This sonnet (published in its final form in the 1887 edition of the Poésies) is unusual among Mallarmé's many ceremonial tributes to the dying or the dead in that its entire funerary drama is internal to the mind. Elsewhere, in his hommages and tombeaux, death is something that happens to other people, out there in the world, and that sets the poet-narrator's mind echoing with its own frailty. Here, it is an inward monition, many-voiced and not to be stilled. Elsewhere, a painful path leads from the moment of loss, through the work of mourning, towards an eventual reassertion of the survivor's potency: Mallarmé in ‘Toast funèbre’ is less Attic and less copious than Milton in ‘Lycidas’ or Shelley in ‘Adonais’ or Arnold in ‘Thyrsis’, but he shares their sense that bereavement provides the poet with an artistic education not easily to be had elsewhere.