I haven’t had much time for reading lately. Poems and stories I’ve read in the past pop into my head a lot though. Mallarmé’s ‘Brise marine’ is one of those. I find most of his work incomprehensible but that’s a poem I enjoyed as a boy and still do now. It’s obviously very much under the influence of Baudelaire’s dream voyages but gives a completely different sensation to them and I thought I’d try to say something about the difference.

One of its obvious beauties is how perfectly formed it is, line by line, so that much of it reads like a series of haunting aphorisms:

La chair est triste, hélas! et j’ai lu tous les livres.
Fuir ! là-bas fuir! Je sens que des oiseaux sont ivres
D’être parmi l’écume inconnue et les cieux !
Rien, ni les vieux jardins reflétés par les yeux
Ne retiendra ce coeur qui dans la mer se trempe
Ô nuits ! ni la clarté déserte de ma lampe
Sur le vide papier que la blancheur défend
Et ni la jeune femme allaitant son enfant.
Je partirai! Steamer balançant ta mâture,
Lève l’ancre pour une exotique nature !

Un Ennui, désolé par les cruels espoirs,
Croit encore à l’adieu suprême des mouchoirs !
Et, peut-être, les mâts, invitant les orages,
Sont-ils de ceux qu’un vent penche sur les naufrages
Perdus, sans mâts, sans mâts, ni fertiles îlots …
Mais, ô mon coeur, entends le chant des matelots !

Simply murmuring the words aloud gives me an intense, almost sensuous pleasure in the formation of their sounds, both on a phonetic level and in the cadence of the phrases (though of course different readers do pitch these phrases differently). Moreover, though the broad Baudelairean influence is obvious, what’s striking is how original line after line, image after image, statement after statement is in the way it encapsulates the ideas and sensations it expresses.  This is what gives them such imaginative bite. With what stunning sweep ‘La chair est triste, hélas! et j’ai lu tous les livres’ brings together physical and intellectual malaise to suggest a comprehensive jadedness with what the speaker’s actual life offers. The very hyperbole of ‘tous les livres’ suggests an exacerbating state of nervous exhaustion. Almost every statement seems to me to realise its idea with almost equal precision and penetrating power. What’s really striking, though, is that although the power of these lines depends on the way they suggest ideas through concrete images, these images are so generalised as to hover on the edge of abstraction. Nothing makes us imagine the steamer, the anchor, the alien clime, the waving handkerchiefs, the storm, the fertile islands with any particularity. This is a strength of a very different kind to what we find in Baudelaire’s poems of southern and eastern voyaging. In them there’s a sensual, almost carnal physicality to the imagery, as when, smelling his mistress’s hair, he imagines

Un port retentissant où mon âme peut boire
À grands flots le parfum, le son et la couleur
Où les vaisseaux, glissant dans l’or et dans la moire
Ouvrent leurs vastes bras pour embrasser la gloire
D’un ciel pur où frémit l’éternelle chaleur.

Sense slides into sense in a way that blurs together dazzlingly visual, tactile and kinaesthetic impressions. The very sound of the words seems to be impregnated with the sensations they describe. Some such impressions are difficult to explain. I’m not sure I know why ‘glissant’, coming between ‘vaisseaux’ and ‘dans l’or et dans la moire’ embodies an impression of sliding so vividly, though I think it has something to do with the way the fractional blockage of the hard /g/ emphasises the rapid gliding of the clear /l/ that follows it, and the way the sound of ‘slip’ (in English) seems so apt to what it describes. However, the mimetic effect in ‘retentissant’ is obvious in the double echo of the /t/ and ‘en’ ‘ant’ sounds. I think the sound and movement of ‘Ouvrent leurs vastes bras pour embrasser la gloire’ are equally expressive but what really interests me here is how the echo of ‘bras’ in ‘embrasser’ drives home the idea that the ships’ sails open like arms to embrace the light. So the physical evocativeness works on several levels at once: fused with the image of ships unfurling their sails is one of people joyfully spreading their arms. More elusively, it seems to me that the very sound and movement of the line give a sense of space, and that space is filled with heat and light (‘un ciel pur où frémit l’éternelle chaleur’).

So there’s an immediate contrast between the sensuality of Baudelaire’s imagination and the way the images by means of which Mallarmé embodies ideas are themselves almost as disembodied as images can be. There are advantages to each approach, though I personally find the Baudelairean one the more profoundly engaging.

The physicality of Baudelaire’s imagination relates to another of his great gifts. This is his empathy. Often, of course, the intensity with which the external world impinges on his imagination produces horror, disgust or irritation. At other times it sweeps him outside himself, as in the image at the end of ‘Il est amer et doux’. In that poem the very metaphor by which he expresses his own despairing sense of creative paralysis produces a stunning evocation of a far more absolute, physical and final failure of power:

Moi, mon âme est fêlée, et lorsqu’en ses ennuis
Elle veut de ses chants peupler l’air froid des nuits,
II arrive souvent que sa voix affaiblie

Semble le râle épais d’un blessé qu’on oublie
Au bord d’un lac de sang, sous un grand tas de morts
Et qui meurt, sans bouger, dans d’immenses efforts.