllables, we must go carefully. As if dealing with chronometric time, regular verse treats its syllables as metrically equal (with the implication that they are also isochronous); in demetrifying verse, the poet liberates another kind of time, a heterotemporality. These decasyllables are not decasyllables, and all that that entails of metrical equivalence and caesura; no, these are trimetric lines of ten syllables where the expressive qualities of syllables (duration, semantic colouring, articulatory characteristics) enjoy greater individual foregrounding. And the sub-lineal rhythmic units have a greater autonomy, too. One might argue that the really important unit here is the pentasyllabic measure, which in lines 2, 3, 4 and 5 is the measure of imagination, of simile and metaphor. How fitting, then, that in the line following it should be the vehicle of that feature, the ‘chevelure’, which has been the theme of this set of psycho-physical variations. Finally, the pentasyllabic measure modulates into a sequence of three tetrasyllables, as the hair, across Glaucé's mouth, at last catches up with itself, coincides with itself. Instead, then, of myth classicizing itself in a mythology, in a narrative or tableau, we have a mobile, dynamic verbal surface which seeks to recover from myth its vivid proximity, its capacity to make inexhaustible meaning out of our world.

As a final note on this text, we might mention the presence of the seven articulated ‘mute’ es in this stanza—‘émerge’, ‘comme’, ‘flammes’, ‘Vertes’, ‘étoiles’, ‘coquillage’, ‘chevelure’—not to mention the phonatable es of the feminine rhymes. If free verse offered the freedom to modernize pronunciation (by introducing syncope and apocope, and by reducing diaeresis to synaeresis), Symbolist and Decadent verslibristes rarely availed themselves of it. Louÿs himself gives us a reason why:

L'i consonne et l'e muet donnent des sons indistincts et pourtant réels, qu'on entend, et qu'on n'entend pas, qui se manifestent et qui se dissimulent, qui vont être et qui ne sont déjà plus.36


[The semi-consonant i and the mute e produce sounds which are indistinct and yet real enough, which you both can and cannot hear, which are at once manifest and concealed, which are about to occur but have already died away.]

The mute e is a twilight syllable, on the cusp between presence and absence, an auditory illusion, a space of semantic ‘retentissement’, a sound which beckons as from a distance, drawing us below the level of consciousness. When it occurs with a coupe enjambante (where the coupe pushes the e forward into the next measure, as in ‘est un coquilla:/ge de pourpre’ or ‘Sa chevelu:/re cramoisie’), the mute e acts as an acoustic complicity, the relational, the broker of seamless transition. With a coupe lyrique (where, for syntactic or expressive reasons, the coupe falls after the mute e, as in the first reading of ‘Vertes etoiles/’), the mute e acts as a momentarily isolating, insulating extinction of sound as the image seems to withdraw into itself, the ‘voile de Silence sous quoi [les objets] nous séduisirent et transparaît maintenant le Secret de leur Signifiance’37 [‘veil of Silence from behind which [objects] captivated us and through which now shows the Secret of their Significance’].

But free verse and regular verse are not as conflictually related as might at first appear. The prosodic space between the regular and free is occupied by all manner of Symbolist and Decadent variation and formal experimentation. As far as the sonnet was concerned, Baudelaire had already provided examples of the ‘sonnet renversé’ (‘Bien loin d'ici’) and the ‘sandwiched’ sonnet (‘L'Avertisseur’, tercets between quatrains). Jean Lorrain reverses the pattern of ‘L'Avertisseur’ in several of his sonnets, ‘Les Paons blancs’ (Les Griseries, 1887) for example:

La demeure humide et noire
Est close, un reflet de moire
Baigne le perron désert;
Et du sommet des grands hêtres
De grands paons blancs, essaim clair,
Calme s'abattant dans l'air,
Tombent au bord des fenêtres.
Dans leur suaire argenté
On dirait un troupeau d'âmes,
Ames d'implorantes femmes
Autour d'un logis hanté
Et le vieux parc enchanté,
Est plein de frissons de soie
Et de satin qu'on déploie.

[The house, damp and dark, is closed, a shimmering reflection bathes the deserted steps; and from the top of the tall beeches, great white peacocks, bright flock, calm tumbling in the air, drop down beside the windows. In their silvery shrouds, they look like a gathering of souls, souls of imploring women encircling a haunted habitation. And the old enchanted park is full of ripples of silk and satin being spread out.]

