Talks on Poetry

TALK THIRTY

We have now to take a close look at Mallarme's Azure. We have already seen it as something of a lost Eden to which he has a nostalgic relation in the midst of his quest for a new kind of poetic utterance that keeps eluding him. You may note that the Azure makes here for Mallarme a joint reality with rose-woods. Flowers on the earth and the blue sky above fused in his mind and in an early reference to the latter he speaks of the former as having their origin in the Azure: he makes Mother Earth cull flowers

Des avalanches d'or du vieil azur, au jour

Premier...

(From the ancient azure's avalanching gold,

On the first day...)

The Life Force at its most delicately beautiful in an exquisite abundance is what the Azure in one aspect is. Just a shade different is the aspect in which the Azure is a source of vague desires for life's fullness. Mallarme writes of it as of a child's thirst in the morning for its mother's breast:

...des levres que l'air du vierge azur affame...

(...lips made hungry by the virgin azure's air...)

Like a Godhead hanging aloft in a lovely languor of illimitable ease the Azure calls and calls: the poet's soul fountains irresistibly to it:

Fidele, un blanc jet d'eau soupire vers l'Azur!

—Vers l'Azur attendri d'Octobre pale et pur...

(Faithful, towards the Azure, a white jet sighs!

—Soft Azure in pale pure October skies...)

Here we have an interesting combination of white and blue and we may also surmise the background which is a garden where the white jet is leaping upward. Out of Nature's tenderly thrilled

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prolificity the aspiration goes forth — a white aspiration feeling that the Azure above is the ultimate goal of this crystalline cry.

The Azure in all these lines is felt as a blissful creator — an effortless artist bringing out of himself the world of sensation, the world of plastic form and powerful scent and penetrating touch. The Azure is an inexhaustible spontaneous fecundity — all-creating, all-containing, all-constituting. But this fecundity is found by Mallarme to be not altogether a cause of innocent hunger in the human heart. There is a subtle sensuousness in the very essence of the Azure and it evokes a rapture of response in the depth of our flesh-built being. Mallarme figures a young girl stirred by it and saying:

le tiede azur d'ete,

Vers qui nativement la femme se devoile...

(summer's tepid azure,

To which a woman is born to unveil herself...)

Innocence and voluptuousness are thus blended in the omni-present blue. Yearning and love in terms of subtilised sensation, in terms of soulful sensuousness: that is what the Azure reveals itself to be when Mallarme the idealist answers to its call. It is at the same time wonderful and disturbing to him: the natural man in him enjoys its stimulus but the white jet at the centre of his being, though sighing towards it as towards the highest it can view, holds in its soupir not only a delicate idealistic ache but also a vague tremulous regret that it can do no other than thus move blueward.

The artist in Mallarme is also disturbed. Bent on creating some rare poetry and failing to do so he wanders amidst Nature's prolific domain of leaf and blossom and winged music, and nurses in his own breast a poignant ennui, a boredom and a fatigue with wasted effort so much in contrast to the ease with which the Azure conjures up the world around him by means of an entranced happiness as of an infinite overarching flower:

J'attends, en m'abimant, que mon ennui s'eleve...

— Cependant l'Azur rit sur la haie et l'eveil

De tant d'oiseaux en fleur gazouillant au soleil.

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(I wait, self-doomed, for boredom to lift up...

—But the Azure laughs above the hedge and the rush

Of bird on bird in bloom with the sun their cry.)

The intensest agony experienced by the artist Mallarme vis-a-vis the Azure finds tongue in the famous poem called L'Azur. There the disturbance caused in him by the sky-presence turns into a revolt. Under the gaze of the great Demiurge on high, the pro-ductive abundance at once sublime and soft; innocent and volup-tuous, sky-showered and earth-sprouted, the poet feels not only barren but also baulked and broken as if by a subtle mockery:

De l'eternel Azur la sereine ironie

Accable, belle indolemment comme les fleurs,

Le poete impuissant qui maudit son genie

A travers un desert sterile de Douleurs.

(The eternal Azure's serene irony

Crushes with its indolent beauty as of flowers

The impuissant poet cursing his genius

Through a sterile desert of despairing hours.)

