Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird On "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" Helen Vendler The blackbird is the only element in nature which is aesthetically compatible with bleak light and bare limbs: he is, we may say, a certain kind of language, opposed to euphony, to those "noble accents and lucid inescapable rhythms" which Stevens used so memorably elsewhere in Harmonium. … There are thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird because thirteen is the eccentric number; Stevens is almost medieval in his relish for external form. This poetry will be one of inflection and innuendo; the inflections are the heard melodies (the whistling of the blackbird) and the innuendoes are what is left out (the silence just after the whistling) … … The blackbird has perhaps something in common with Eliot’s "shadow" that falls between potency and act, desire and consummation [in "The Hollow Men"]. But Stevens would deny that it is remediable or accidental intrusion between two things that without it would be better off. It is, rather, of one substance with the things it relates: I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after. (iv) Between the man and the woman is the blackbird, one with them; between the man’s mood and his environment is the blackbird, the indecipherable cause of the mood which is man’s response to nature (stanza vi); between the man of Haddam and their imagined golden birds is the blackbird, the real on which they construct their "artifice of eternity" (vii); between the haunted man and his protective glass coach is the terror of the blackbird (xi); it lies at the base of even our powerful verbal defenses, those beautiful glass coaches of euphony and lucidity/ It is, finally, the principle of our final relation to the universe, our compulsions, first of all, The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying. (xii) and, lastly, our despair at death: It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow. The blackbird sat In the cedar limbs. (xiii) But neurosis and death are only instances of a pervasive relational eccentricity. Our extent in space (as well as in time) goes only as far as the blackbird goes – the blackbird is our "line of vision" (ix), as it is our line of thought: when we are of two minds (or, as Stevens presses it, "of three minds"), it is not as if we had a blackbird, an oriole, and a pigeon in view, but only "a tree / In which there are three blackbirds" (ii). The blackbird is by no means all – it is surrounded by the 1 vastness of twenty mountains, the autumn winds, the snow – but though only a small part, it is the determining focus of relation. From Helen Vendler, On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens; Longer Poems (Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1969), 75-77. Beverly Maeder [I]t both unmakes the logical expression of ontological being, and creates a new linguistic field for speculative exploration. "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" is, from my way of looking here, one of Stevens' primary testing grounds for combining older uses of metaphorical and symbolic meaning with new nonrealist and nonidealist--non-ontological--uses of to be. Although widely applauded, it has received surprisingly little close attention. Sections I and XIII embrace a sequence of great diversity and even dispersal, unified, it might seem, only by the presence of a referential blackbird (or blackbirds) in each section. Each of the thirteen sections demonstrates a fragmentary instantaneousness that relates it to Imagist poetry of the period and may distract us from the fact that the framework itself creates a very strong sense of location or setting; that is, it posits a spatial context and indicates the extent of this context for the sequence it embraces. I Among twenty snowy mountains, The only moving thing Was the eye of the blackbird. XII It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow. The blackbird sat In the cedar-limbs. The closing section XIII reiterates the sense created in section I of a solid geographical or "natural" landscape. Through the Stevensian technique of prepositional foregrounding, Stevens attaches the very grammatical subjects of his sentences to the material stuff of signifiers like "Among . . . snowy mountains" and "In the cedar-limbs." The referentiality of the setting might be thought of as preexisting since there is a pretense of artlessness coupled with inertness, as though nature's handy perches were simply ordinary givens. They offer themselves as the place for "the only moving thing" to begin a series of movements that finally still themselves in XIII. But of course, this assertion relies on a premise of ontological fullness—somewhere--in nature, in the 2 speaker's choice from among external givens, or in the human imagination's constructs from nature. The past tense of the frame may contribute to this sense. In section I, the given, "Among twenty snowy mountains," is both enticing and imprisoning. The tight chiasmic embrace of "A-mong . . . moun-tains" encloses the playful euphony of the adjectives "tw-en-ty" and "sno-wy." Movement intervenes through semantic reference, but it is enacted through the play of signifiers when the spell of the phrase is loosened in the second line by the advance, of regular iambs and the "rhyme"-ing, unstressed in "moving" and stressed in "thing." The final "moving" of the sentence's subject, the "eye of the blackbird," moves us from a natural given to an imaginative or imaginary one, still ontological, in the movement that is necessary for the flight of the poem. The paradox of predicating this imaginative and emotional reality--a bird's eye is anatomically incapable of movement--stresses its metaphorical value. Indeed, as a synecdoche for the activity of the viewer and a metaphor for the work of a poet, that roving, moving "eye" signifies the initial impulse for the movement needed to find "thirteen ways of looking." The blackbird's eye represents the shifting, animated, spirited world of creatures in the midst of the frozen world of geology. It also forms part of a delicately traced visual image that we might imagine as contrasting the dark glint of the blackbird's eye with the supposed whiteness of the mountains, a tiny eye point with a vast expanse, and lively and attentive movement (fictive and anatomically impossible though it is) with frigid immobility. Considering the blackbird's potential symbolic import as a bird of ill omen, this function of glinting, shifting, living, moving must relativize any simple contrast between its blackness and the white background. The eye of the blackbird must embrace a range of symbolic meanings across a spectrum from the benign to the malign, like Melville's whale. Although ominous in its blackness, it is also promising for its ability to escape all but the determinism of movement itself. We have seen in "The Motive for Metaphor" how a demiurgical chain of unexpected transformations can be set off by "Desiring the exhilarations of changes." For besides leading back to the quasi-ontological eye of the blackbird, the "moving thing" also implicates the emotions of the looker who is moved. The eye of the "I" implicitly scans the frozen landscape to pick out the one object that moves or that moves him--that is, the only object that signifies: blackbirds. The "I"'s desire determines the terms in which the fiction of the poem can be constituted. The verb form "was" in this case predicates the first step toward fulfillment of the speaker's purpose, which is to examine one object from English grammar, and it makes us hesitate not only about the rules of metaphorical resemblance, or its supposed basis in described empirical reality, but also about deduction and its basis in linguistic logic. The first four sections, however, constituting our way into the poem, play a predeterminant role in foregrounding to be. They encourage us as readers to problematize the question of "being" we will encounter in later sections in other developmental schemes. The speaker in the opening sections I to IV reaches into language and removes it from its common sense and ontological ground. For instance, the speaker predicates himself saying that he "was of three minds," not two. He then proceeds not by exegesis but by a simile in which he trickily deploys the tactic of reshuffling mere letters: He strips "three" of its h to make "tree," pseudo-ontologically puts it back in "there are," and leaves the "tree" again, through the copular bond of "are," to produce "three blackbirds." This 3 is the new definition of "I" as sleight-of-hand man. Switching tactics, the speaker's trinity of minds and trinity of blackbirds give way in section IV to another trinity consummated by a simpler copular use of the verb to be: "A man and a woman and a blackbird / Are one." The paradox begotten of this copula may be an even more convincing play against ontology. "Are one" suggests the commonsense possibility of the union of flesh, love, knowledge, social life, and being within the semantic paradox of "one" being two. Including the blackbird in the "one" of man and woman in the second statement introduces the difference of an alien species, making the union a perhaps unholy one. In this vein, the resolution of the two statements into a hypothetical third statement of the implied syllogism would produce nonsense. A man and a woman are a man and a woman and a blackbird. The minor point is that syllogism is in any case for Stevens an example of philosophical or rational language that has no validity as poetic statement. What Wordsworth in his Prelude called the "syllogistic words" of a wizard are an apt simile for the logic chopping of rationalism, in that both wizards and rationalists "unsoul" the mysteries that bind humankind together into "one brotherhood." The major point lies elsewhere: equivalence in poetic language is shown to result from the accretive movement from "man" to "wo-" + "man," to a second movement that adds "blackbird;" poetic unity is created by the syntactic parallel of "Are one." That is, it is the copula that is the unifying force of the speaker's world. Semantically or lexically weak, it obtains its strength from establishing pivotal relations and balancing forces. It is a point around which degrees of distinction and equivalence, and diversity and unity, can be deployed experimentally. Such moves take place within very small poems whose referential boundaries are established by visual, spatial images. In sections I to III these images are expressed with the verb to be combined with prepositions which incorporate it into the locative function. In addition, the "tree / In which" we meet the "three blackbirds" in II signals a unified grammatical and graphic space created by language for the poet's creative free play. This is given phonetic expression in section III, where the blackbird thing and "blackbird" word "whirled in the autumn winds." Who knows what the antecedent of "It" is in "It was a small part of the pantomime"? (Is it "The blackbird," the whole preceding sentence, or the phonetic play?) "It was," however, is what holds the speculative balancing act together among the vast possibilities of which the poem illustrates just a few. The "pantomime" is not just a "natural" mimicry but also a linguistic one, the great space of English. Although it is difficult to extend such readings beyond the merely self-reflexive or metaphorical, we notice that the semantically weak locative is foregrounded as one of the main structuring principles for the extra-ontological cognitive work of the poem. Once the principle of location has been firmly established through the verb to be, it is constantly reiterated in other verbal contexts. The prepositional phrases have extremely diverse syntactic functions, as in: "The mood / Traced in the shadow / An indecipherable cause" (VI) "the black bird / Walks around the feet" / "Of the women about you" (VII) "the blackbird is involved / In what I know" (VIII) "the edge / Of one of many circles" (IX) "the blackbird flew out of sight" (X) "At the sight of blackbirds / Flying in a green light" (X) 4 "He rode over Connecticut / In a glass coach" (XI) "The blackbird sat / In the cedar-limbs" (XIII) (emphasis added) The referential looking denoted in the poem is focused on delimited spaces or even on the very elements that delimit them. Language is an analogous space whose limitations or boundaries are thus also inherently defined through a process of foregrounding and reiterating linguistic functions rather than affirming semantic meaning. This is one of the senses of sections VI-VII and IX-XI, in which the locative is joined with verbs of filling, crossing, tracing, walking, flying, marking, riding. Inscribed within the space under a Roman numeral, they suggest the various motions of drawing, barring, scratching, dotting, jotting, coloring, and running off the page effected by the writing. The location is the necessary precondition, whether the frame be a "long window" or "shadow" (VI), the positioning of women "about" the men (VII), "the edge / Of one of many circles" (IX), "in a green light" (X), or the "glass coach" in which a man goes riding "over Connecticut" (XI). Both "looking at" a natural blackbird in a natural world and attempting resolution by logic are displaced by speculation (also looking, even spying) of another sort. On the one hand, this new speculation should avoid the fantastical deformations imagined of the "thin men of Haddam"--Adam (VII) or mistakes made despite seeming transparency (XI). On the other hand, it should deal with the material given by the "shadow" inscribed within the writer's frame rather than pursue an irretrievable and "indecipherable cause" (VI). Crossing and walking around within the poetic context and testing it metaphorically by flying "out of sight" (X) graft small-scale but bold experimentation onto an acute awareness of grammatical artifice and convention. Symbolic conventions are also subordinated to the foregrounding of grammatical ones. Among the archetypal spatial symbols Stevens evokes in "Thirteen Ways" is