Mallarme - Minij Kim

Being one of the influential symbolist poets, Mallarme uses unconventional methods to create his own unique poems, which convey his intention of abandoning traditional structure of conventional poems. A typical poem is constrained by the words that the poet chooses to convey his or her message. Words are limited to the literal meaning that they carry and unable to be visually stimulating to the reader. The reader is only able to visualize what the poet depicts through rhetorical devices. However in Mallarme’s poem, the nonsensical structure transforms the poem into a painting.

Mallarme uses various poetic tools in his poem, “A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance,” that make it unconventional and nonsensical. Both Lewis Carroll and Mallarme use polysemy in their pieces to create nonsense; however, the form of polysemy is quite different from one another. Lewis Carroll uses polysemy with puns while Mallarme uses polysemy with the spacing in the poem that consequently leads to the spacing out of the reader’s mind. The irregular spacing within the text creates nonsense as the typical linear poem cannot be identified within “A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance.”  New and different meanings can be derived from the poem that includes both different fonts and font sizes. The different fonts influence the reader’s understanding and allow the possibility of many interpretations that lead to no one answer. The fact that there is not one right analysis of the poem creates confusion for the reader and thus, the spacing out of the mind. The different fonts can either be grouped into the same category of font style and size or the spacing of the poem.  

In addition to the use of polysemy of spacing, Mallarme uses blank space to evoke nonsense in his poem.  The blank space between words does not have meaning but the space itself symbolically gives another definition to the words. For instance, the word “mute” is sandwiched between two blank gaps that accentuates the silence and ultimately necessitates the creation of more meaning behind the word. The white space does not carry any significant meaning, but forces the reader to create a deeper, and possibly unnecessary, interpretation of the blank space.  Therefore, it is nonsense that the blank space, which itself does not have any meaning, can produce another meaning to the words by cooperating together.

Even though the methods Mallarme utilizes in his poem are quite different from ones that are used by Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, who follows a limerick structure and a certain pattern throughout his poems, Mallarme’s piece is still considered to be a nonsense poem since it contains several components of nonsense. Along with the use of polysemy and spacing, run-on sentences with no punctuation marks in the poem make readers confused when they try to figure out the author’s meaning of the poem. Mallarme’s poem overall makes sense in a way that readers can find possible themes of the poem which is the dice and ocean; however, structures and the use of language create nonsense with various unique and striking methods.