Before reading Mallarme, we read numerous shirt poems by Lear and talked about the characteristics of those short nonsense poetry. For one, the limericks had a very strict structure and a fairly consistent meter to them. While the structure was strong, the actual content was nonsense. For example, the poem about a young lady with a chin sharp enough to play the harp or an old man whose beard was so large he found birds nesting in it. Similarly, the longer poems of the nonsense songs have similar characteristics. The strong and stable structure of the poems allows there to be no real meaning in the actual words themselves. In essence it's as if taking a dictionary and randomly choosing words to fill the sing song, simple, and silly meter in both the limericks and the nonsense songs. The relationship among the words connect to create paradoxical nonsense. For example, in the nonsense song about the Jumblies, they are sailing in a sieve, which is absurd since a sieve is a container with holes in it. While sailing in a sieve makes no logical sense, it fills out the meter and happens to rhyme with "live".
While this may be the case for the limericks and the songs, this is clearly not the case in Mallarme's poem A Dice Throw. There is no structure in almost every sense. The words are positioned all over the place and seem so disconnected. This is a sharp contrast to Lear's poems. While the meanings of words don't matter as much as the structure in Lear's poems, the lack of any "physical" structure in Mallarme's poem demands the reader to pay attention to the words themselves. The irregular spacing of the words forces the reader to really focus on the content; to "work for it" so to speak.
One thing I've noticed in the nonsensical poems and in Alice in Wonderland is that they comment on the parts of grammar we tend to take for granted and thus tend to ignore. For example, the polysemy in Alice and the logical meaning of words in Lear's poems draws our attention to how often we take advantage of our ingrained instinct to differentiate different meanings of words or the meaning of words in a context. However, I find that Mallarme is commenting on how we take structure for granted. We depend so much on even the position of the words on the page to help us understand, we don't even question it. However, there is somewhat a parallel between Lear's and Mallarme's poems. While Lear worked with a freedom restricted by sentence structure, Mallarme worked within the words themselves. He used different font sizes and capitalization and italics to create emphasis.
That being said, I do find Mallarme's poem to be nonsense of a different kind. It might be my short attention span or my inferior knowledge of poetry, but his spastic placement of worse and phrases makes it very difficult to piece together any coherent thought. The lack of structure and punctuation creates a million puzzle pieces that can be put together in a million ways. It is hard to follow any train of thought to where it feels like one huge run on sentence with a rather large metaphor placed here or there. The confusion of it all that envelopes the reasonable phrases makes this to be nonsense, at least to me.
I still barely have any idea of what Mallarme's poem is about or what is even going on.
Hi Matt, I liked your analysis of Mallarme. I agree the disconnectedness of Mallarme’s poems create the true essence of nonsense itself. The disjointedness of the poem comes from the difference in structuralization and word usage. Such disjointedness comes from Mallarme focusing and stressing the importance of establishing connections between the structuralization of the poem as well as the imagery. Connections were important to Mallarme because he wanted to stress the thematic representations of poems through defiance of the set structuralization of a poem. Yet I feel this disjointedness also demonstrates the question of free will throughout the poem itself. Free will is defined as one’s ability to be truly free without bias. With a poem that truly defies societal expectations of poetry, one still tries to define the poem to a specific interpretation. Yet, does the poem truly represent one theme? With the nonsensical aspects, Mallarme uses the disjointedness to his advantage in that each individual reader is able to connect to the poem at a different viewpoint. This allows for multiple interpretations as well as for the poem itself to continuously pose the question of free will.
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