Symbolist art is certainly well populated by peacocks, as the attributes of Hera, as many-eyed, Argus-like guardians of deserted demesnes, as the spirits of departed nobility, with tails also like the starry firmament. Lorrain's particular variation on sonnet structure creates a rhyming interdependence between tercet and quatrain, so that the poem divides 7 + 7 rather than the standard 8 + 6, and in each half, one rhyme sound, the masculine, occurs as a triplet: ‘désert/clair/air’; ‘argenté/hanté/enchanté’. These triplets suggest a fixation, moments of obsessive fascination. In fact, this masculinism is at first clearly overborne by the feminine presences that the peacocks, themselves masculine and the generators of the /a/ of the second triplet, mediate or corporealize. Curiously, although the feminine occupies all the other rhymes, its /a/ becoming particularly insistent in the final seven lines, the /waR(s)/ of the opening couplet loses its /R/ in the closing couplet and thus assimilates itself more to the masculine (masculine rhymes tend to be consonant + vowel rather than vice versa). Conversely, the first triplet not only shares /ε/ with the ‘-êtres’ rhymes; its terminal /R/ clearly gives it affinities with the /waR(s)/ rhymes; this latter affinity is also evident in the phrase ‘suaire argenté’. We might then find in this poem an example of that sexual disempowerment as a prelude to a ‘higher’ sexual union which we have already adverted to. The interplay of linguistic and prosodic gender reveals here the Symbolist desire to make boundaries and categories permeable, reinterpretable: all post-lapsarian distinctions must be redeemed in the prelapsarian androgyne.

We might have looked at other formal experiments, at the ‘tailed’ sonnets of Lorrain or of Samain, at the ‘free verse’ sonnets of John-Antoine Nau, at the four-line terza rima of Louis Le Cardonnel, or this same poet's development of rhymelessness in otherwise strict, enneasyllabic, five-line stanzas. Formal experimentation was what the Symbolist and the Decadent shared. Poets of the period were at once trying to turn away from the long prosodic shadow cast by Hugo—and indeed by Baudelaire in one of his guises38—and the kind of rhetoric it perpetuated, without, however, abandoning these poets' visionary drive; and, at the same time, to carry forward in verse that sensibility and aesthetic to be found in ‘the other’ Baudelaire's prose poems. Looked at from another point of view, the enterprise of Symbolism was, from the outset, both metaphysical (the ‘supernatural’, the ‘illumination’, the world of the ‘Idea’, the ‘Pure Notion’) and physiological (synaesthesia). While reinvesting words with the ability to reach beyond conventional signification and transformatively to act on mind and matter, poets also came to terms with the nerves as a creative source, and with the psychology of sensory experience, and its relativization. When language, no less than the human organism, was called upon to ‘cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul’,39 then, as with Dorian Gray, awkward schisms were bound to occur, and that disequilibriated state called ‘Decadence’ came to disturb the contemplative equanimity of Symbolism.

Notes

  1. Pierre Louÿs, ‘Idées sommaires sur le nouveau vers français’, in Ouvres complètes XII (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1973), pp. 31-32. Unless otherwise stated, the translations are my own. Louÿs's words cannot but remind us of Yeats' assessment of the necessary change: ‘[…] we would cast out of serious poetry those energetic rhythms, as of a man running, which are the invention of the will with its eyes always on something to be done or undone; and we would seek out those wavering, meditative, organic rhythms, which are the embodiment of the imagination, that neither desires nor hates, because it has done with time […]’ (‘The Symbolism of Poetry’ (1900), Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1969), p. 163).

  2. Émile Verhaeren, ‘Leconte de Lisle: Le Vers prosodique et le vers libre’ (1894), Impressions: Troisième Série (Paris: Mercure de France, 1928), p. 99.

  3. Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Le Mystère dans les lettres’ (1896), in Ouvres complètes, ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), p. 386.

  4. Jules Laforgue, ‘L'Impressionnisme’, in Textes de critique d'art, ed. Mireille Dottin (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1988), p. 172: ‘L'objet et le sujet sont donc irrémédiablement mouvants, insaisissables et insaisissants. Les éclairs d'identité entre le sujet et l'objet, c'est le propre du génie’ [‘The object and the subject are thus incurably shifting, elusive and unapprehending. Capturing the flashes of identity between subject and object is the peculiar gift of genius’].

  5. Walter Pater, ‘Coleridge’, in Appreciations (London: Macmillan, 1907), p. 66.

  6. Stéphane Mallarmé, Correspondance complète 1862-1871 suivi de Lettres sur la poésie 1872-1898 avec des lettres inédites, ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), p. 206.

  7. Mallarmé, ‘Petit Air I’; translation by Anthony Hartley, Mallarmé (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 81.

  8. Ibid., p. 171.

  9. Walter Pater, ‘Conclusion’, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Kenneth Clark (London: Collins Fontana, 1961), p. 222.

