The stylistic problem faced by the Symbolist poet was how to make a poem strange. Of course, it is unlikely that he posed the question to himself in such a conscious way: he simply wrote poems, and each poem was itself an answer. A good answer, a satisfying answer, was followed by another attempt along the same lines; a bad answer was rejected and its direction abandoned.

Poetic strangeness, as noted earlier, first took the form of strange subjects—remote times and civilizations, taboo tastes and delights, the “plaisirs artificiels” praised by the master Baudelaire. There were also strange verse forms, which destroyed the sacred alexandrine line (again following Baudelaire) and introduced new, short, sing-song lyrics, “refrains niais, rythmes naïfs.”¹ And then there was something else, more diffuse and all-encompassing, a revolutionary technique—perhaps a whole new way of writing. It was the use of “symbols,” Moréas and the others said; but …, this did not go very far in describing it.

Surely this style of writing went further than Baudelaire, further than anything else that had been done, and the new poetry shimmered with a beauty unknown before—but what was it exactly, this use of “symbols”? Again, the poet is interested in writing poems, not literary criticism; if he can keep creating this new effect without having to explain it satisfactorily, he will. And, as has been seen from the morass that is the Symbolists' terminology, this is precisely what Moréas, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Maeterlinck, and the others did do.

The first poem to achieve this symboliste effect in the French language was not, however, written by any of these men. It came far earlier, preceding by four years the publication of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal—in other words, it came long before the word Symbolist was coined. “El Desdichado” by Gérard de Nerval is still something of a wild, flashing poem today; it is difficult to imagine how this archetypal Symbolist piece must have looked to the casual reader of Le Mousquetaire as he opened his issue of December 10, 1853:

EL DESDICHADO

Je suis le ténébreux—le veuf—l'inconsolé,
Le prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie:
Ma seule étoile est morte,—et mon luth constellé
Porte le soleil noir de la Mélancolie.
Dans la nuit du tombeau, toi qui m'as consolé,
Rends-moi le Pausilippe et la mer d'Italie,
La fleur qui plaisait tant à mon coeur désolé
Et la treille où le pampre à la rose s'allie.
Suis-je Amour ou Phébus? … Lusignan ou Biron?
Mon front est rouge encor du baiser de la reine;
J'ai rêvé dans la grotte où nage la sirène …
Et j'ai deux fois vainqueur traversé l'Achéron:
Modulant tour à tour sur la lyre d'Orphée
Les soupirs de la sainte et les cris de la fée.(2)

A first reading of the sonnet will leave the reader, at the very least, puzzled. If “El Desdichado” is as good a poem as I feel it to be, that same first reading—or subsequent readings—may catch the reader up in some of the mystery of the lonely speaker's plight: the allusions to his fabulous adventures in a world of queens, castles, and dreamy sea-caves and, for all that, his overwhelming, unconsolable sadness. But whatever else the reader may feel when he finishes it, he must at least have a sense of being “out of it,” cut off from the poem—for what, after all, does he know about it?

The poem appears to be a desperate, death-bound lament of … El Desdichado.³ The reader does not know who the speaker is, although apparently a good deal of the sonnet is devoted to that subject. The speaker identifies himself as the Prince of Aquitania, Cupid, Phoebus (Apollo), Lusignan, Biron—in other words, none of these, for the very profusion of names prevents the reader from taking any one of them seriously: they are metaphors, allusive comparisons. The reader knows, or senses, that this central figure is mourning some sort of loss (he is “widowed,” he tells us in line 1, and unconsoled; his “star” is dead—line 3). But what has he lost—his woman? Is she dead, or simply gone?

And then, what is the meaning of these other phrases: “My brow is still red from the kiss of the queen”—which queen?—“In the night of the tomb,” “I have dreamt in the grotto where the siren swims”? How does all this fit together?

My purpose in posing these questions is not to introduce a thorough gloss of the source of each mysterious fragment in the poem,⁴ but to focus only on two phrases that occur early in the poem—“le prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie” and “ma seule étoile est morte”—and to ask, not what they mean, but how they are “strange,” how they work in the poem.

“Le prince d'Aquitaine” appears to be a reference to some figure out of French history or folklore. It, and phrases such as “la nuit du tombeau,” “le baiser de la reine,” and others, are allusions which pass unrecognized by the reader. In each case, the implication is that some specific person or thing or event is being referred to, but the reader does not know who or what. He is in the same position as someone who has never studied the Aeneid or heard of Dido and who, in the course of reading Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, comes across the lines:

                                                            In such a night
Stood Dido with a willow in her hand
Upon the wild sea-banks, and waft her love
To come again to Carthage.