He seeks to escape but in vain. Always the Azure is there, beautifully beyond all attainment and imitation and urging him to an ever-hopeless striving. Like an Ideal it shines, yet an Ideal that denies his fruition: it is a Divinity whose beatific omnipotence becomes a torturing obsession to him, a Devil that will not let him rest. It sends him flying to all sorts of endeavours to forget it, but everything reminds him of it. He even attempts to abolish its idealistic spur to him and turns towards the commonalty of men so that he may be lost in the human herd. Just then the Church bells ring their evensong, the Angelus, and he is pierced with a memory of the unattainable altitude and his own impotence tears at his heart again. His whole life becomes one cry, which we have already quoted, of helplessness bespelled by an Azure inescapable and everywhere.

Here Mallarme the artist finds his most bitter and passionate expression under the pressure of that baleful loveliness. Mallarme the idealist may be heard through the mouth of his dramatic character, Herodiade, the daughter of Herodias whom history

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knows as Salome. Salome was a dancer at the court of King Herod of Palestine. We are told by legend that she fell in love with John the Baptist, the holy man who preceded and heralded Jesus. On being repulsed by him she took a horrible revenge. When, after a marvellous dance, King Herod offered to give her anything she asked, she demanded the head of John the Baptist. The head was brought to her on a plate. She seems to have been a woman who fell passionately in love with the Baptist's purity: she would not yield to any man, she would live in seclusion from their attentions and be a sinner only with a saint! In Mallarme's poem she is pictured as living frigidly, all by herself, a bewitching woman who would not surrender her virginity to anyone. Through her mouth Mallarme expresses his sense of a strange hell in the glorious godhead of the Azure, a satanic sweetness whose allure has to be shunned, though seeming ever so heavenly:

...clos les volets, l'azur

Seraphique sourit dans les vitres profondes,

Et je deteste, moi, le bel azur!

Des ondes

Se bercent et, la-bas, sais-tu pas un pays

Ou le sinistre ciel ait les regards hais

De Venus qui, le soir, brule dans le feuillage:

J'y partirais...

(...close all the shutters, the seraphic

Azure is smiling through the panes profound,

I hate the beautiful Azure!

Lo beyond

Where in its cradle of billows the sea sways,

A land whose sullen skies bear the loathed gaze

Of Venus who, eve-long, in the foliage burns;

There will I go...)

No doubt, the Azure finds a natural echo in our heart, all our delight seems awaiting us in it, but the depth of rapture by which we are fascinated is a sensuousness, a voluptuousness to be sur-passed. We must shut our eyes to the beauty that glows out to us from that depth: then alone shall we discover the ultimate truth and, through it, the ultimate beauty. For, the ultimate beauty is of

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Eternity, not of Time, and the way towards it is not the way of the body-thrilled desire but the way of self-withdrawn virginity. Along a track of whiteness within us seeking a white felicity and no blue bliss, we have to move: our consummation is some vast Nirvana, an oblivion of the colourful storm that is Nature. Even though the track may seem to lie through a shadowy bleakness under "sullen skies" we must enter into their loathing of the Azure-lapped foliage-burning Venus and resolutely say: "There will I go."

Occasionally, just as the white jet sighs to the blue, the blue sends forth to Mallarme a glimmer of the Nirvanic peace and then we have a line like:

L'insensibilite de l'azur et des pierres.

(The insensibility of the azure and of stones.)

But mostly the Azure is a splendorous Time-God and, though invested with an ecstatic innocence at its high origin or in its flowery reflex below, its appeal and evocation is to a refined voluptuary in man, the sex-tinged lover of the beautiful. Enchanting as the Azure-steeped existence might be, Mallarme aches to transcend it. At first this ache finds no clear formulation. He just feels his own sterility as strangely elevating in the very moment that it is terribly depressing. And his innate ennui, at war with the sensuous stir in his heart, is driven under the Azure's multiform paradoxical presence to a desperate yearning for sleep, death, extinction. He feels that in them there is a secret of fulfilment which the Azure can never give to the deepest and highest in man.

As I have said in an earlier lecture, the sleep, death, extinction yearned for was to Mallarme not what is usually understood by these things. They were to be something queerly conscious. The experience which he had of the Superconscient through the In-conscient supplied the basis on which he built the idealism as well as the artistry of his later life. It set him pursuing the composition of enigmatic verse in which unearthly idealities figured as emerging from and hovering against an infinite White which is at the same time sterility and the Ineffable. The link between this sterility and the Ineffable is a virginity of being.

We may now look at Mallarme's White from several angles. From the viewpoint of Art, this White is, as we have observed,

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...le vide papier que la blancheur defend.

(...the bare paper guarded by its own white)

It is also the season of Winter, when the snow draws the mind away from sensuousness and puts it in tune with the far Ideal:

L'hiver, saison de l'art serein, l'hiver lucide...

