Reading Order
L'Après-midi d'un faune Reading Order
L'Après-midi d'un faune (The Afternoon of a Faun, 1876) by Stéphane Mallarmé is the poet's most celebrated single poem — an eclogue (a classical pastoral dialogue) in which a faun meditates in the afternoon heat on whether the two nymphs he remembers from the morning were real or a dream, and gradually subsides back into sleep. Published in a luxury édition de tête illustrated by Manet in 1876, the poem is the definitive statement of Mallarmé's aesthetic: it takes a classical form and subject (the faun and the nymphs) and dissolves it into pure sensory suggestion — the reader never knows whether the nymphs existed, whether the faun's memory is real or fantasy, whether the whole poem is a dream. Debussy's 1894 Prélude, inspired by the poem, brought it to the attention of the world beyond French literary circles and remains the most famous creative response to any Symbolist text. L'Après-midi d'un faune is considered the beginning of the Symbolist movement: Verlaine dated Symbolism to its publication.
Where to start
Read the poem slowly, attending to the sound rather than trying to resolve the syntax into a definite meaning — Mallarmé's French has a musical quality that the meaning is secondary to. Then read a commentary that explains the general situation (faun, possible nymphs, afternoon, dream) before returning to the text. Listen to Debussy's Prélude alongside — the music captures the atmosphere better than any summary.
Complete L'Après-midi d'un faune Book List
- 1Buy
L'Après-midi d'un faune (1876)
Stéphane Mallarmé·1876·Available in the Pléiade Œuvres complètes and in bilingual editions — the most accessible is the Norton Critical Edition of Mallarmé's selected poems in French and English translation, or the Penguin selected poems. - 2Buy
Poésies (1899)
Stéphane Mallarmé·1899·The complete verse collection of which L'Après-midi d'un faune is the centerpiece — the natural next reading for anyone captivated by the eclogue. - 3Buy
Prélude à l'Après-midi d'un faune
Claude Debussy·1894·Debussy's ten-minute orchestral prelude (1894) — not a setting of the poem but an evocation of its mood; essential companion work, available in countless recordings. The conductor Simon Rattle's Berlin Philharmonic recording is particularly transparent. - 4Buy
Hérodiade (1867-98)
Stéphane Mallarmé·1898·The other major poem Mallarmé worked on throughout his career — the counterpart to the Faun's sensory openness is Hérodiade's cold, hermetic self-enclosure; reading them together reveals the two poles of Mallarmé's imagination. - 5Buy
Divagations (1897)
Stéphane Mallarmé·1897·The prose collection where Mallarmé explicates his own aesthetic in the essays 'Crise de vers' and 'La Musique et les lettres' — reading the theoretical prose alongside L'Après-midi d'un faune clarifies what the poem is attempting.
L'Après-midi d'un faune — Frequently Asked Questions
Is the poem saying the nymphs were real or a dream?
This is exactly what the poem refuses to say — the uncertainty is the point. The faun meditates on whether the two nymphs were real women or his own fantasy, but Mallarmé systematically avoids resolving the question: the syntax and imagery are structured so that both possibilities remain equally available. The poem's subject is not 'the faun's afternoon' but the impossibility of distinguishing between sensory experience and imagination, between desire and its object. Verlaine said the poem was 'the first Symbolist work' precisely because of this refusal of definite statement.
Who is the faun and where does he come from?
The faun is a classical figure — a half-man, half-goat nature deity from Roman mythology, associated with woodland, music (the pan-pipes), and erotic pursuit of nymphs. Mallarmé inherited the figure from classical pastoral poetry (Virgil's Eclogues, Theocritus) and from the Parnassian poets who had modernized classical subjects. What he did with the figure was entirely new: instead of a classical narrative, the faun is given an interior monologue of extraordinary ambiguity and sensory complexity.
What is the connection between L'Après-midi d'un faune and Nijinsky's ballet?
Diaghilev's Ballets Russes premiered a ballet based on the poem in 1912, choreographed by and starring Vaslav Nijinsky, with music by Debussy (the 1894 Prélude). The twelve-minute ballet caused a scandal at its premiere because of the faun's explicit final gesture with the abandoned scarf — suggestive enough that Le Figaro called for it to be banned. The ballet is now considered a masterwork of twentieth-century dance; the connection runs Mallarmé → Debussy → Nijinsky → the entire history of modernist ballet.
Why did Manet illustrate the 1876 edition?
Mallarmé and Manet were close friends throughout the 1870s (Mallarmé translated Poe's 'The Raven' in an 1875 edition illustrated by Manet), and the 1876 edition of L'Après-midi d'un faune was a genuine artistic collaboration — Manet contributed four drawings in his characteristic sketchy style. The luxury edition was sold to subscribers as an artist's book and represents an early and significant example of the Symbolist ideal of a total work of art that combines poetry and visual art in a single object.
What does 'eclogue' mean?
An eclogue is a short pastoral poem in dialogue form, from the Greek tradition (Theocritus) and the Latin (Virgil's Eclogues, ten short pastoral dialogues). Mallarmé called L'Après-midi d'un faune an 'eclogue' partly to situate it in this classical tradition and partly because the form implies dialogue — though the 'dialogue' in Mallarmé's version has collapsed into pure interior monologue, the faun talking to himself rather than to the absent nymphs. Calling it an eclogue is one of Mallarmé's characteristic gestures: citing a classical form in order to dissolve it.
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