[5.1.11-14]

Not knowing who Dido is, he might still be able to piece together some of the elements of the allusion—a woman, probably sad, bidding good-bye to her lover—but he would definitely feel “outside” of the allusion, like a walker overhearing snatches of a conversation five or ten paces ahead of him.

This is how the reader of “El Desdichado” feels, faced with these “allusions to nowhere.” “Le Prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie” sounds like an allusion to some famous legendary episode in French history—but one which, strangely, the reader doesn't quite recall. When he tries to piece together the available evidence, he receives only fragmentary impressions: “prince” to him does not mean a specific person, but only connotes youth, royalty, and days of yore. Likewise “Aquitaine” means “Old France,” “olden days,” perhaps also “Spain” (it is near the Spanish border), thus reenforcing the impression created by the Spanish title. “À la tour abolie” makes the reader think of a ruined castle, hence also of antiquity, and suggests loneliness and “living on borrowed time” (abolie). There is no meaningful way to put it all together, nothing that would make a reader say “Oh, I see!” but there is not total lack of communication either. Like the eavesdropper, the reader has caught snatches of a conversation and, he tells himself, perhaps it will become clear later on.

In a similar way, mystery hovers around the phrase “ma seule étoile est morte.” Taken literally it is an unlikely statement. People do not usually refer to heavenly bodies as “mine” or “yours,” and furthermore it is only modern astronomers who say that stars “die” or are “born,” so to say “my only star is dead” is on two counts unacceptable in its literal meaning. We therefore assume the phrase implies that some “figurative” meaning is called for—but one which is not clear.

Now étoile in French, like star in English, is one of those words around which a whole iconography has grown up. Because it was once believed that the stars controlled the destinies of men, star in many languages has the (now figurative) meaning of fate or destiny. Through a similar but apparently unrelated process, star also acquired the meaning “hope.” Via the Latin feminine stella in Roman and, later, in Christian symbolism, it gained the further significance of “beauty” or “beautiful woman.” In short, star is one of those words commonly characterized as having a great many “figurative” meanings.

One fact about such meanings is immediately apparent: they are purely conventional. A star (the heavenly body) has no more to do with hope, beauty, or fate than—say—the moon, but the latter's verbal iconography has evolved instead to inconstancy, madness, jealousy—again, for purely conventional reasons. It is the same literary tradition that makes lions courageous or mighty, roses beautiful, hearts the seat of the emotions, etc. Ultimately, iconographic meanings have a real source—an ancient belief or custom, a well-known folk-tale or saying, in short, some piece of the civilization's lore—but the source is unimportant, for the lore-based meaning has long since come into its own: it is almost part of the language.

But not quite. For just as these meanings depend on pure literary convention, so they come with the label “figurative” attached to them, they are not quite on a par with other meanings. When someone says, “Only the stars will decide the outcome of the game” or “Barbara is a rose,” a listener will understand, as part of the meaning, that the speaker is being somewhat literary, and is “speaking figuratively.” Now this “figurativeness” has nothing to do with the thing-associatedness of the usages. Were the sentences changed to read “All the stars will be in today's game” and “Barbara is a peach” the usages would no longer be perceived as “figurative”—these meanings are too common, they truly have been absorbed by the language.

All of this is a long way to explaining the reader's reaction to phrases like “Ma seule étoile est morte,” “le soleil noir de la Mélancolie,” “la fleur qui plaisait tant …” etc. In each case the reader is aware that “star,” “sun,” or “flower” is rife with iconographic possibilities, and that one figurative meaning or another is being called for—but which precise meaning is unclear. The reader is not sure he has understood. If, for example, he reads on in the poem looking for some confirmation of one reading of étoile over the others, he is disappointed: he may suspect this “star” to mean a beautiful woman, a last hope in the speaker's life, the speaker's fate—or some combination of the three. But whichever it is, no more precise information is offered. The thing the speaker has lost only goes on to be called or associated with: “le Pausilippe,” “la mer d'Italie,” “la fleur qui plaisait tant à mon coeur désolé” “la treille où le pampre à la rose s'allie.” These offer little help.

Now there is a basic similarity between the reader's reaction to “le prince d'Aquitaine” and “ma seule étoile est morte.” In both cases, he feels there is an essential bit of information which he does not have and which is necessary to full comprehension. In the first case, it is the identity of the prince, that apparent historical or legendary figure whom the reader has somehow not heard of; in the second it is that particular “figurative” meaning of étoile which will make all the vague phrases after it come clear. Of course, readers don't puzzle for hours over each phrase as it appears. In “El Desdichado,” the reader is grasping bits and pieces—he can surmise the speaker is lamenting the loss of someone or something, and that the speaker is that shadowy, noble, dashing figure from somewhere near the Pyrenees—and so he reads on. But the poem, for him, has a certain aura of mystery about it, due to the “missing information” which, it is implied, is necessary for full comprehension. In other words, the poet creates the strangeness by not telling everything, or, more precisely, by implying that not everything has been told.