(Winter, serene art's season, lucid winter...)

Mallarme's best work used to be done in the cold months. Here he is like Milton who has left it on record that his finest inspiration came between the autumnal equinox and the vernal equinox. Between September 21 and March 21 the old Puritan poet sat day after day in his favourite pose, one leg thrown over the arm of a chair, and dictated his magnificent thunder to his bored daughters or secretaries. There is something cold about Milton's splendour, but I wonder whether the quality of his verse can be described as snowy or crystalline. One may speak of a certain grey grandeur in him, but not anything in the Mallarmean mode. For one thing, he is not subtle enough, not inward enough. For another, though he is a scrupulous shaper of things, he is not enough of a purifier. No doubt a greater creator than Mallarme, but in terms of the Azure, however dulled by Puritanism in the midst of the sublime vitality that the Renaissance temper in him brought to his work. Mallarme's delicacy and depth are not in Milton, just as Milton's vibrant vastness is lacking in Mallarme. We cannot think of Milton raising the soul of Winter to that intensity of remote coldness we find in the phrase Mallarme gives to his Herodiade when she apostrophises the star-pierced night:

O toi qui te meurs, toi qui brule de chastete,

Nuit blanche de glacons et de neige cruelle...

(O you that die to yourself in chastity's glow,

White night of clotted ice and cruel snow...)

Here is a passion for passionlessness from which Milton's Puritanism of reasoned restraint is miles away. Even in a less pas-

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sionately passionless treatment of the stars we have a non-Miltonic sense of the virginal, the white — a sense that is aesthetic and mystic, not mental and moral. Here, as also in the previous vision, there is a merger of the Ultimate with the Ideal. The White is seen not as a formless infinity but as a pattern, and the pattern is given as caught in a reflective earth-mood. A glimpse of some chord of the Archetype-harmony in the rapt consciousness is suggested through the physical imaging of the constellation Great Bear, with its seven silver points, in a still mirror hung opposite a window in the poet's room:

...encor

Que dans l'oubli ferme par le cadre, se fixe

De scintillations sitot le septuor.

(...while yet

In the frame-closed oblivion is set

At once of scintillations the septet.)

The French word "septuor" is a term in music, meaning a piece for seven voices or seven instruments. So the suggestion here is of a sevenfold music that is yet a sevenfold silence.

The idea of whiteness and scintillation is presented in a different form in a poem about a Japanese fan in the hand of Mallarme's daughter. At the end of a whole series of intuitive fantasies whose central motif is "un pur delice sans chemin" — "a pure pathless delight" — the poet sees the Japanese fan folded up by his daughter and held against her braceleted arm as if it were a wing closed in a self-inwardness, and he discovers in that still attitude of cool colourlessness against cool colour a conjuration of dream-distances: a queenhood of virginal mystery calls up a magical sky filled with sunset-splendour: the shut fan is like a sceptre —

Le sceptre des rivages roses

Stagnants sur les soirs d'or, ce l'est,

Ce blanc vol ferme que tu poses

Contre le feu d'un bracelet.

(Sceptre of roseate shores that lean

Stagnant on depths of evening gold—

This flight of whiteness which you fold

To rest athwart a bangle's sheen.)

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You may mark here how Mallarme is able to take up any subject, be it ever so trivial, and use it as a means to his Reve and his Mystere. He has written memorably apropos of a glass-tube in a chandelier, the ash collected at the tip of his cigar, the lace-curtains on a window whose panes brighten with the dawn after the poet's night-vigil for the revelatory word and into whose brightness the curtains seem to dissolve by becoming translucent — curtains that are quite different in their function from those on a bed which shut one up into darkness:

Cet unanime blanc conflit

D'une guirlande avec la meme,

Enfui contre la vitre bleme

Flotte plus qu'il n'ensevelit.

This conflict of unanimous white,

Garland with garland-twin a-strain

And vanishing on the window pane,

Floats more than buries down the sight.)

In this vision, blessing with its poetic suggestion Mallarme's night-long search for self-expression, we have a symbol for Mallarmean poetry itself: the poet has to be like the white curtains and lose his own identity by turning into a diaphanous transmitter of virginal light like the dawn's — the poet has to carry the eyes of his reader towards free ethereal spaces as those curtains do and not submerge the consciousness into dense earthly comfort or pleasure as do bed-curtains.