the circle, dear to Saint Augustine and Emerson. IX When the blackbird flew out of sight, It marked the edge Of one of many circles. Stevens' image disperses the unifying mystical force of Saint Augustine's God whose center was everywhere and circumference nowhere. Stevens' circles are akin to the material illustrations with which Emerson opens his essay, "Circles"; "The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second." The circle is indeed that through which we see and the limit of what we see. But whereas Emerson goes on to say that "throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end," Stevens, rather than looking for a First Idea here, affirms an undifferentiated plurality that strips his circles of the Ideal that Emerson calls in this essay "the highest emblem in the cipher of the world." The linguistic circles Stevens inscribes in this poem are not all variants of the same but all differently shaped spaces of looking as well as of speculating. The role of locative constructions, of which the word circle is a semantically full sign, is to establish the linguistic 5 architecture of 'Thirteen Ways"--a confined space of verbal looking or speculation. What is beyond the circle is not seen; its edge erects a boundary for the thought of the poet. The liminal situation of the poet's vision in section IX is paralleled by the situation of his language in it: it signifies, on the one hand, the constraints given by language, materialized in an "edge" at the end of a line, a graphic shape that borders on the void but is saved from conclusion by the following line, "Of one of many circles." If there are other circles, with other edges then, the "edge" mentioned here is the only one that is related to this blackbird. The section also affirms a movement that surpasses or passes over the edge of any single circle--the section's metaphorical unity--into a plurality of other circles or the space containing those circles. Each section in "Thirteen Ways" inscribes its own distinctive logico-grammatical movement within a specific syntactic space that has only tangential rational or ontological relevance. As poets have always known, the acceptance of certain material limits allows creativity to concentrate itself. Stevens' limits are less the traditional ones of versification than the ambiguous boundaries of the grammatical functions of some of the most common words in English, most = "imitation" (III) strikingly to be and prepositions. The reference to the panto- = "all" and mime affirms an ambition to point beyond the minutiae that are denoted. It would be wrongheaded to deny the idealist aspirations of Stevens' project, or to overlook his search for a concrete poetic utterance that would be adequate to some metaphysical or noumenal form like "The thing I hum" that "Appears to be the rhythm of this celestial pantomime" in "Landscape with Boat. But his chosen medium, language--not clay, paint, dance movements, or musical sequence--must find "all" it can do in its own terms. And in "Thirteen Ways" we discover that language inevitably narrows itself in order to expand and circumscribes in order to "whirl" (related to Old Norse hvirfill = "circle, ring, summit") as "in the autumn winds" (III). Stevens' English shows that its power comes from revolving within a space it is familiar with in order to make strange new relationships within it. As a last movement in this chapter, then, I would like to look at sections V and VIII, which signify the difficulty of the poet's balancing act. They illustrate in particular the impossibility of choosing between external and internal speculation. In imagistic terms, sections V and VIII suggest alternatives: the pleasure felt during the blackbird's whistling, as compared to that felt after it in V; a rhythmic or sound-oriented model for poetic knowing, as compared to the primarily cognitive and/or symbolic model of the blackbird in VIII. V I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after. On the level of the signified, but on this level only, section V seems to propose an ontologically "full" choice between "The beauty of inflections / Or the beauty of innuendoes," that is, for 6 example between the modulations of voice (parallel to the "whistling" of the blackbird) and the meaningful suggestions that come to the mind with a slight delay (parallel to "just after"). On the level of the metaphors, there is an impossible choice between poetry itself and its resonance in the mind. This relatively simple metaphor becomes a complex place of poetic rather than ontological speculation when we consider the playful use of etymology in "inflections" and "innuendoes." We recognize that the word "inflections" illustrates the principles of English word building, like the use of different prefixes already present in Latin (inflect, deflect, reflect) and the Anglicization of the marks of different parts of speech, such as the common substantive suffix -tion here, or such forms as inflected, inflectional, inflexibility. It thus belongs to a large family of regularized and domesticated English words derived from the Latin root, flectere, now considerably impoverished in terms of its morphology--that is, its inflections. The hidden genealogy of the word "innuendoes" is quite different. Despite sharing with "inflections" the in-prefix meaning "in or toward, "innuendo" derives from the ablative case of the Latin gerund and is thus less a fixed thing and more a function or means. Appropriated as an English noun, its unusual -endo form nonetheless separates it from the static abstractness of -tion and relates it to musical terminology like "crescendo" and "diminuendo." It suggests not only by its etymology (nuere = "to nod") but also by its form a process or unfurling. It brings with it the functional or relational aspect of innuere = "to nod, to signify." Contrasted with the unbending bendingness of the word "inflections," the word "innuendoes" moves toward another gerund, another holder for that moving suffix -ing but a Germanic one this time: "whistling." The blackbird's inflections increase in sensuousness through this encounter between Latin and Old English. Interaction between the Latin and Anglo-Saxon roots of modern English can also be found in the spurious parallel between "prefer" and "after," words that dimly mime each other in look and sound but are in fact constructed along entirely different principles. "Prefer" and "after," verb and adverb, delimit a temporal location within which the section unfurls and moves forward. What should come first is undecidable, as is what can happen in the "after" after the section's end. Such play with root meanings, real and spurious kinship, and metaphor suggests both non-referential speculation within the poem and semantic inference beyond the limited sphere of the poem. The necessity of this doubleness is stated allegorically in section VIII. VIII I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms, But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know. The triple "I know" counters the "I do not know" of section V, but it articulates a disturbing discrepancy ("But") between light ("lucid" ? lucidus = "light, brilliant, pure") versus dark ("blackbird"), and linear movement ("accents" and "rhythms") versus circular containment ("involved" ? volvere = "to roll, turn"). The speaker must submit himself to the requirements of aesthetic forms implied by the "noble accents" and "lucid, inescapable rhythms," just as he must accept the quotidian material reality of "the blackbird" and the necessary symbolic grounding 7 implied by the circle of being "involved." Sound and bird are locations into which the speaker is inevitably taken by the prefix in-. Yet the "I" is greater than the "blackbird," which is only a part of what he knows. The two halves of the section do not balance evenly. In the speculative process, which is linked to vocal utterance and music here, the movement inward is only part of the larger movement forward, enough to stop the progress of this particular section but not enough to dry up the poet's utterance. The sound of the word "no" is repeated three times in the form of its homonym ("know") and once in "noble." "I know" forms a three-step staircase in the spatial layout of the poem, a descent from "noble accents" (chiming with "noble ascents"?). Yet it is a "yes" to knowing "in" the parts of language that can be loosened from purely referential and semantic bonds, in parts where the poet's inner ear listens to the sound patterns of the poem. This is also where Stevens' possibility lies. The material signs that allow for such linguistic cross-fertilization, alternation, and overlapping as we find in section V are especially visible in Stevens' early poetry, though present throughout his whole poetic oeuvre. Such etymological and morphological play suggests a jouissance in the doubleness of Stevens' relationship in and to language, a pleasure to be found in the doubleness of constraint and possibility in language. The poet works from within it to reach his "objective," "the truth not only of the poem but of poetry." The blackbird's constantly shifting "meaning" does indeed give it a Moby-Dick-like ambiguity of good-evil, loving-fearsome, vital-deathbound traits, while the web of morphological resemblances and syntactic modulations through which it moves confer on it that rational "decreation" that is so typical of Stevens' poetry up to "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction" in the early forties. The blackbird thus becomes a figure of the very language that effects a realignment of cognitive activity within language. Language means both the denotative, symbolic, and metaphorical space of its signifieds and the textual space of the signifiers, such as the word "blackbird." Hence the insistence on grammatically marked location throughout the poem. If Stevens' poem speaks of its own condition of being determined by its linguistic history, it also allows the poet to "create" beyond the provincial boundaries his own linguistic culture has erected. If the language deceives, then the shock may represent a danger for knowledge, as when the passenger in the coach "mistook / The shadow of his equipage / For blackbirds" and was pierced by fear (XI). Or if its activity surprises the observer and transforms the objects, as in "blackbirds / Flying in a green light," our values may be shaken like the "bawds of euphony." We are warned too that something false can be taken for that play of possibility and constraint represented by the blackbird in its varying linguistic contexts. If the blackbird seems to have an effect on every section's context and changes the reader's sense of what Stevens called "reality" in it, it is also the case that each local verbal or linguistic context changes the blackbird and changes the effect of the whole on us as we become aware of how our linguistic culture works cognitively, The various contexts created throughout the "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" might be considered from the romantic point of view as haphazard attempts at defining or identifying the writing subject's relation to an object that is already ambiguous in itself and is a symbol rich in potential for producing hopes and fears. But here the emphasis would be on subject and object. If we place an emphasis instead on the "writing," the sections individually create an expectancy. The various dubitative stances of such sections as II, V, VI, VII, and VIII reveal an unavowed search 8 for perfection. But a poem like "A man and a woman / Are one. / A man and a woman and a blackbird / Are one" (IV) stands only on the decidedness, not the ontological or logical value, of the copular "Are one." The destabilization brought about by extra-ontological strategies forces meaning out of the visible world of natural looking and its invisible counterpart, into the world of language and its place in the poet's and reader's world. In this sense, the ill omen of the blackbird's color and the number thirteen are counterbalanced--though not entirely counteracted--by a counter-ethos of what I called before the "optimism" of section V. Poe's raven can only reiterate "Nevermore," but Stevens' blackbird becomes a signifier that enables the proliferation of ever new contexts. The speculative activity of "Thirteen Ways" consists less in creating cognitive knowledge about some hypothetical truth than in creating a poetic being, both as the text is being listened to and looked at and in the post-poem silence, beyond the bird's whistling and the hearer's listening, and beyond the confines of the page. From Wallace Stevens’ Experimental Language: The Lion in the Lute. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Copyright ? 