'Une dentelle s'abolit' de Mallarmé

"Une dentelle s'abolit" is representative of the later poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898), the poetry in which he came closest to accomplishing his purposes as a poet. An analysis of the poem reveals that all its images and ideas are developed from a single matrix. The poem is a perfect illustration of what Mallarmé meant when he spoke of "evoking an object little by little in order to show a state of soul." No simple statement of what the poem is about is possible. It exists between dream and reality, a poem of virtually intangible contingencies. Here Mallarmé has tried to raise both the poem as a whole and individual words to the pitch of metaphor. (In French) (RMR)