This is the genius of Nerval's poem, and the fundamental discovery of the Symbolist poets. They were the first to seek out systematically this effect of withheld information, recognizing in mystery a source of beauty and depth not known in poetry before. There is a compelling urgency about Nerval's new way of writing. An anonymous communication drops onto the page, a blur: prince, tower, sadness, death, Italy, flower. Read it again. The flashing scenes group about a single idea, repeated and restated throughout the poem: the grief of deprivation or separation. Who the speaker is, what he has lost—it is important that we not know these things, for their haziness is what gives the sonnet its force and urgency. The point of the poem is not that we find these things out. The point of the poem is that we read it again and again, that we read it until the simple message—veuf, inconsolé, Mélancolie—is enough for us to glide on, until we can get so much into the poem that we can accept all its words and love their mystery.

Now I have described “le prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie” as an apparent allusion; the same description will fit “ma seule étoile est morte.” For what we tend to call an allusion in literature is simply a reference to somebody or something outside of the immediate context but (it is assumed) within the knowledge or experience of most readers. It may be a real person or a character from literature, a historical event or a scene from a novel, a legend, a primitive belief, a fact of natural science, a well-known landmark—in short, something that figures in the general lore. As has been seen, this same stock of lore is the locus of the sought-after meaning of étoile. So if an allusion can be seen as a reference to lore, it is clear that le prince d'Aquitaine differs from étoile only in its specificity; the two partake of essentially the same process.

For every allusion there is a triggering mechanism: incomplete comprehension. What makes the reader perceive “prince d'Aquitaine” as an allusion is that, as a factual statement of the speaker's identity, it adds nothing, it is unrecognized and makes no particular sense in the poem. On the most immediate level, he finds nothing to complete his understanding and so must go looking for some lore to help. Similarly, what makes the reader seek a “figurative” meaning for étoile is the fact that, taken as “heavenly body,” it doesn't make sense: it is (like soleil noir later on in the poem) a contradiction in terms, and so demands some resolution. The reader sets out to look for it.

What normally happens in an allusion is that the sought-after lore is found and the incomprehension removed. Consider, for example, a stanza of A. E. Housman's “To an Athlete Dying Young”:

Smart lad to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Taken as botanical entities, laurel and rose don't make much sense in the poem (“Why's he talking about flowers all of a sudden?” the reader may ask). Incomplete comprehension leads the reader away from these “literal” meanings to two lore-based “figurative” meanings: for rose, feminine beauty, and for laurel, accolade (here, as is clear from the context, the recognition given to young athletes). With the proper lore, the sense becomes clear: “You were smart to die at a young age, since athletic prowess fades even faster than a woman's beauty.” The allusive process has been completed.

Now the precise stylistic characteristic of “El Desdichado” is that the allusive process is not satisfied but continually frustrated. Again and again the reader is confronted with what looks like an allusion (in the broad sense I have been using the term) but he is unable to find the suitable bit of iconography that will unlock the mystery. And so, as has been seen, phrases break down into their constituent parts (le prince d'Aquitaine “means” only the sum of individual associations hovering about “prince,” “Aquitaine,” “tour,” etc.); the whole becomes disjointed and chaotic. From the shimmering fragments there emerges a pattern—the lament for something irretrievably lost—but it is like a small cry in a howling wind.

Having focused on the source of mysteriousness in the poem, it is equally important to identify two unifying elements: our knowledge of the present state of the speaker, and his attitude in his lament. Whoever he may be, emphatic restatements throughout the poem of the fact that he is le veuf and l'inconsolé continually provide a framework in which to order all the flashing allusions. For all that he is and all that he has done, he remains bereft and unconsoled. “J'ai rêvé dans la grotte où nage la sirène” is a perfect expression of his state, his fabulous experience, and his total immersion in self. The reader's awareness of this state (which begins with the first line of the poem) allows him to order all the other allusions of the poem as reiterations and elaborations of the speaker's identity. Similarly, the attitude of the speaker in the poem is clearly established. He is in a state of desperate introspection (apparent in the two parallel sets of self-characterizations beginning “Je suis” and “Suis-je”), and the magnitude of his despair is clear in the hyperboles of the second quatrain (“Rends-moi le Pausilippe …” etc.).