The Mallarmean White comes also in the symbol of sailing beyond the temporal and terrestrial to some infinity and eternity. In one poem a young practitioner of verse-craft is hailed as a new Vasco da Gama whom no mere Orient can halt or satisfy: a salute is raised

Au seul souci de voyager

Outre une Inde splendide et trouble —

(To the lone will of voyaging

Beyond all Ind of splendour and trouble—)

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and in another poem we find this "seul souci" concretised at the end of another toast to the poet's goal of transcendence:

Solitude, recif, etoile

A n'importe ce qui valut

Le blanc souci de notre toile.

(Solitude, rocky reef and star,

To all that lures of high avail

The straining whiteness of our sail.)

Here, as in the preceding quotations, we are shown what we should strive to attain in the future. But Mallarme's conception of the supreme White covers life's beginning no less than life's end. This White is what meets us at very birth and if we go deeper than the high-hung Azure that seems to make the infant's lips thirsty for some ultimate happiness we shall discover the true source of that primal longing. In fact, the very line we have cited in this connection is preceded by a phrase pointing to the White rather than the Azure and leading on to the latter simply because Mallarme did not yet fathom profoundly enough his own poet-heart. Let us give now the total context:

...le sein

Par qui coule en blancheur sibylline la femme

Pour les levres que l'air du vierge azur affame...

(...the breast

Whence flows in sybilline whiteness woman bare

For lips made hungry by the virgin azure's air...)

"Blancheur sibylline" — that is the stuff of sovereign felicity. And even the "azur" which is taken for the top splendour drawing the idealist's vision is characterised as "vierge". The truth behind the aspiration of these lines stands out clear in some words Herodiade utters, Herodiade who has spoken of the burning fires of chastity in the heights of heaven: these words are her cry to her old nurse who suckled her as a babe and they convey the sense of a supreme purity merging childhood and sainthood in a mystic White:

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Je ne veux rien d'humain, et, sculptee

Si tu me vois les yeux perdus en paradis,

C'est quand je me souviens de ton lait bu jadis...

(Nought human I desire and if perchance

Thou seest me sculpture-still with paradised glance,

Know that I dream thy milk my child-lips drained...)

We may say that the Mallarmean poet awakes to his mission in the very moment he tastes for the first time the milk of his mother's or his nurse's breast. Behind that initial — or, shall we say, initiatory — gulp of life-nourishment is the primordial Mystery for whose service and revelation he is born. Has not Coleridge spoken of the essential poet as one who inspires "holy dread" by "his flashing eyes, his floating hair",

For he on honey-dew hath fed

And drunk the milk of paradise.

It is this "milk of paradise" that Mallarme symbolises in those lines in the mouth of his Herodiade. And the nurse to whom they are addressed is a medium, as it were, through whom he throws out a shape-suggestion of the primordial Mystery about which he affords us a hint in a prose-phrase more poetic than the verse of many poets and brief-bright and sudden-white like the very lightning-burst it expresses: "Quelque eclair supreme ou s'eveille la Figure que nul n'est" — "A supreme flash from which is aroused that Shape which no one is".

Mallarme never faltered in his aspiration towards this Shape. But he never felt that he had achieved his aim. And it is true that time and again what he achieves is only an inner subtlety and not the mystic flash. But even in the midst of his greatest triumphs he rhythms forth a regret. I suppose the regret is due to the fact that though Mallarme the poet has found fulfilment in some poems Mallarme the idealist has not made his home in what these poems have sung. The fulfilment went no further than communicating a living sense of the wondrous White. But to be at all moments this Wonder itself and to let poetry issue from such an experience — "where," asked Mallarme, "where is this in my poetic life?" All his verses he regarded as mere preliminaries to some great Work

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yet undone. And even these preliminaries — how few were they! Not that he was unaware of the special quality of his exiguous production. He knew he had caught a small pure flame which grander poets had missed: particularly the grand poet Victor Hugo who had spoken so much about "infinite" and "eternite" and "divinite" seemed to miss that flame because he had no access to the inner secrecy in whose ever-present Absence Mallarme breath-ed and moved. Hugo, besides being led away by his rhetorical tendency from the true mystic articulation, was still subject to the intellectualism inherent in the French language as developed through the centuries: Hugo at even his best had but sublimated by an imaginative and rhythmic process the spirit of prose. It is with men like Nerval and Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine, that the French Muse began to emancipate herself from prose, and in Mallarme she exceeded herself by partly becoming non-French. Mallarme was conscious of his own rare accomplishment, his distil-lation of poetry through a hushed inwardness. But he was con-scious also of the immensely more that remained to be accom-plished. His consciousness of his own rarity was just the strength with which he was able to resist all temptation to be popular, to write in the usual mode: it saved him from loss of his poetic virginity, so to speak, but it did not provide him with any self-satisfaction. The lack of self-satisfaction found speech in several fine poems, and once he uttered it with a masterly poetic art in a sonnet which he wrote in 1885 — a confession of failure which is one of his greatest poetic successes: Le Cygne (The Swan). It has a basis of personal poetic history, but it widens out into a soul-truth valid for Man in general.