1999 by Beverly Maeder. B.J. Leggett "Thirteen Ways" makes explicit what "Of the Surface of Things" indicates more indirectly--that a thoroughgoing perspectivism finds its ideal expression in aphorism. Aphorism's resistance to definitive meaning, its emphasis on the sense of things, on interpretation--all these in turn depend on a form that dictates the notion of a plurality of views that assume no larger context. Aphorism proclaims in its form, as does "On the Road Home," that "There are many truths, / But they are not parts of a truth" (CP, 203). In order to give this sense of the multiplicity of seeing, the poem must isolate each perspective while indicating that they are all directed toward the same general subject. (A collection of aphorisms on a variety of subjects would not make quite so emphatic the poem's point of showing perspectivism without saying anything about it.) "Thirteen Ways," like "Of the Surface of Things," must therefore avoid a consistent style that might lead to the view that it is merely a set of observations of blackbirds, a view of things as they are rather than as they are perceived. A particular passage, say A man and a woman Are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird Are one must be connected only through the presence of blackbirds with what comes before ("The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds. / It was a small part of the pantomime") and what comes after: 9 I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after. Neither style nor convention (stanza or line lengths, rhythm, etc.) nor "theme" pulls these passages together into anything approaching sustained and coherent thought or feeling, although the stanzas have been made to form something closer to a traditionally structured poem by countless New Critical analyses operating under the assumption that a central poem by a major poet must have a formal coherence. Speaking of a poem that presents the same formal problems, "Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery," Helen Vendler argues that "if we believe in Stevens' good faith we must assume he thought it a viable whole" (66), and a generation of readers sought for ways to save Stevens from the charge of bad faith. Thus M. L. Rosenthal writes of "Thirteen Ways" that its stanzas "are woven together along two main strands of thought." One of these is "the blackbird as a symbol of the inseparability of life and death in nature," and the other, more vaguely defined, is "the poet's attitude toward his symbol" (128). The possibility that the form of the poem itself implies the absence of an overarching unity in which each look at the blackbird finds its place would have been a difficulty for several decades of Stevens criticism. ------------------- [Leggett quotes Stanzas V-VIII] There is, as Coyle suggests, a sense of finality in these stanzas, but there is also the sense that each is only "For a moment final, in the way / The thinking of art seems final when / The thinking of god is smoky dew" (CP, 168). This passage from The Man with the Blue Guitar also draws the connection I have been pressing between the absence of being (or the postulation of becoming) and the adoption of perspectivism. It defines almost exactly the paradoxical effect--a finality that proclaims simultaneously the impossibility of finality--that aphorism imparts to 'Thirteen Ways." Each of the stanzas above may of course be interpreted in a conventional manner. Stanza V, for example, opposes two kinds of beauty, one distinct and the other suggestive, that the blackbird's whistling is made to illustrate, and Stanza VI observes the way an object like a blackbird is defined by (and in turn defines) its surrounding. What is unconventional here is that the poem does not allow us readily to apply what we have seen or understood in one stanza to our reading of the next, since the linguistic function of the one "constant" in the poem, the blackbird, keeps shifting. It may be a part of a poetic figure in one stanza, a more or less literal reference in the next. The "meaning" of Stanza V thus has only a negligible bearing on a reading of Stanza VI; its "truth" is confined to the moment in which it is sensed or read. Only through such a form could the poem demonstrate its assumptions (in Robert Rehder's words) "that each act of vision re-creates reality and that every perception is a metaphor" (59). Without pursuing a Nietzschean interpretation, Rehder nevertheless arrives at. the same point, which recognizes the two fundamental assumptions "Thirteen Ways" is built on--each sense of the world is a new seeing, confined to its own unique perspective, and each has its origin in the perceiver (i.e., is a metaphor). 10 The poem illustrates Nietzsche's view that the world "has not one sense behind it, but hundreds of senses"' (WP, II, 13), or, to state it in the visual figure of "Thirteen Ways," "There are many kinds of eyes. . . . therefore there must be many kinds of 'truths,' and consequently there can be no truth" (WP, II, 50). The contradiction that Nietzsche's statement entails--the assertion that there can be no truth offered as what appears to be the truth--is, we may note, appropriately mitigated by the fact that it occurs in a series of aphorisms, which tends both to highlight it--to emphasize its exaggerated profundity--and to neutralize it, to render it "just one more truth, one more / Element in the immense disorder of truths" (CP, 216). 'Thirteen Ways" is generally content to suggest its "truth" through its form rather than to assert it directly. The closest it comes to including its implied perspectivism as a theme is in Stanza IX: ''When the blackbird flew out of sight, / It marked the edge / Of one of many circles," which is a way of saying that the world contains not one sense but many. Each sense of the blackbird defines an intelligible circle, the "meaning" of which exists only until the blackbird crosses its horizon. "We measure the world by these horizons," Nietzsche writes in The Dawn qf Day, "within which our senses confine each of us"; thus, "a concentric circle is drawn round every being. . ." (122). Stanza IX creates a figure for the aphoristic quality of the poem as a whole, a series of circles containing a blackbird or blackbirds, each of which achieves a momentary (but not therefore trivial) meaning. Beverly Coyle believes that "the early Stevens sought for aphoristic techniques to make [his] tropes sound as fragmentary--as 'trivial'--as possible." She writes: "Skepticism is the philosophic basis for this particularly terse aphoristic style through which Stevens implies that there is no assertion that he can endorse with complete seriousness" (215). But this is to ignore a distinction between skepticism and perspectivism that is crucial for Stevens' poetry. The recognition that each sense of the blackbird is not a part of a larger whole does not trivialize it. To the contrary, texts such as "On the Road Home" (CP, 203) that assert multiple truths in place of one enveloping truth also assume that one's current perspective is enlarged rather than lessened by this insight: It was when I said, "There is no such thing as the truth." That the grapes seemed fatter, The fox ran out of his hole. . . . Far from leading to decline, the pluralist view here sharpens every sense of a world that is not less real because each perception of it is unique to the perceiver at that moment of perception, and the poem suggests again Nietzsche's view that "plurality in interpretation is a sign of strength" because it does not rob the world of its "disquieting and enigmatical nature" (WP, II, 101). It is important to recognize that "Thirteen Ways" and the other aphoristic poems in early Stevens are not, strictly speaking, expressions of skepticism. They never question the reality of their world, only its accessibility to a universally true or stable description. One may say of the epistemological assumption of "Thirteen Ways" what Nehamas says of Nietzsche's thought, that it is not skeptical since it "does not deny the reality of things"; it does not "doubt that the world exists." It doubts only "that the existence of the world requires the existence of a description that is 11 true of it from every possible point of view, a description that would depict it in itself as it really is" (83-84). It is not the existence of the world of "Thirteen Ways" that is at issue, only the possibility of a definitive description of it that does not originate in the sensibility of the perceiver. And aphorism in early Stevens, as in Nietzsche, is a way of depicting the resulting multiplicity of senses without discrediting or trivializing any particular depiction. Excerpted from a longer analysis in Early Stevens: The Nietzschean Intertext. Copyright ? 1992 by Duke UP. Kenneth Lincoln In his Letters Stevens said of the blackbird sequence, "This group of poems is not meant to be a collection of epigrams or of ideas, but of sensations." In what senses? Among the Russian formalists, a theorist named Viktor Zhirmunski published a study of rhyme in 1923 when Stevens's first book, Harmnium, appeared beside Williams's Kora in Hell, Donald Wesling recounts in The Chances of Rhyme, specifically focusing on off-rhyme and what his Russian colleagues called "making it strange." The device of inexact rhyme calls self-reflexive attention to a literary text and language-as-medium, Zhirmunski said, through a sequencing effect: defamiliarizing a reader entering the text, defacilitating the interpreter with verbal intricacy, and retarding the critic's progress digressively. The effect is to slow down time, heighten awareness, and open radical interpretive possibilities, where assumption blocks intuition, or arrogance shuts down understanding. Similarly, in Shakespeare's Meanings Sigurd Burkhardt writes of Shakespeare driving a verbal wedge between sound and meaning, in order to free his language from expectation and cliche. As with off-rhyme, so with slant images—beyond critical paraphrase, slightly gnomic—they throw the poem into what Yeats called "radical innocence," positions of witness and testament, less interpretation, the bear's heart all the more singing differénce. A poem must be, Auden noted, more than anyone can say about it. Just so with the blackbird sequence, a poem of optics and phonics, among other things, shattering reality into irregular facets of a mysterious jewel that reflects spectral colors, iridescent light from a black diamond. At least thirteen ways into this, each angle of refraction redefines the blackbird, as each moment shifts the image. To begin, the trochaic title is strangely reverse of blank verse (the only pentameter in the poem): "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." The trochee's insistently reverse rocking, beginning with that superstitious surd, thirteen, an indivisible number with no stable root, sets up an inverse poetics, or radical set of "Ways"—that is, passages or mental journeys—of "looking at" (not so much seeing) a bird the color, all colors, of the night. This is trickster stuff, as Ted Hughes darkly develops in Crow, the off-comic possibilities of god as Harlequin who tosses disappearing dice with reality. The poem shows us seeing a "black" bird as surd pronoun, it, treading syllabic night terrain, searching for winged focus on a disappearing, then reappearing radical. Call it the blackbird factor, the unpredictable quark of reality, the poem's decentering center. Disruptively patterned, this wild shadow is its own original being, in motion. 12 Oddly enough, the first tercet is a still scene, the minimalist quiet of Oriental landscape painting brushed with haiku delicacy. "Among twenty snowy mountains," the line opens, rising and falling reversely, "The only moving thing / Was the eye of the blackbird." Can this be iambic meter, when six of the seven two-syllabled words are trochaic, and the second line enjambs a trochee spondaically, "thing / Was"? What are the metrics? Twenty-one syllables in three lines, 8/6/7 ,focus on "the eye" of a blackbird among "twenty" whitened mountains. The reader's eye and ear move back over the syllables, searching for clues to movement in the landscape, and fix, sideways, on the blackbird slanting at an angle. So the equation seems to be twenty mountains, plus one black eye (a perceptual pun?), in twenty-one micro-syllabics, or n + 1, as the blackbird factor to begin. We can always count on one radical in any given set, moving among counted numericals. Still more, while one blackbird eye moves visibly, the other remains hidden, we imagine (the back side of things), suggesting forces behind or beneath the surface visual image. (Not) see it new would be Stevens’s take on "Make it new," Pound's modernist formula from the Chinese. That which is beyond us remains irreducibly the Other, to be noted, respected, acknowledged, if not altogether seen. Like the other side of the globe, or the dark side of the moon, or the libido's reservoir in the id, we must also imagine it new, as this Other eye is always turned away, but always there. For Stevens, it must be imagined because it is, even if we can't quantify or touch it, as with an electron, a black hole, the square root of three, or a perfect human union. Shamanic riddles, the quizzical chill or slant truth of Dickinson's work, say, always lie hidden behind the mask, beneath the surface of ordinary things. There’s mystery in the old mundo, marvelous in the mundane, as ordinary things harbor extraordinary potential. This won't be an easy poem to track. Through the rhyming acoustics of three, tree, and there, the second tercet toys with lingual, hence metaphoric triangulation: "I was of three minds, / Like a-tree / In which there are three blackbirds." Perhaps the optic reference is two eyes focusing on one tree, a + b = c, or in a folkloric vein, mortality witnessing the tree of life-and-death, the indivisible trinity completed on the cross (three is the first surd with no square root). Also note that it takes two eyes, focusing diagonally, to create one three-dimensional, in-depth image. Perceptual reality is complex, to say the least, and at its simplest, most mysterious (Leonardo spoke of "the vanishing point" in his three-dimension rendering of the Annunciation, Gabriel, Mary, and a distantly dissolving river). The meter of the third line is uncertain, "In which there are three blackbirds," perhaps, and the formal arc of the poem less and less calculable. Still, a unified diversity hovers there, one consciousness "of three minds," like blackbirds three-in-one-tree. The poetics tilt dangerously off-center, just shy of nursery rhyme magic. Subtract an h, or add one and shift the r: the slightest change changes everything, three-treeee-there; yet the whole remains one cross-stitched homologue, an optic riddle and odd-sense rhyme. The next couplet implies that the mind mimes the world it sees in motion, as a blackbird whirls in autumn winds. Nature shows itself a "pantomime" or dumb show without words, its essential action preceding language. The fourth section, all form lines starting with a, or alpha, hints that no anaphoral coupling, Adam to Eve, man to woman in the beginning, is complete without a decentering third radical, the blackbird factor. Union comes from disunion, as even turns on odd. The dark stranger—Pluto to Orpheus and Eurydice—thickens the plot radically, realistically. The unknown other to a given rhyme or couplet keeps the poem going (Pinsky's "pleasure of 13 disturbance"). So far, the text is playing with parts-in-motion