These two elements—the persona, or identity of the speaker of the poem, and the tone, the speaker's attitude toward the subject of the poem and toward the reader—constitute the “fixed star” of the poem.⁵ The mystery of the speaker's grief, along with the poem's other unknowns, is softened just enough by the one thing the reader knows for certain: the speaker is “widowed” and desperate. He who has been consoled is unconsolable, the star that is dead is dead forever. The speaker's yearnings for reunion (symbolized as “the trellis where the vine to the rose is joined”—line 8) and remembrances of his own past, which together make up the rest of the poem, only throw his present state into greater relief.

“El Desdichado” was a freak occurrence—Nerval never wrote anything quite like it again, nor did anyone else for the next twenty years. But despite its early date, it cannot be called a “precursor,” but must be considered the first Symbolist poem in French. The frustrated allusion, the well-defined persona and tone—these are the elements on which most of the greatest Symbolist poems are built. In its total effect, “El Desdichado” has that haziness, that strangeness, which the Symbolists valued so highly. Mallarmé spoke for all the Symbolists when he repeatedly asserted this mysteriousness—with all its mystical overtones—as poetry's central concern:

La poésie est l'expression, par le langage humain ramené à son rythme essentiel, du sens mystérieux des aspects de l'existence, et constitue la seule tache spirituelle.⁶

Toute chose sacrée et qui veut demeurer sacrée s'enveloppe de mystère.⁷

Il doit y avoir énigme en poésie, c'est le but de la littérature.⁸

Why such a poetry of mysteriousness came to be called symbolism will never be entirely clear. Much of it was the work of accident, that whim (it does not seem to have been much more) that Moréas had in calling his salon group the “symboliques,” a name that somehow stuck, like Impressionism.⁹ But if “symbol” did have any real meaning in the minds of the Symbolists or their critics, it seems to have been, not as the name of a single trope or figure, but as a general term for the allusive phrases or images that filled their poems, “le prince d'Aquitaine,” “ma seule étoile” and hundreds more, which became the inscrutable icons in their Temple of the Word. For this reason Nerval's “frustrated allusion” is of particular importance. It is the archetypal Symbolist device, as much a “symbol” as is any discrete element to be found in the Symbolists' poetry.

Notes

1. The phrase is from Rimbaud's “Une Saison en Enfer” (Œuvres, p. 228). Gustave Kahn, Jules Laforgue, and Tristan Corbière were the most influential in regard to verse-form innovations. Kahn, claiming to have invented vers libre, divided his colleagues into two other groups: those who, like Mallarmé sought to “essentialize” poetry in its already existing forms, and those who, like Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Corbière, wrote lines that were “délicieusement faux exprès” (G. Kahn, préface to, Premiers Poèmes, pp. 14-17); the latter group did much with off-rhyme as well.

2. G. de Nerval, Œuvres, 1: 693-95.

3. The title is probably not understood by most readers—it means “the disinherited”—and is the first of many uncomprehended things in the poem. It thus serves a definite function, that of distancing the reader, and furthermore anticipates the role of “Aquitaine” in placing the speaker near the Spanish border.

4. Such information is available (e.g. Lemaître's notes in Nerval, Œuvres) but, as will be seen, a knowledge of it only undercuts the poem's strangeness and undermines its overall effect.

5. The two are hard to distinguish here, since the speaker's own identity and present melancholy are precisely the subject of the poem. A good discussion of tone and persona and the relationship between the two may be found in R. A. Brower, Fields of Light, pp. 19-30.

6. Mallarmé, “Definition de la poesie,” in La Vogue, April 18, 1886 (quoted in Michaud, p. 15).

7. From Jules Huret's “Enquête Littéraire,” reprinted in Mallarmé's Œuvres Complètes.

8. Quoted in Michaud, p. 17; cf. Mallarmé's essay “Le Mystère dans les lettres,” Œuvres Complètes, pp. 382-87.

9. Impressionism derived its name from a critic's jeer at an early Monet painting entitled “Impression—soleil levant.”

Bibliography

Brower, R. A. Fields of Light. New York, 1951.

Kahn, Gustave. Premiers Poèmes. Paris, 1897.

Mallarmé, Stéphane. Œuvres complètes. Edited by H. Mondor. Paris, 1945.

Michaud, Guy. La Doctrine symboliste (Documents). Paris, 1947.

———. Message poétique du symbolisme. 3 vols. Paris, 1947.

Nerval, Gérard de. Œuvres. Edited by H. Lemaître. 2 vols. Paris, 1966.