I have analysed this Sonnet in a book I have written on Mal -larme. So I shall not repeat myself here. Sri Aurobindo's words on it should really suffice to bring home its crowning place in Mal-larme's ouevre. But let me preface the comment with the poem first in French, then in an almost literal translation and finally in a more or less free metrical and rhymed version.

1

Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui

Va-t-il nous dechirer avec un coup d'aile ivre

Le lac dur oublie que hante sous le givre

Le transparent glacier des vols qui n'ont pas fui!

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Un cygne d'autrefois se souvient que c'est lui

Magnifique mais qui sans espoir se delivre

Pour n'avoir pas chante la region ou vivre

Quand du sterile hiver a resplendi l'ennui.

Tout son col secouera cette blanche agonie

Par l'espace infligee a l'oiseau qui le nie,

Mais non l'horreur du sol ou la plumage est pris.

Fantome qu'a ce lieu son pur eclat assigne,

Il s'immobilise au songe froid de mepris

Que vet parmi l'exil inutile le Cygne.

2

The virginal, the vivid, the beautiful today —

Does it come to tear with a stroke of drunken wing

This hard forgotten lake which, under the hoar-frost, is

haunted

By the transparent glacier of flights that have not flown?

A swan of other times remembers that it is he

Who, magnificent but without hope, frees himself

For not having sung the region where one should live

When the boredom of sterile winter has shone forth.

All his neck will shake off the white agony

Inflicted by space on the bird which denies space,

But not the horror of the soil where the plumage is caught.

Phantom whom to this place his pure brightness assigns,

He is immobilised in the cold dream of contempt

That is worn, amid his useless exile, by the Swan.

3

Virginal, vivid, beautiful Today —

Will it tear with a stroke of drunken wing this lone

Hard lake where haunts mid hoar-frost's overlay

The transparent glacier of flights unflown?

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A swan of the past remembers now his own

Splendour left hopeless even though flaming free,

Because he sang not life's dominion

Beyond dull winter's bright sterility.

His neck will shake off the white agony

Space-flung upon the bird denying space,

But the soil's horror grips his plumage down.

Phantom whose pure sheen fits him to this place,

He is stilled in the cold contemptuous reverie

That clothes the useless exile of the Swan.

Now for Sri Aurobindo's light on the poem. A disciple found the sonnet tortuous and unintelligible in parts. Particularly the verse about the hoar-frost, the glacier and the flights left him dazed. He wondered how the last two could fuse and he mixed up the first two as if the frost had turned into the glacier. Sri Aurobindo wrote: " 'Givre' is not the same as 'glace' — it is not ice, but the covering of hoar-frost such as you find on the trees etc., the congealed moisture of the air — that is the 'blanche agonie' which has come down from the insulted space on the swan and on the lake. He can shake off that but the glacier holds him; he can no more rise to the skies, caught in the frozen cold mass of the failures of the soul that refused to fly upward and escape. It is one of the finest sonnets I have ever read. Magnificent line, by the way, 'le transparent glacier des vols qui n'ont pas fui!' This idea of the denied flights (imprisoned powers) of the soul that have frozen into a glacier seems to me as powerful as it is violent. Of course, in French such expressions were quite new — in some other languages they were already possible. You will find lots of kindred things in the most modern poetry which specialises in violent revelatory (or at least would-be revelatory) images. You disapprove? Well, one may do so, — classical taste does; but I find myself obliged here to admire." When he was told that the poem was usually interpreted in terms of Mallarme's peculiar unfortunate inward check on poetic production, Sri Aurobindo replied: "The swan is to my understanding not merely the poet who has not sung in the higher spaces of the consciousness, which is already a fine idea, but the soul that has not risen there and found its higher

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expression, the poet, if Mallarme thought of that specially, being only a signal instance of this spiritual frustration. There can be no more powerful, moving and formidable expression of this spiritual frustration, this chilled and sterile greatness than the image of the frozen lake and the imprisoned swan as developed by Mallarme."

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