of a whole, jockeying for kinetic position to view the blackbird's collective facets. The fifth stanza questions which tonal cadence most makes way for beauty, in-flec-tion or in-nu-en-do, "The blackbird whistling / Or just after." Is it accent, or afterthought, that suspends sense—the word spoken, or the reflective silence that follows? The plot is in the pause. Just so, shadow to caesura, the longer sixth section shows the triple remove of the blackbird's shadow, crossing icicles of "barbaric glass" outside a "long window." Here "barbaric" (from the Greek, ethnoi for foreigners who stutter bar-bar like sheep) modifies the scintillant dactyl, "icicles," and we sense how many optic removes the eye, a fluid sphere refracting light in a black pupil, must see through to catch a fleeting glimpse, a dark image of a darker flying object. Icicle, literally Old English "ice of snow," traces back through Frost's melting verse on a stove to the snow man's wintry Otherness, the "nothing that is" out there. The blackbird's shadow darts back and forth outside civilization's glassed house (again the empty jar's echo). The radicals of remove prove multiple, metrically tracing "in the shadow / An indecipherable cause," as Plath says pointillistically of the retreating horseman in "Words," those "indefatigable hoof taps." Window, shadow, to and fro, mood, and shadow come together as the first true rhymes of the poem: an echoing sense that we've reached an inner corridor, a winged truth. In high rhyme now, the poet addresses those "thin men of Haddam" to ask why they follow Yeats to Byzantium after imagined "golden birds," when the real blackbird walks at the feet of their women, looking up. Not fantails, but fleshy feet give the physical downbeat of art ("let be be"), the "under"-standings that Poldy Bloom glimpses following a woman's skirt up the stairs, or admires on library chairs under reading women. High diction and formal metrics amount to little, lacking the ground sense and sensual counterstress of the blackbird's fetching antics, deconstructing all art that climbs too high. And so the bird flies off the page, over the horizon, "the edge / Of one of many circles," from viewer's eye to global curve; and just so quickly, it reappears in an Edenic green light, drawing bawdy cries of ecstasy. Recall the first poetic speech as interjection (Ah! or Ha!), here from "the bawds of euphony," those academic wenches of high art. Even critics can be moved from fustian to ecstasy by springing resurgence ("the green corn gleaming"). The eleventh set trips metrically uneven, the poet riding "over Connecticut / In a glass coach," again reminiscent of the artifice of the Tennessee jar. Through the rattling glass of a formal poetic (train) coach, a mistaking "fear pierced him"—the shadow of his carriage, that high-riding "equipage" of art, seems the steely shadow of the blackbird, a decreative omen sparking creative fear. And so, penultimately conclusive, the Heraclitean river flows ever onward, never to be stepped in twice the same, the blackbird still flying—and it is about to snow, that in-between "evening all afternoon," when slant light haunts the study, and the end anticipates a new beginning: "The blackbird sat / In the cedar-limbs." Cedar is the dream wood the world over, Lebanon to the Dakotas, the tree of seeing visions, and in it still sits the bird of all-colored night, shadow of shadows. In a world of radical unrest, he will momentarily close as the fixed radical, reality's shifting point-of-reference, just as the poem opened with one black eye among twenty snowy mountains. Poetry comes from a voice about to sing, Valery said, and Stevens's verse rises out of blackbirds soon to fly. 14 from Sing with the Heart of a Bear: Fusions of Native and American Poetry, 1890-1999. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Copyright ? 2000 by the Regents of the University of California. On 'Of Mere Being" Joseph Riddel "What are we to make of this late Stevens? Is he a man satisfied with his edgings and inchings, with the swarming activities of "statement, directly and indirectly getting at"? … Coming upon one of Stevens’ last edgings and inchings, a poem cryptically entitled "Of Mere Being," the critic is hard put to place his man. Does the "mere" of the title mean "simple" or "pure"? and does Stevens at last transcend (or inscend?) the physical to discover a central, the thing itself? [Here is quoted the poem in its entirety.] Beyond thought, beyond reason – here in the intuitive moment one perceives "mere being" but still perceives that one is perceiving. What he knows of mere being is a "palm" (a form, a faith?) beyond the physicality of tree and a bird’s song without meaning. Unreal, yes! – but that is Stevens" word for the reality of poetry, the "one of fictive music." What one knows of mere being is an image on the edge of space. at that point where being becomes nothingness. Is this not to prove the ultimate creativity of self, of the mind which must always conceive a reality beyond form or metaphor, beyond thought, but nevertheless at the end of, not outside, the mind?" Eleanor Cook Of Mere Being allows what Stevens has not allowed before, anagogic metaphor, which we may hear in his explicit and implicit word-play: The palm at the end of the mind, Beyond the last thought, rises In the bronze decor, A gold-feathered bird Sings in the palm, without human meaning, Without human feeling, a foreign song. You know then that it is not the reason That makes us happy or unhappy. The bird sings. Its feathers shine. The palm stands on the edge of space. The wind moves slowly in the branches. The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down. 15 This slowly moving play of excitation begins with the title and its obvious double sense of "mere." This is mere (bare, only) being and also mere (utter, very) being. On the edge of things, including life, this is how being may be. The implicit pun is on the word "phoenix," which is what this fiery bird is. The Greek word for this fabulous sacred bird is also used for a date-palm. The bird "sings in the palm" and through a pun is the palm. So also the poem is contained in its words or its leaves, and vice versa; it also is its words or leaves. So also space is contained in the mind, and vice versa; it also is the mind. This use of "is" sounds like the merest play of the verb "to be" or of "being." Yet such a visionary sense "at the end of the mind" is also of utter and very being. These are no longer the "intricate evasions of as"; here "as and is are one." This is being as in the A is B of anagogic metaphor. And we recall Stevens' old play with "B," "be," "to be"--of mere being, so to speak. Anagogic metaphor is paradisal: this is as close to paradisal language as Stevens will allow himself. He echoes the bird of the earthly paradise from the lemon-tree land of An Ordinary Evening in "dangle down," also rhymed on. He evokes the sun once more, for the phoenix lives in the City of the Sun. He uses no language of upwardness and no language of home. The poem is of mortality yet with a sense of immortality, though not personal immortality. It is a kind of will and testament of song. Thus, I think, the touching on Yeats; this is a Byzantium poem of sorts, a land of gold and kinds of transmutation. The "last thought" is the last thought possible before we move beyond reason, whether toward imagination or toward death. From Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens. Copyright ?by Princeton University Press. Charles Berger "Of Mere Being" says nothing about the sun or choirs; it displays a fabricated world, though its "firefangled" bird may indeed come from the sun, the fire fashioner. The question toward which the poem leads is the Blakean one: who made thee, who formed thy symmetry? The "gold-feathered bird" stands gorgeously alone, as if the scrawny crier of "Not Ideas" were now transformed into something rich and strange, something singular--or self-begotten, if we read the bird as phoenix. . . . [Berger quotes the entire poem] The palm at the end of the mind, a destination and a reward, symbolizes both resurrection and poetic glory: as the palm rises, so do we. Like the soldier, in "Metaphors of a Magnifico," Stevens sees a tree in the distance, though there is no assurance that the "edge of space" beckons on to a village, much less the walled city of Jerusalem. Much rides on whether or not "the end of the mind" and "Beyond the last thought" are synonymous, or whether Stevens implies that there is a space between the last thought and mind's end, a region that lies within the mind but beyond the range of thought. "It is not the reason / That makes us happy or unhappy" might point to this region. If one chooses to equate the two phrases, then the palm would rise, the bird's feathers 16 "dangle down," just beyond the mind's edge: "It would have been outside," to quote from "Not Ideas." Wherever we stand in space, "bronze decor," with its echoes of Horace's claim for poetry-exegi monumentum aere perennior--and the string of words in the final line, convince us that bird and palm alike blaze with artifice. Yet the maker or fashioner remains unidentified. "Of Mere Being" is poised on the edge of unanswerable questions. Does the wind move slowly because it is dying down, as the spirit departs in death? Or does it move slowly because a new life is starting up? Whose spirit is this? From Forms of Farewell: The Late Poetry of Wallace Stevens. University of Wisconsin Press. On "Anecdote of the Jar" Pat Righelato Wallace Stevens is, at times, the exemplary figure of the austere Modernist, shorn of Transcendental excess, wary of its expansionist programme for consciousness: ‘Anecdote of the Jar’ has been mined by generations of students teasing out its seemingly endless self-referentiality to demonstrate that ‘less is more’. The poem is, of course, an ironic critique of the Romantic yearning for the creative interfusion of consciousness and nature as the basis of art. Its circular self-enclosing form seems an austere rebuke to Emerson’s more expansive solipsism. Emerson wrote, ‘The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end’,but Steven’s circling is a demarcation line, an exclusion zone. Similarly the poem cheats the reader’s desire for narrative lift-off; this is an anecdote which leads nowhere, which fends off chatty familiarity, and in which there is no significant joining that transcends its constitutive elements. These refusals are particularly evident when comparing the poem with its famous Romantic precursor, Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. The heated imagination of the narrator of Keats’s Ode desperately interrogates the ‘cold’ and ‘silent’ Urn about the narrative significance of its figures; this is frustrating for the questioner, but at least the Urn bears signs of nature to which consciousness can respond. Stevens’s jar, more exigently, has no trace of nature, human or otherwise, and the ‘I’ of the poem does not attempt to read the jar or to express feeling, but merely notes its regulatory effect with a punctilious disinterestedness. The poem itself jars, repels the reader’s consciousness. Keats’s poem concludes in enigmatic utterance, yet the very ambiguity as to whose voice the final words are to be attributed is a kind of merger: Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ -that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. The voice is rhetorically identified as the voice of art, whose utterance has been achieved by the coming together of passionate warmth and cold silence; together they have produced the epigram 17 (literally ‘an inscription’) which, although circular, seems to suggest something beyond its apparent limited prescription. Most strikingly and consolingly, the reader of Keats’s poem is aligned with nature, with ‘breathing human passion’; the reader and the poet share the intensities of transience, whereas the bald statements of Stevens’s poem are indifferent to such intensities. The jar is a visual surveillance point, not teasingly enigmatic but blank, without cordial allusions to illustrious urn forebears and implicitly a rebuff to Keats’s expression of ardent longing for a consummate reciprocity between art and nature. Stevens’s own Keatsian proclivities are being kept well in check in this self-admonitory anecdote —an anecdote for the artist. But Stevens’s modernist austerity nakedly reveals that his theme is power. In an American context the poem engages with Emerson’s Transcendentalist emphasis on the possessive power of the eye. The genteel tradition, of which Emerson was the principal representative, might seem to have existed in rarefied seclusion from the commercial energies of the age, but it underwrote the expansionist energy of the era by transforming its power into an aesthetic of consciousness. In his essay ‘Nature’, Emerson comments on property: The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. What is significant here is that this is not a rejection of ownership —indeed it expresses land-hunger — but a relinquishment of an inferior category of ownership for a superior, more active one. Similarly, Emerson’s ‘transparent eyeball’ utterance is the expression of a colonising consciousness — there is space which the eye can acquire: Standing on the bare ground — my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing: I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God ... I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. The disclaimer, ‘I am nothing’ is disingenuous within the overall context of the egotistical sublime in which ‘I’ becomes ‘eye’, infinitely expansive, capable of encircling nature. Consciousness is prehensile and invasive, its transports masking its annexations. In ‘Anecdote of the Jar’, Stevens’s curious use of the word ‘slovenly’to describe the ‘wilderness’ converts the traditional meaning of the expression to a positive rather than a pejorative sense, as well as drawing on the more recent and more neutral American meaning of ‘uncultivated’. Indeed, in ‘Anecdote of the Jar’ the Tennessee wilderness is less satisfactorily assimilated by the power of the colonising consciousness: the jar may take ‘dominion’, but the wilderness is not internalised as an active source of creative power; it does not give its energy and fecundity to the jar. Emerson, ‘crossing a bare common’, is exhilarated by the winter landscape and the initial bleakness is suffused with a rhetoric of euphoric exchange; however, when Stevens’s starting point in the 18 Harmonium volume is an Emersonian one, the bleakness is not the occasion of rapturous interfusion. From Righelato, Pat, "Wallace Stevens." In American Poetry: The Modernist Ideal. Ed. Clive Bloom and Brian Docherty. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Ó 1995 The Editorial Board Lumiere (Cooperative Press) Ltd. Glen MacLeod [Note: The "readymade" described herein is defined as the urinal that Marchel Duchamp upended and signed as "R. Mutt" and submitted to the 1913 Arsenal Show as "Fountain by R. Mutt." "Mutt" was a notoriously debased name, one half of a popular cartoon strip, Mutt and Jeff.] "It is not the execution but the idea behind the work that makes the readymade interesting. In the creation of a readymade, emphasis is thrown upon the object itself, placed in a strange environment and divorced from its practical function, so that it is viewed solely as a "thing" without relation to its use. As Duchamp put it, "functionalism was … obliterated by the fact that I took it out of the earth and onto the planet of aesthetics." And equal emphasis is placed upon the artists, not as a craftsman, but as gifted perceiver whose choice of an object is seen as a creative act. … The readymade thus becomes the focus of a meditation on the relation between external things and our perception of them or – to use the terms Stevens would later employ to describe the same effect in his own poetry – a self-conscious meditation on the relation between reality and the imagination. … Characteristic of both "Anecdote of a Jar" and Duchamps’ Fountain is an essential ambiguity: To place a jar on a hill in Tennessee, and to place a porcelain urinal on its side atop a pedestal, are both ambiguous (as well as strange) gestures. In each case the nature of the object is also ambiguous: Is it to be considered a machine-made object, without aesthetic value in itself, an instance of anti-art? Or is it, on the other hand, to be considered a worthy example of utilitarian design? It is the nature of the readymade to inspire these questions without resolving them. … If we are willing to consider "Anecdote of a Jar" as a readymade, then Roy Harvey Pearce may well have discovered the particular mass-produced object Stevens had in mind when he wrote the poem [see photo of "Dominion" canning jar]. This fruit jar was in use in Tennessee in 1919 when Stevens traveled there prior to writing "Anecdote of a Jar." It is specially designed to take "Dominion" everywhere" and it is unquestionably "gray and bare." In meditating on such an object, Stevens was adapting Duchamp’s enigmatic art form to his own poetic purposes. And this meditation resulted in one of his most successful and popular poems. That fact alone suggests the importance of Duchamp to Stevens’ poetic development." From Glen MacLeod, Wallace Stevens and Modern Art: From the Armory Show to Abstract Expressionism (New Haven: Yale U P, 1993) 20-22. 19 Frank Lentricchia Formalists must all sooner or later come to the grievous conclusion about "Anecdote of the Jar" that the aged Ezra Pound came to about his Cantos: it will not cohere. And things only get worse: the imposing jar is also a "port" (haven? gate? but for whom?). The original structural opposition of "jar" and "wilderness," an opposition of nouns as substances, modulates into an opposition of verbs or actions: jars "take," the wilderness "gives." Jars take power--"dominion" (supreme authority, sovereignty, absolute ownership). Who is responsible for this power? Certainly not "I"; the jar did it. No longer can we avoid the question of tone; the postulate of the literary universe will not help us now, no amount of knowledge--not even Frye's--about literary structure will help us here to hear. Structuralists, by definition, cannot attend to non-repeatable textures of voice; structuralists, by definition, are tone-deaf. So what are we to make of the reiterated sounds of jar music, in the major key of "round"? A whole lot of "round" for such a short poem: surround, around, round (twice), ground. "Round": an insidiously invasive sound which evokes at this poem's aural level all of the big thematic points condensed in the key word of the poem: "dominion." Dominion "everywhere"--"everywhere"/"air"/"bare"--this triplet, in a poem otherwise devoid of rhyme, is unavoidable to the ear: a saturating totality, a faceless totality of authority. The jar is into every damn thing. In the world according to the jar, this aural imperialist, there is barely, just barely, one letter's worth of ground: mainly, in this world, there is "g-round." This madly incisive and potentially scary jabberwockian sense is the decisive entry to the poet's panoramic point of view, his presiding tonality: detached, above it all, neither for jars nor for nature, he writes in playful self-possession (whatever else you can say about him he's certainty not frightened of anything) this line, best read in the manner of W C. Fields: "The jar was round upon the ground." From Ariel and the Police: Michel Foucault, William James, and Wallace Stevens. Copyright ? 1988 by The University of Wisconsin Press. Donald Gutierrez Being placed on top of a hill gives the jar an apex of human purpose through nature. But the jar asserts authority even more through the implied design of its own rotundity. It is the design of a created object embodying a human, cultural purpose. Further, the roundness is the symbolic design of purpose placed in nature, which in itself lacks purpose or order. The jar's roundness, exerting a centripetal force on the "slovenly wilderness," endows the wilderness (including the hill) with the order of a center. All the natural disorderliness of the wilderness acquires a purposive spatial character through "centering," and is given a figurative order in the way "rounded" and rounding human purpose shapes significance into the raw matter of earthly phenomena. Accordingly, human circularity, human centralization, civilizes "wilderness," not only the wild, that is, but chaos, nullity, meaninglessness, by providing it structure. This governing force is so powerful that even in its plainest, simplest representations ("grey and bare") the jar compels a "surrounding." 20 "Anecdote of a Jar" is a metaphor about the magnetic power of mind and art to order a void (and the void). Stress is laid upon its non-naturalness (11.10-12) to accentuate the crucial power of artistic and thus human purpose. Art (mind) governs its antithesis, nature—"It took dominion everywhere," even, indeed, especially, in a non-civilized, non-human place. The shaper here is himself "round"; he rounds significances through symbolic artifacts which express his desire to dominate all that is senseless or shapeless or wild by compelling it into pattern, thus transferring from God to art and man the force of the ancient gnosis that "God is a Circle, whose Circumference is nowhere and whose Centre is everywhere." from "Circular Art: Round Poems of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams." Concerning Poetry 14:1 (Spring 1981). Roy Harvey Pearce ‘ … I think it worth noting that Stevens as he wrote the poem must have had in mind a specific fruit jar, the "Dominion Wide Mouth Special."… Although manufactured in Canada, the jar has been widely distributed in the United States from 1913 to the present, The exemplar photographed dates ca. 1918; Stevens was in fact traveling in Tennessee in April and May 1918. … As a "wide mouth special," the jar is particularly notable, of its kind, as "tall and of a port in air." And its glass, compared to that of other fruit jars, is especially "gray and bare." Whether in Tennessee in 1918 fruit jars were used as containers for "moonshine," I have not been able to establish definitively. Surely, granting Stevens’ penchant for "moon" and "shine," the matter is worth investigating. From Roy Harvey Pearce, "’Anecdote of the Jar’": An Iconological Note," The Wallace Stevens Journal 1:2 (Summer 1977), 65. John Vernon There is a persistent strain in modern poetry that has a great deal to do with this sense of objects. The conclusion to Yeats's "Among School Children" is one example: O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance? The answer to both questions is each possible answer. The chestnut tree manifests itself in each of its parts, as with the Tree of Life; and the tree can be a unity of these parts only because it is totally proliferated in each of them. Similarly, the dancer is and is not herself in the perfect unity of the dance. The dance is not a shape imposed upon her body; it is shape as act, as the unity of the 21 dancer with her motion and her medium, her space, just as in modern physics a particle is perfectly united with its trajectory, its act. Many of Wallace Stevens' poems are also about this sense of objects. His persistent theme is the relationship of seer, world, and object. In "Someone Puts a Pineapple Together" he asserts that each person sees in the pineapple a "tangent of himself," and that "the fruit so seen" is also "a part of the nature that he contemplates." In "Connoisseur of Chaos" be says that "the pensive man ... sees that eagle float / For which the intricate Alps are a single nest." The point of both poems is that the wholeness of the world is composed by a single object that opens upon it, the pineapple or eagle, and this unity of object and world in turn passes through the perspective that opens upon it, the someone who puts the pineapple together or "the pensive man" who sees the eagle. This is why the jar in "Anecdote of the jar" can "Make the slovenly wilderness / Surround that hill." And it is why such an object as the jar couldn't possibly be an inert thing enclosed in its shape; it reaches out for the eyes of whoever is watching and with those eyes arranges the world around it--it infuses the world with itself and itself with the world by means of the point of view, the body, it is anchored in. Objects are like the glass of water in the poem of that title; they are both defined and released by their boundaries: That the glass would melt in heat, That the water would freeze in cold, Shows that this object is merely a state, One of many, between two poles. The two poles are not only heat and cold but also the seer and the world. If objects are events as Whitehead says, they are events that mediate between the body of the seer and the world, events that carry that body into the world and the world into that body. The sense of an object as an event rather than a thing goes hand in hand with the sense of form as act, as temporal form, which characterizes a great deal of modern poetry. From The Garden and the Map: Schizophrenia in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973. Copyright ? 1973 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Joseph Carroll "Anecdote of the Jar" (1919) . . . celebrates a moment of aesthetic triumph. Stevens achieves this triumph by means of a tactic similar to that of "The Snow Man"; he transfers his own imaginative activity to an inhuman medium. The effect of this tactic in "Anecdote of the Jar" is to represent the conflict between the mind and external reality as an impersonal play of aesthetic forces: 22 I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill. (CP, 76) The three stanzas of the poem move in a circling pattern, repeating first elements in a jubilant manner and gradually coming closer to the concentrated focus of the third stanza: "The jar was gray and bare." The jar serves as an extension of the poet's own drive to order, but it achieves dominion over the chaotic wilderness precisely because it is inanimate. "It did not give of bird or bush." The jar does not itself move or change; it merely sheds influence. The source of its power is its perfection of empty form. It is "of a port in air," stately and imposing but also vacant, a mere circular opening in the air. The dominion of the jar is evoked on the level of sound and image by the repetition of the word round. The jar is round upon a rounded piece of ground, a hill, and the image of roundness is picked up again, phonetically, in the word ground: "The jar was round upon the ground." Stevens catches the assimilation of chaos to order in the moment of transformation. The wilderness, though "slovenly," surrounds the hill, and though it sprawls, it sprawls "around." The transformation to controlled pattern is reflected even in the metrical structure of the poem. The smoothness of contour in the short, tight iambic lines is broken only once, by "slovenly wilderness," and at this point the wilderness is already being rounded up. The word slovenly is a backward glance at irregularity. Whatever potential form or roundness there may be in the wilderness answers to the realized form of the jar. The jar simply is round, and because it is round, the wilderness moves to surround it. The jar in Tennessee represents a purely formal principle of order, and this kind of order cannot satisfy the deepest needs of Stevens' imagination. He ultimately seeks not only to impose order on the external world but to integrate the mind and the world within a sentient unity of being. As long as he remains fixed within a dualistic conception of the world, this fulfillment will elude him. From Wallace Stevens' Supreme Fiction: A New Romanticism. Copyright ? 