  10. Translation by Francis Scarfe, Baudelaire (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), p. 35.

  11. Laurent Tailhade, ‘Les Fleurs d'Ophélie’, in Vitraux, 1891.

  12. In an article for The Art Monthly Review (September 1876), Mallarmé describes this effect in relation to Manet's Le Linge (1876): ‘Everywhere the luminous and transparent atmosphere struggles with the figures, the dresses, and the foliage, and seems to take to itself some of their substance and solidity; whilst their contours, consumed by the hidden sun and wasted by space, tremble, melt, and evaporate into the surrounding atmosphere, which plunders reality from the figures, yet seems to do so in order to preserve their truthful aspect’ (see Penny Florence, Mallarmé, Manet and Redon: Visual and Aural Signs and the Generation of Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 14).

  13. Letter to François Coppée of 5 December 1866, Correspondance complète 1862-1871, pp. 329-30.

  14. Joris-Karl Huysmans, A Rebours, ed. Pierre Waldner (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1978), p. 240; translation by Robert Baldick, Against Nature (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1959), p. 219.

  15. Paul Valéry, ‘Sur la technique littéraire’ (1889), in Ouvres I, ed. Jean Hytier (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), p. 1809.

  16. Again, Pater's is the classic formulation of this existential condition: ‘Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without’ (‘Conclusion’, p. 221).

  17. Baudelaire, Ouvres complètes I, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), p. 658.

  18. Ibid., pp. 658-59.

  19. As Baudelaire puts it in one of his projected prefaces for Les Fleurs du Mal: ‘comment la poésie touche à la musique par une prosodie dont les racines plongent plus avant dans l'âme humaine que ne l'indique aucune théorie classique; que la poésie française possède une prosodie mystérieuse et méconnue, comme les langues latine et anglaise’ [‘how poetry has affinities with music thanks to a prosody whose roots plunge further into the human soul than is indicated by any classical theory; that French poetry, like the Latin and English languages, possesses a prosody both mysterious and poorly understood’ (Ouvres complètes I, p. 183].

  20. Scarfe, Baudelaire, p. 145.

  21. ‘Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how they would be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, […]’ (Pater, ‘Leonardo da Vinci’, in The Renaissance, p. 122).

  22. Mallarmé, Propos sur la poésie, ed. Henri Mondor (Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 1953), p. 174.

  23. Verhaeren, Impressions: Troisième Série, pp. 114-15.

  24. Mallarmé, letter to Henri Cazalis, 14 May 1867 (Correspondance complète 1862-1871, p. 343).

  25. Baudelaire, Oeuvres complètes I, p. 676.

  26. Ibid., p. 419.

  27. Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes, p. 366; trans. Hartley, p. 171.

  28. Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations, ed. Nick Osmond (London: The Athlone Press, 1976), p. 59; trans. by Oliver Bernard, Arthur Rimbaud: Collected Poems (London: Penguin Books, 1962), p. 246.

  29. Georges Rodenbach, ‘La Poésie nouvelle: A propos des décadents et symbolistes’, Évocations (Brussels: La Renaissance du Livre, 1924), p. 253.

  30. Trans. John Porter Houston and Mona Tobin Houston, French Symbolist Poetry: An Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), p. 50.

  31. Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes, p. 645.

  32. Ibid., p. 368; trans. Hartley, p. 175.

  33. Trans. Hartley, p. 86.

  34. Trans. Bernard, p. 170. Of these lines, Louÿs writes: ‘Enfin le mot Vigueur prend ici une force, qu'il n'avait jamais eue en français’ [‘Finally, the word ‘Vigueur’ here takes on a force that it had never before had in French’] (‘Rimbaud’, Oeuvres complètes XII, p. lviii).

  35. Laforgue, ‘Complainte des pianos qu'on entend dans des quartiers aisés’. Translation by Graham Dunstan Martin, Laforgue: Selected Poems (London: Penguin Books, 1998), p. 32. In ‘Complainte de l'orgue de barbarie’, Laforgue rhymes ‘Sulamites’ with ‘rites’.

  36. Louÿs, ‘Idées sommaires sur le nouveau vers français’, p. 42.

  37. Mallarmé to Rodenbach, 25 March 1888, on receipt of the latter's first collection Du Silence (Correspondance III 1886-1889, ed. Henri Mondor and Lloyd James Austin (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), p. 177).

  38. One remembers the charge levelled at Baudelaire by Rimbaud in his letter to Paul Demeny of 15 May 1871: ‘et la forme si vantée en lui est mesquine. Les inventions d'inconnu réclament des formes nouvelles’ [‘and the form which is so much praised in him is trivial. Inventions from the unknown demand new forms’] (trans., with French text, Bernard, p. 16).

  39. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Peter Ackroyd (London: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 26.

Get Ahead with eNotes

Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.

Get 48 Hours Free Access
Previous

The Poetry of Consciousness

Next

The Linguistic Turning of the Symbol: Baudelaire and His French Symbolist Heirs

Loading...