A Throw of the Dice

Introduction

A symbolist poet whose works are generally considered by critics to be the best example of “pure poetry”, Stephane Mallarme was born in Paris into a family of French civil servants. According to Mallarme, nothing lies beyond reality; however, within this state of nothingness, there exists that which is the essence of perfection (Williams, 48). This takes the shape of what he refers to as the “perfect form”. He believed it was the poet's task to find these essences within the void of nothingness and to clarify them with the language of poetry (Toscano, 116). This paper presents an analysis of poetry “A Throw of the Dice” written by Stephane Mallarme in 1914.

Thesis Statement

The poem centers on the idea of chance, which is random and will always exist.

Analysis

This piece of artwork written by Stephane Mallarme represents an unconventional form of poetry. In spite of following regular arrangement of words in verses, Stephane Mallarme moved across random patterns to develop the typography of the poem. Mallarme focused on the schematic representations of the themes of the poem; sequential inferential of the poem develop from the positioning of words to their meaning in the verses context (Williams, 84). This poem is more focused on establishing connections, associations and transformations, with less emphasis on narrative and storytelling (Toscano, 151). Mallarme went beyond this concept, stressing the inherent magical quality and the sacredness of poetry. He spent long periods of time obsessing over the minute details in “A Throw of the Dice”, reveling in the importance of even the smallest and seemingly most insignificant details of language and imagery. This poetry was allusive and often hard for readers to grasp. The poet compressed the language of the poem in such a way that a finished poem often seemed more an interpretation than a poem that could be easily defined.

A proper understanding of inherent meaning of the poem demands an awareness of the process of poetic creation. In “A Throw of the Dice”, Mallarme moves away from the usual poetic focus on the meaning and sound of words and enters into a visual dimension (John, 124). This helped in creating imagery, space and shaping the poem with the help of scattered lines arrangements, different font size, numbering, sides of the page, and spacing of words. He used different sizes of font and rapidly changing tone of the words to create a ...