1987 by Louisiana State UP. B.J. Leggett Although other sounds are more numerous, round is what we hear as it imposes itself on the poem: I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill. The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild. 23 The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air. Just as the sound of round appears to dominate the poem once we fix on it---that is, once we read from a perspective that concentrates on roundness--so too does our understanding that the jar orders the wilderness depend on our adopting momentarily the point of view of the jar. The jar orders the wilderness by interpreting it from its own perspective, by imposing its own shape, making the wilderness surround it. And one must note here that the wilderness as a whole is not ordered, only the edge that has been made round (given form) by surrounding the jar. That is, the order imposed by the jar is a perspectival order. From the point of view of the jar, the wilderness is no longer wild, alien; it has been given a shape familiar to the jar (the only shape it knows or needs to know, to paraphrase another text on a jar). But to adopt any perspective other than that of the jar is to see that the wilderness is in no real sense changed; it is to recognize the arbitrary quality of the ordering, as the poem eventually does. The issue of point of view is clearlv central to the poem, as Frank Lentricchia has recently noted, although Lentricchia's own perspective--he wants to read it as an anti-imperialist anecdote--does not allow him to pursue the issue to its conclusion. He writes that point of view in "Anecdote of the Jar" is mainly "panoramic," but at two crucial points limited. At first we view the world "according to a jar, refusing to keep its proud sense of its own well-formed self to itself, smugly taking itself as the distributing point of order and sole topographical coordinate: we see the wilderness forced out of itself into order." At the end "we experience the point of view of the wilderness in the sense that the panoramic speaker takes the side of the wilderness" (10). This is also the side Lentricchia takes. He argues that the old point of controversy--is the poem for art or for nature?-- disappears "when we note that [Stevens] lets nature get the last word by characterizing the autonomous jar of art, at the end of the poem, as an absence of nature." Nature is "maternal, creative, pliant," while the jar is "inflexible, hard," a "receptacle that doesn't receive and from which nothing emerges." Lentricchia suggests as well that the poem does not achieve coherence on its own terms; it asks us to go outside the text for an understanding of its implications: "Formalists must all sooner or later come to the grievous conclusion about "Anecdote of the Jar" that the aged Ezra Pound came to about his Cantos: it will not cohere" (10). Whether or not a poem coheres depends in large measure on the way we opt to read it. In my reading of "Anecdote of the Jar" Lentricchia's brand of incoherence, which arises from the absence of a political context, is of less importance than the incoherence that arises from the poem's epistemological and aesthetic ideologies. "We'd better look harder at point of view," Lentricchia writes of the poem, but he chooses to ignore its most crucial perspective, that of the "I" who initiates the action. He finds that "this is an anecdote that does not, apparently, centrally involve the human actor who places the jar" (7), and, in truth, the poem's first line--"I placed a jar in Tennessee"--has never been sufficiently emphasized. To put it another way, the speaker's perspective on the opposition of order and chaos needs to be uncovered, which also means that we need to be more careful in our phrasing of what actually happens in the poem. To speak of the jar's "refusing to keep its proud sense of its own well-formed self to itself," to accuse it of being smug, or to say that the wilderness is "forced out of itself into order"--these are products of Lentricchia's own point of view and not sanctioned by 24 the poem itself. Neither does the poem sanction the question of whether it is for the jar or for the wilderness. All of these issues are a result of personifying the jar as human intelligence, forgetting that it is itself the result of an arbitrary imposition of order and that another ordering principle lies behind it. The first line of the poem modifies our entire reading if we recognize that the speaker takes full responsibility for this arbitrary imposition of order. He places the jar, imposes a "geometrical simplification" onto the void, notes the domination of any center of power, but, being more mobile and more sophisticated than a jar, also notes that from another perspective the jar's ordering power is illusory. The wilderness is not physically changed; it is not literally "forced out of itself into order," as Lentricchia claims, any more than a text is physically changed by a new interpretation. The jar "made" the wilderness surround it only in an interpretation that adopts for a moment its point of view. Interpretation here means the imposition of sense and value, these being reduced in this case to roundness. To ignore the interpretation that lies behind the jar's interpretation and initiates it is to be surprised by what has appeared to many readers a sudden and arbitrary shift in point of view. In the third and last quatrain the speaker says of the jar's ordering power It took dominion everywhere. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee. Readers who have assumed that the poem is for the jar against the disorderly wilderness may feel that the speaker's attention to the jar's sterility is not sufficiently prepared for, or, like Lentricchia, who is for the wilderness, they may feel that the poem does not cohere. But the point of view that controls the poem, that comprehends both the jar and the wilderness, does not blunder into incoherence. It recognizes instead the ironies of perspectivism--that it is only through the adoption of a willful and arbitrary point of view that one is able to interpret a world too slovenly (not only "slipshod," but "of low character" and thus, like the giant, "uncultivated" or "uncivilized") to provide its own meaning, and, simultaneously, that the perspective through which the world is given form is not itself a part of that world. The jar, as the speaker's form of artifice, is utterly alien to the world of bird and bush, which is to say (as does "The Snow Man") that any order, any interpretation of the Tennessee wilderness would be an imposition and therefore not a true depiction of that world as it is. To follow the development of the poem we must understand that it reflects the speaker's point of view, which exceeds that of the jar and identifies with it only momentarily. It is for this reason that Lentricchia is, I think, mistaken in arguing that the preposition of in the title "means not 'about' but something like 'belonging to,' as if the jar could speak, as if the poem were really about a story that a jar might tell about itself" (8). Against Lentricchia I would argue that the poem is neither for nor against the jar, and that a political context that includes our forefathers' slaughter of the Indians who lived in the Cherokee village for which Tennessee is named is not particularly helpful in our understanding of the wilderness. It is a poem primarily about perspective and interpretation, which come to mean very much the same thing. It is aware of the dilemma it dramatizes--that perspective is both necessary and untrue--but it cannot escape another dilemma inherent in its own perspectivist assumptions, 25 which we recognize once the speaker's point of view is no longer identical with that of the jar. The poem ceases to cohere with the line "The jar was gray and bare," for at this point the speaker recognizes the jar's alien status. It is like "nothing else in Tennessee" since it is static, not "natural," incapable of change and generation. To make this distinction between the jar and the wilderness, however, the speaker must assume that we can know the Tennessee wilderness as it is, that it presents itself to us, in Macherey's suggestive metaphors, as "an open fruit" or as "a discourse already constituted" (6), and not as something whose only meaning is that given to it by the jar. The first two stanzas of the poem are however based on the assumption that reality will be known only as it is interpreted by such a geometrical simplification as the jar represents, and that to interpret is to create according to one's own sense and values. If the description of the jar's effect on the wilderness is to be taken seriously, the speaker must also impose his sense and values on that which he identifies with the living world antithetical to the artificial jar. And we now see that what was presented as disorder was by necessity already ordered from the beginning. By associating the wilderness with a particular region, Tennessee, by characterizing it as sprawling, slovenly, by referring to its vegetation and animal life, the persona had given form to that which he then set against form. And in the end, by asserting the jar's alien presence in a readily apprehended world of bird and bush, the instigator of this epistemological exercise unmasks a naive empiricism that lies behind the more official perspectivist stance of the poem. The first two stanzas give us a world that is "fully made," while the last gives us one that is "fully found." If the character of the Tennessee wilderness is a given, if it can be known as it is, then the ordering power of artifice over unordered nature, seemingly the point of the anecdote, is made unconvincing. The poem, that is, has it both ways--the character of reality is a creation of perspectival seeing and ordering; the character of reality as a given exposes the artificiality of any given perspective. From Early Stevens: The Nietzchean Intertext. Copyright ? 1992 by Duke UP. On "Disillusionment of 10 O' Clock" John Gould Fletcher Over the roof-tops race the shadows of clouds: Like horses the shadows of clouds charge down the street. Whirlpools of purple and gold, Winds from the mountains of cinnabar, Lacquered mandarin moments, palanquins swaying and balancing Amid the vermilion pavilions, against the jade balustrades; Glint of the glittering wings of dragon-flies in the light: Silver filaments, golden flakes, repulse and surrender, The sun broidered upon the rain, The rain rustling with the sun. 26 -- John Gould Fletcher (from Poetry 3:3 [December 1913], 85). Robert Pack Stevens' titles often provide us with his attitude toward the action that takes place within a poem, and therefore they have a special function in the structure of the poem. If the title is humorous, ironic or ambiguous, it is necessary to regard the poem from this perspective. "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock" contrasts people who "are not going/ To dream of baboons and periwinkles" with the old, drunk and dreaming sailor who "Catches tigers/ In red weather." The inability of these people to live in the colored world of the imagination, to be ghosts dressed in "purple with green rings," is their disillusionment. Stevens' irony is severe in its judgment; clearly he would not have the sailor abandon the illusion that enables him to catch tigers. And we may conjecture further: why are ghosts in "white night-gowns" any more real than ghosts attired in color? The color red suggests the intensity of the sailor's commitment to imagination, and if we believe with Stevens that the imagination is "The magnificent cause of being, the one reality/ In this imagined world," then surely the dreaming sailor's illusion saves us from the disillusionment which reduces modern life to a drab reality. The "disillusionment" in this poem would deprive us of the fictions that enrich our lives. From Wallace Stevens: An approach to his poetry and thought. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1958. Copyright ?1958 by Rutgers, The State University. Robert Buttel Another poem which is like the work of the Imagists is "Here the grass grows" (1909, "Concert of Fishes"), which later become the third poem of "Carnet de Voyage." Framed by the grass and wind at the beginning and end, the vivid description of the fishes suggests perhaps the beauty and depth of life within the flux of nature: Here the grass grows, And the wind blows, And in the stream, Small fishes gleam, Blood-red and hue Of shadowy blue, And amber sheen, And water-green, And yellow flash, And diamond ash. 27 And the grass grows, And the wind blows. The Impressionistic use of color is similar to what some of the Imagists were up to, again concurrently, with Stevens, though unlikely to have influenced him directly. F. S. Flint’s "The Swan" and Allen Upward’s poem "The Gold Fish," both included in [the anthology of Imagist poems entitled] Des Imagistes, are examples of this; here is a stanza from " The Swan": Under the lily shadow And the gold and the blue and mauve That the whin and the lilac Pour down on the water, The fishes quiver. … Stevens must certainly have been discovering some of the same sources that inspired these poets. One such source, at least for Stevens, was Japanese color prints; an entry in his journal for May 1909, reads: "Kakuzo Okakura is a cultivated, but not an original thinker. His ‘Idols of the East’ was interesting." Then shortly thereafter: "Japanese color prints: Pale orange, green and crimson, and white, and gold and brown. / Deep lapiz-lazuli and orange, and opaque green, fawn-color, black and gold." Earlier (March 18, 1909), he had written a letter to Elsie Moll in which he referred to Okakura and then listed the colors above plus these: "lapis blue and vermilion, white, and gold and green." From these lists emerged, following the orders of colors in the journal entry, this manuscript poem: Colors I Pale orange, green and crimson, and White, and gold and brown. II Lapiz-lazuli and orange, and opaque green, faun-color, black and gold. … In "Colors," as in "Here the Grass Grows," Stevens aimed at an orchestration of color values, with a vital clarity of description evident in the latter, and a contrast of overtones in the former. From Robert Buttel, The Making of "Harmonium" (Princeton: Princeton U P, 1967), 68-71. Anthony Whitting 28 "… The disillusionment of the title refers in part to the poverty described in the first part of the poem. The middle-class American goes to bed at ten o’clock and haunts his own house by wearing a white nightgown. The title may also refer to [James MacNeill] Whistler"s "Ten O’Clock" Lecture. Though Stevens" emphasis on color might recall poems such as [Oscar] Wilde’s "Impression du Matin," The Thames nocturne of blue and gold Changed to a harmony in grey: A bare with ochre-colored hay Dropped from the wharf, the use of color in Stevens" poem does not seem intended to render a "mood" or "impression." Rather, the contemplation of colors in various combinations seems to be a pleasurable end in itself, and the poem appears to endorse the pure good of artifice and decoration ("socks of lace / And beaded ceintures") in a landscape that would otherwise be blank. Stevens, though, is not giving another "Ten O’Clock" lecture in "Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock." In imagining the nightgowns these Americans might wear, Stevens is envisioning a meeting of art and life that is unaesthetic in emphasis. In the "Ten O’Clock" lecture Whistler says that he wants to lift the burden of art from the shoulders of the middle class: The boundary line is clear. Far from me to propose to bridge it over – that the pestered people be pushed across. No! I would save them from further fatigue. I would come to their relief and would lift from their shoulders this incubus of Art. Why, after centuries of freedom from it, and indifference to it, should it now be thrust upon them by the blind – until wearied and puzzled, they know no longer how they shall eat or drink – how they shall sit or stand – or wherewithal they shall clothe themselves – without afflicting Art. "Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock" does not seem to follow this separationist policy. It colorfully investigates how the middle class might "clothe" itself with art. The disillusionment of the title, then, refers not only to middle-class lack of illusion, but also to Stevens" disillusionment with "Ten O’Clock" aestheticism. Aesthete and middle-class burgher are used in "Disillusionment" to point to each other’s limitations. Both of these personae, however, are criticized from a third perspective, that of the old drunk sailor, a figure Stevens perhaps borrowed from Baudelaire, who writes in "Le Voyage" of "ce matelot ivrogne" [the "drunken sailor" who, in Baudelaire’s poem, also "invents Americas"]. The sailor"s dream life sets him apart from the burgher. As Milton Bates writes, "[T]he people who want to keep regular hours are unlikely to dream of baboons and periwinkles." And his tiger hunting is unlikely to appeal to the aesthetes. (Try to imagine [Huysmans’ notoriously decadent "hero"] Des Esseintes traveling to another continent to go on safari!) 29 from Anthony Whitting, The Never-Resting Mind: Wallace Stevens" Romantic Irony (Ann Arbor: U Michigan P, 1996), 83-84. On "The Emperor of Ice Cream" Helen Vendler "For purposes of experiment, I have put the details the poem gives us into the form of a first-person narrative; I see the poem as a rewritten form of this ur-narrative, in which the narrative has been changed into an impersonal form, and the linear temporal structure of narrative form has been replaced by a strict geometric spatial construction – two rooms juxtaposed. Here (with apologies) is my conjectural narrative ur-form of the poem, constructed purely as an explanatory device: I went, as a neighbor, to a house to help lay out the corpse of an old woman who had died alone; I was helping to prepare for the home wake. I entered, familiarly, not by the front door but by the kitchen door. I was shocked and repelled as I went into the kitchen by the disorderly festival going on inside: a big muscular neighbor who worked at the cigar-factory had been called in to crank the ice-cream machine, various neighbors had sent over their scullery-girls to help out and their yard-boys bearing newspaper-wrapped flowers from their yards to decorate the house and the bier: the scullery-girls were taking advantage of the occasion to dawdle around the kitchen and flirt with the yard-boys, and they were all waiting around to have a taste of the ice cream when it was finished. It all seemed to me crude and boisterous and squalid and unfeeling in the house of the dead – all that appetite, all that concupiscence. Then I left the sexuality and gluttony of the kitchen, and went in to the death in the bedroom. The corpse of the old woman was lying exposed on the bed. My first impulse was to find a sheet to cover the corpse; I went to the cheap old pine dresser, but it was hard to get the sheet out of it because each of the three drawers was lacking a drawer-pull; she must have been too infirm to get to the store to get new glass knobs. But I got a sheet out, noticing that she had hand-embroidered a fantail border on it; she wanted to make it beautiful, even though she was so poor that she made her own sheets, and cut them as minimally as she could so as to get as many as possible out of a length of cloth. She cut them so short, in fact, that when I pulled the sheet up far enough to cover her face, it was too short to cover her feet. It was almost worse to have to look at her old calloused feet than to look at her face; somehow her feet were more dead, more mute, than her face had been She is dead, and the fact cannot be hidden by any sheet. What remains after death, in the cold light of reality, is life – all of that life, with its coarse muscularity and crude hunger and greedy concupiscence, that is going on in the kitchen. The only god of this world is the cold god of persistent life and appetite; and I must look steadily at this repellent but true tableau – the animal life in the kitchen, the corpse in the back bedroom. Life offers no other tableaus of reality, once we pierce beneath appearances. 30 Helen Vendler At the heart of many of Stevens's poems are harsh and unpalatable experiences revealed only gradually through his intense stylization. The famous poem, "The Emperor of Ice-Cream," resisted explication for some decades, perhaps because no one took the trouble to deduce its implicit narrative from its stylized plot. (The Russian formalist distinction between "story" and "plot" is often useful for this and other Stevens poems.) The basic "story " of "The Emperor" is that of a person who goes to the house of a neighbor, a poor old woman, who has died; the person is to help "lay out" (arrange for decent viewing) the corpse in the bedroom, while other neighbors are sending over homegrown flowers, and yet others are preparing food, including ice cream, for the wake. Stevens "plots" this story into two equal stanzas: one for the kitchen where the ice cream is being made, one for the bedroom where the corpse awaits decent covering. He "plots" it further by structuring the poem as a series of commands from an unknown master of ceremonies, directing--in a diction of extreme oddness--the neighbors in their funeral duties: "Call the roller of big cigars, / The muscular one, and bid him whip / In kitchen cups concupiscent curds. /. . . / / Take from the dresser ... / ... that sheet /... / And spread it so as to cover her face." Both the symbolic kitchen stanza (life as concupiscence) and the symbolic bedroom stanza (death as final) end with the same third-order refrain echoed by the title: "The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream." Faced with life (however slovenly and appetitive) in the kitchen and death (with its protruding horny feet) on the bed, one must, however unwillingly, acquiesce in the reign of life. We cannot know what personal events prompted this 1922 poem, apparently set in Key West (so the poet Elizabeth Bishop conjectured, who knew Key West, where Cubans worked at the machines in cigar factories, where blacks always had ice cream at funerals), but it derives resonance from Stevens's mother's death ten years earlier. What is certain is that it represents symbolically, with the Procrustean bed of its two rooms, the bitter moment of choosing life over death, at a time when life seems particularly lonely, self-serving, lustful, and sordid. Art is exposed as too scanty in its powers to cover up death; the embroidered sheet (a figure for the embellished page), if it is pulled up to cover the dead woman's face, reveals her "horny feet," which show "how cold she is, and dumb." In choosing to "let the lamp affix its beam," as in a morgue, and in acquiescing to the command, "Let be be finale of seem," Stevens makes his momentous choice for reality over appearance. From The Columbia History of American Poetry. Ed. Jay Parini and Brett C. Miller. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. Copyright ?1993 by Columbia UP. Kia Penso Here is an interesting experiment anyone can try if he or she has followed me this far: first, find an intelligent and discerning person who is perhaps not very interested in or familiar with Stevens' poems; this is not as difficult as it might seem. Get this person to read "The Emperor of 31 Ice-Cream." (This person, obviously, has to be honest and not trying to ingratiate himself with you, i.e. willing to say "I don't get it.") Then try to explain, using only the one poem, why it is about belief. What details of that scene have anything to do with belief? "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" is frequently anthologized, and yet, standing by itself it reads like lively wordplay that has carefully crafted the illusion of referring to something. We start out hearing some of the objects as symbols. But what could a deal dresser missing a few glass knobs be a symbol of? And a dead woman's protruding feet are much too distracting as objects in themselves to be pointing to something transcendent. The poem does refer to something, of course. The line "let be be finale of seem" can be explained. But it is not a simple task to explain what it has to do with the action in the rest of the poem. Part of the meaning of the poem comes from the speaker's zest for details, which he possesses even in this setting. The attitude is expressed in the tone of voice and in details such as the fantails embroidered on the sheet. Why notice the embroidery now? These little, illuminated details nevertheless come to the narrator's attention in the flow of the practical tasks. It's the bright, unillusioned sufficiency of all this together that makes the narrator say "Let be be finale of seem." All of which can be explained to someone, but doesn’t guarantee that they will see it for themselves. This experiment reveals two things: 1) how Stevens’ poems are interrelated, and 2) how even though they are interrelated the individual poem makes a very vigorous claim--it demands that we learn to think in its idiom. From Wallace Stevens, Harmonium, and The Whole of Harmonium. Archon Books. Copyright ?1991 Milton J. Bates That Stevens could write a pure poem without recourse to Symbolist metaphysics or exoticism is brilliantly demonstrated in a piece like "The Emperor of Ice-Cream." Here, the impending night of "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" and "Domination of Black" has descended, quenching not only the woman's life but also any possibility of protest. Instead, the poem affixes its relentless beam up[on the common, even repellent details of the woman's room and her corpse. In a voice that suggests the sideshow barker rather than the unctuous minister or funeral director, the speaker of the poem insists that the naturalistic "be" replace the religious or romantic "seem." He calls for a wake devoid of pomp and ceremony; the mourners (or are they celebrants?) are to wear their workaday clothes and one of them, the muscular cigar maker, will serve ice cream--a symbol not only of life's ephemeral pleasures but also, as Stevens told R.P. Blackmur, "of the materialism or realism proper to a refugee from the imagination." Not that "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" is an unimaginative poem. Though Stevens spoke of its "deliberately commonplace costume" when he chose it as his favorite in 1933, he also said that it seemed to him to contain something of the "essential gaudiness" of poetry. These remarks seems contradictory until one remembers that Stevens, in keeping with a fundamental precept of pure poetry, typically inverted the usual hierarchy of subject and style. Since poetry is the true subject of a pure poem, the ostensible subject is, relatively speaking, mere "costume." Such costume is not dispensable, however. "Poetry is like anything else," Stevens told Latimer; "it cannot be made 32 suddenly to drop all its rags and stand out naked, fully disclosed." Consequently, though the "essential gaudiness" of "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" lies in its expressive diction and oratorical flair, "The Emperor" does have clothes: the woman's wake. Because its costume is so prosaic--as compared, for example, with "Domination of Black"--the poem is a triumph of attitude over reference. Ostensibly an endorsement of "be," it testifies still more eloquently to the power of "seem." One is not surprised to learn that Stevens, when he tried to recall the inception of the poem years later, could remember the "state of mind" which gave rise to it but not the external occasion. from Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self. Copyright ?1985 by the University of California Press. Kenneth Lincoln This little nonsense ditty takes a serious turn at the stanza break. Someone and somethings are missing. The woman's dresser, where she "used to wear" lingerie, lacks "three glass knobs" (three-in-a-jar trinity?), and her bedding may be too short to cover both head and feet. Her prone body, mocking how the wench lived, lies flat in the indignity of death. "If her horny feet protrude," those limb ends tell us "how cold she is, and dumb." So a wench is dead, stretched out cold at the ice cream party. The dresser deal "knobs" transpose to "horny" bunions, glass to skin calluses. No empty jar lies here, rounding the wild, but a woman's body in its cool opaque skin, thickened from walking the earth. Her "horny feet" index a prosaic, if bewitching reality, bunioned and "dumb" as the "slovenly wilderness": feet are the earthen root, nonetheless, the vulgate "base" of a poetic meter iambically shamanic. She embroidered "fantails" on her bedsheet, her tail-end art. Those curlicues may rover her face, if they cannot mask her feet, which grounded her in reality, finally in death. So, for a fourth and final call, "Let the lamp" of nature "affix its beam," the sun its sundown flame, as the seeing eye celebrates an inner light in mortal darkness, a comeback optics of imagining sunrise reborn at sunset. As elsewhere, the well dressed man with a beard finds, After the final no there comes a yes And on that yes the future world depends. No was the night. Yes is this present sun. Dreaming jouissance is critical. The imagination, Stevens said in his Letters, is "like light, it adds nothing, except itself." The "supreme fiction," lighting us to the end, is to believe in our world, "my green, my fluent mundo," as one lives and faces death in others (no less than Emily Dickinson a-wake or Sitting Bull the sash-wearer). Poetry is to imagine well what must be. "The final belief is to believe in a fiction," Stevens wrote in Adagia, "which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly" (reflective chronotope turned precept). 