Dissecting a sigh
Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Soupir” (“Sigh”), which appeared in the first collection of Parnasse contemporain in 1866, is a relatively early poem that already displays the poet’s fascinating use of language.
This poem, consisting of only one sentence and ten lines, is peculiarly knotted. What’s “happening”? We can simplify the poem to its most basic “action” in the following way:
My soul rises towards your brow and the roaming sky of your eye like a white fountain sighs towards the Azure.
Of course, Mallarmé doesn’t make it that simple. He fleshes out this skeleton considerably with evocative images that make up a broader scene. This is hardly surprising in the context of a poem. But his real genius is to use this additional material to obfuscate the streamlined “narrative” and, in doing so, give the text a different purpose than to tell a linear story.
He does this with unconventional and ambiguous word order. The poem starts with the main subject of our synopsis version above (mon âme, my soul), but doesn’t give us the verb attached to this noun until the beginning of line 4 (monte, rises). Instead, we’re immediately given one of two objects to which this soul is rising (ton front, you brow) and, two lines later, the second (le ciel errant de ton œil, the roaming sky of your eye). These two objects are themselves separated by further description of the brow, a description which is itself in a unconventional and obscuring word order: first a verb (où rêve, where dreams), then a direct address aside (ô calme sœur, oh tranquil sister), and finally the subject (un automne jonché de taches de rousseur, an autumn strewn with freckles). Only after being suspended through these three lines of descriptive tangent do we get to the rising which is supposedly the main action of the sentence. Then, again, before we can discover to what this ascent is being compared in line 5 (comme un blanc jet d'eau soupire vers l'Azur, as a white fountain sighs towards the Azure), we have to wait for and to wade through more context: a faithful fountain in a melancholy garden (dans un jardin mélancolique / Fidèle). And again, this description, aside from further delaying the sentence structure, is itself unclear. The placement of the adjective fidèle before the noun it describes (jet d’eau), offset by commas, is counter to typical French word order, wherein most adjectives come after their nouns. The result is that, omitting the commas, it could almost seem that the melancholy garden is faithful. Additionally, because fidèle begins the line in a one-word phrase exactly like the main action verb monte just one line above, we might associate it all the way back to mon âme, even if it isn’t technically linked grammatically: mon âme monte fidèle (my soul rises faithful). This is made possible by the gender ambiguity of the adjective, which exhibits no change whether masculine or feminine singular. While it describes the masculine jet d’eau, it could describe the feminine âme without any spelling change. This ambiguity would not be possible with words such as loyal.e or dévoué.e, for instance.
Mallarmé allows – in fact, forces – us to travel through time via the nonlinear association of his words. In complicating the word order, he obscures a purely linear meaning. He explodes the text and extends the rooting potential of each word to others. Fidèle is “properly” – that is, grammatically – linked to un blanc jet d’eau, but spatially and affectively linked to mon âme and un jardin mélancolique because of its peculiar placement. By delaying the “true” partner or meaning of the phrase, Mallarmé a) milks a deeper potential in the word to interpolate others and b) invites us to read beyond a grammatically logical understanding of the text. Fidèle becomes a hinge word that takes us backward while simultaneously propelling the flow of the poem forward.
In a lecture titled “La Musique et les lettres” (“Music and Letters,” published 1895), Mallarmé declares that the point of poetry is to unshackle words from the objective and transactional:
To provide a superior attraction like that exerted by the void, we have the right – extracted from us by the boredom we feel for things – if they establish themselves as solid and preponderant – to madly detach them until we fill that void and thus endow them with splendor through the vacant space, in solitary feasts we hold at will. (1)
That is, to return to words an ambiguity and mystery that broadens how we’re able to interact with them, as more than signifiers assumed to be clear and trim.
In “Soupir,” Mallarmé illustrates the broader content of his poem through its very construction, using the contradictory elements of how we process his words to create the contrary forces of his subject. He dives into the dynamic opposition inherent to breathing – inhalation/exhalation, tension/release, filling/vacuum – by juxtaposing stillness and movement, the fleeting nature of time represented by seasonal change and stasis.
How can he capture timelessness through the forced chronology of a linear medium? By exploding the chronology of the sentence and refracting it, making it loop and jump through the lines of the poem. To some extent, we’re forced to experience the words in a linear fashion, but he rewires us towards a reading that branches multi-directionally, playing with the plasticity of the words to create one larger image for us to take in. That is, he approaches something like how we experience visual art: all at once and in detail, out of time and evolving through it. He imposes a knotted wholeness of experience – a “thingness” to the poem – through sensory overload that keeps us from immediately forming a streamlined narrative. We have to let it wash over us.
At this point, we’ve supposedly covered the full simplified meaning of the sentence, but I’ve only mentioned the first five of the poem’s ten lines. What happens in the second half? In a sense, nothing. In another, everything. The Azur which ends our fifth line also begins the sixth and so becomes the keystone of a giant chiasmus, the most important hinge word of the piece. The rest of the poem is, essentially, a coda, a contemplation on that Azur, which literally changes the entire shape of the poem. If the first five lines are an ascent, the next five take us down.
Mallarmé introduces the idea of reflection: the azure is reflected in large pools of water (l'Azur… / Qui mire aux grands bassins). L’Azur becomes an axis of symmetry between the two halves of the poem. He creates this symmetry partially through the word content on either side of the the Azur keystone:
An arc emerges – monte (rises) → l’Azur → creuse (digs) – and with this, the broader impact of the poem. Despite the fact that Mallarmé himself described the poem as “an autumnal reverie.” (2) It isn’t [just] a declaration of love and connection or a Romantic rumination on nature. It is, both more complicatedly and far more simply, what Mallarmé promised with his title: a sigh. The visceral experience of the human body translated to the medium of words. The sigh isn’t an evocative supporting actor in a poem about love; the language of love is an auxiliary to portray a physical experience.
There is a front to back directionality in the arching line of rising → l’Azur → falling, and so, a certain narrative, wherein the hinge point of l’Azur serves as a line of symmetry along the vertical axis. Up, then down.
But by instilling the image of the sky reflected in the water, Mallarmé also allows us to visualize the elements of the poem spatially. The sky is both at the top of the image and reflected in the water below it. Then, if we combine the action of the first chiasmus – the chiasmus of chronology – with the spatial chiasmus of the sky’s reflection in the water, we form a circle or, perhaps more accurately, a cycle:
Using time and space, Mallarmé creates a kind of infinity.
Notes:
Mary Ann Caws, ed., Mallarmé in Prose (New York: New Directions, 2001), 37.
Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry, eds., Mallarmé: Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 1434.