33 With rhyming comic finality (come/dumb/beam/cream), the refrain rides on a boisterous iambic pentameter, "The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream." The fourteen syllables curdle in a spondee (as with the twelve-syllable, shaggy last line of "The Snow Man"). There's a youthful break in the pace, a jump-rope skip completing the Falstaffian form. From bunioned foot to embroidered fantail, earthly base to fanciful end, this elegy resists loss by making art of what seems to be, seeing what is, delightfully. It is an act of the imagination at a wake; the final test, to return to childhood joy in "cream" made of "ice" (Carolina "aspic nipples" sweetened). A concupiscent summer is whipped up from winter's absence, the snow man's "nothing" curdled by sweet belief. from Sing with the Heart of a Bear: Fusions of Native and American Poetry 1890-1999. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Copyright ?2000 by the Board of Regents of the University of California. On "The Idea of Order at Key West" Mutlu Konuk Blasing Only when Stevens can harmonize the philosopher's exoteric voice with the esoteric voice of the poet can he remain philosophically rigorous yet sound the "watery syllable" of the "saltier well." We hear this language of meditation again in "The Idea of Order at Key West," where he replaces linguistic and metaphysical dichotomies with a triangular arrangement and places the meditating mind at the apex. The poem returns to the discovery of "Sunday Morning" and to its dramatic form but casts the philosopher, the Emersonian essayist, as its central speaker. While it may revert stylistically to the "magnificent measure" that the post-romantic—with his eccentric truth—must learn to relinquish, "Key West" points to Stevens's way out of the impasse of poems like the "Comedian" and "Sea Surface Full of Clouds." It enables us to understand his subsequent insistence that poetry is the proper subject of poetry to be not a solipsistic withdrawal but an adequate response to just that danger. The sea that "never formed to mind or voice" is, in "Key West," both the "inhuman," "veritable ocean" and an inner "nature" of Eros and death. And Stevens counterpoints the "grinding water and the gasping wind" of nature with the "song" of the "artificer" in such a way that neither subject nor object speaks through the other: The sea was not a mask. No more was she. The song and water were not medleyed sound Even if what she sang was what she heard, Since what she sang was uttered word by word. [CP, 128] Both the pathetic fallacy and realism are rejected. The "plungings of water and the wind" are "meaningless" indeed, and we do not hear them, any more than we ever hear nature in poems. And the woman's song does not copy nature; it is "the voice that is great" (CP, 138) within her—her 34 human "spirit" (stanza 3) or "breath"—rising in response to the sea's body and the "gasping wind." Yet we never hear the words of her lyric, either. The sea is an external nature with its meaningless, "constant cry"; its image and counterpart is the "she" who sings "word by word." Her measures and meters utter her song's law, just as the sea's cry sounds nature's law. Stevens distances the lyric voice to the same extent that nature's echolalia is distanced. Instead, he centers on the speaker, the "connoisseur of chaos," and the "idea of order" he entertains. This meditating and mediating speaker is not a singer but a rhetorician, something of a critic even, and in his words, letters, and internal rhymes "relation appears" (CP, 215") between the "she" and "sea." Here Stevens goes beyond "Sea Surface" by explicitly affirming a relation between the sea and song—but only as the subject and predicate of a metaphor about the relationship of life and art. The Emersonian precedent for this poem is "The Snow-Storm," which also centers on the metaphor-making imagination, and invites us to "come see" a process "unseen"—a process not visible to the eye. In "Key West" such "seeing" becomes the link between "sea " and "she." In this deconstruction of a romantic fusion of nature and subject, Stevens constructs a central rhetoric. In the words of the poem's speaker, the alien depths of a nature at once external and internal meet in the surfaces of a poetic language that glosses The maker's rage to order words of the sea, Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred, And of ourselves and of our origins, In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds. [CP, 130] The song has a transforming significance only for its hearer, who hears a new, "amassing harmony" as much beyond the song as beyond the sea. For the critic, the singer's voice makes "the sky acutest at its vanishing" and measures "to the hour its solitude." Her measures open intercourse between nature and "ourselves," mastering and portioning out the darkness of inner and outer seas—but only in the "meta-phoric" speech of the critic who "inter-prets" and outlines the connection between artifice and sea, form and nature, music and death. He occupies the center, which is a portal or passageway—spatially and temporally "measured" by the singer—from a dark sea outside us to a darker sea inside, "dimly-starred" either way. This metaphoric passage is, appropriately, a "fragrant" portal: the synesthesia makes the image a proper vehicle for its tenor, the earthly and earthy truth of figurative language. Measuring a space and time, the singer opens a door that delivers us into yet "separates us from the wind and sea" (CP, 87). The metaphoric/temporal passage is guarded by the "fragrant mother" of "Fictive Music," who belongs to the same "sisterhood of the living dead" (CP, 87), and the poet's muse—the mother of memory and imagination, the "mother of heaven, regina of the clouds" (CP, 13)—is also his earthly source, the "bearded queen" who would "feed" on him (CP, 507 ). All are imaginings of the same "mother" who opens and closes our earthly discourse, who binds the "handbook of heartbreak" (CP, 507 ). Thus Stevens understands metaphoric language as the threshold of fiction and truth, where the philosopher's "human should or would" and the poet's "fatal is" meet. In Stevens's impure voice, Emerson's "fatal is" becomes a copula that marks metaphoric unions. 35 from American Poetry: The Rhetoric of Its Forms. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987. Copyright ? 1987. James Longenbach Stevens always insisted that "Ramon Fernandez" was "not intended to be anyone at all," and, in a sense, like the "Mr. Burnshaw" of "Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue," he is a caricature [Stanley Burnshaw, as addressed in Stevens’ poem, was active as a Marxist critic in the 1930s]. Yet most of Stevens’s readers will know that Fernandez was a critic familiar to Stevens from the pages of the Nouvelle revue française, the Partisan Review, and the Criterion (where he was translated by T. S. Eliot). Fernandez’s criticism became increasingly politically engaged in the 1930s, especially after the violent riots and the general strike he witnessed in Paris in the wake of the Stavisky Affair. (The mastermind of illicit financial deals in which the French government was implicated, Stavisky was found dead – apparently by his own hand, though his suicide seemed to most French citizens to have been far too convenient.) After the riots, Fernandez published an open letter to Gide in the Nouvelle revue française, asserting that while he had not opposed the fascist cause before the riots, he was now converted to the struggle of the proletariat. The letter provoked a number of letters in response, some of them challenging Fernandez, others simply canceling subscriptions to the Nouvelle revue française. That this controversy lay behind Stevens’s use of Fernandez’s name in "The Idea of Order" would have seemed apparent to anyone who read Stevens’s poem in Alcestis along with the current issue of the Partisan Review, which contained a translation of Fernandez’s "I Came Near Being a Fascist." There Fernandez confessed that he had "a professional fondness for theorizing, which tends to make one highly susceptible to original ‘solutions.’" It was just that susceptibility that bothered Stevens and made him challenge Fernandez to answer a question to which he knew there was no certain answer. Stevens’s interest in the ambiguity of ideas did not mean that he took ideas lightly; on the contrary, he lamente what he thought of as "the Lightness with which ideas are asserted. Held, abandoned" in "the world today." Nor did Stevens mean to equate ambiguity with the intentional obscuring of an ambiguous world; he condemned the poet "who wrote with the idea of being deliberately obscure" as "an impostor." With his public announcements of political commitments and conversions, Fernandez was the opposite of Stevens, who recoiled at the idea of associating himself with any group or program that offered "solutions." Fernandez, suggests Stevens in "The Idea of Order," might have been certain about the source and effect of the singer’s song, but the only thing Stevens was sure of was that in his certainty, Fernandez would have been wrong. … Stevens believed that we cannot live without ideas of order, but like [R. P.] Blackmur he understood that he could not talk about order without raising the specter of disorder, and that any idea of order that did not leave space for its own dissolution could not be tolerated. In this sense, responding to Fernandez’s dogmatism, Stevens might have titled his poem "The Idea of Disorder at Key West." As he would put it in "Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue," "even disorder may, / So seen, have an order of its own." In the terms of Kenneth Burke that both Blackmur and Stevens admired, 36 these poems of order do not offer "the seasoned stocks and bonds of set belief," but "a questioning art, still cluttered with the merest conveniences of thinking, a highly fluctuant thing often turning against itself and its own best discoveries."" From James Longenbach, Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things (New York: Oxford U P, 1991), 161-162. J. Ronald Latimer Excerpt from the editorial defining the policy of Alcestis, where "The Idea of Order at Key West" appeared as the lead-off poem in the first issue: "Is it the poet’s function to attack social evils (as Messrs. Spender and Auden do) and make him merely the instrument of an economic theory or shall he (like Mr Stevens and Miss Sitwell) rather try to capture and intensify the beauty of things as the aesthetic? … It will therefore be the policy of Alcestis to publish only verse concerned with presenting artistic (as opposed to social) ends. The poet’s politics do not concern the editor, but his aesthetic themes and the manner in which he expresses them are of real importance. From J. Ronald Latimer, editorial for Alcestis. Gyorgyi Voros Stevens's sense of the American experience of the Nature / culture relation was that modern awareness of Nature--whether Nature be manifest as wilderness, as the human body, or as the human unconscious--had diminished dangerously. Stevens complained, "The material world, for all the assurances of the eye, has become immaterial. It has become an image in the mind." Human preconception had so blunted the human experience of and relation to nonhuman Nature, upon which the human rested, that indeed nothing but empty anthropocentric image remained. Stevens knew that a cancerous humanism diminishes human experience. "The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real," he asserted. This interdependence of imagination and reality is, of course, the subject of "The Idea of Order at Key West." The poem's speaker, walking on the shore, listening to the singer, posing questions and propositions about the nature of art to his companion, posits a series of antinomies which can be reframed as usefully within the categories of Nature and culture and human and nonhuman as they can within reality and imagination. The speaker pits mind against Nature’s "body wholly body," singer's song against the "meaningless plungings of water and the wind," the glassy lights of the town against the darkness of the sea, and language against the "words of the sea." While he asserts the mutual influences between sea and song, he emphasizes an essential discontinuity 37 between them and averts any suggestion of an easy synthesis: "The song and water were not medleyed sound / Even if what she sang was what she heard," he cautions and stresses that "it was she and not the sea we heard." The poem's central question asks, "Whose spirit is this?" That is, what interface exists between human and Nature in song, the poem's metonym for art? The speaker has already shown that the singer's song fails as direct translation of the sea's "constant cry," nor can song effect a seamless identification between singer and natural elements. Is it then a production of individual vision against the spectacular stage set of Nature? After all, "she was the maker of the song she sang. /... [the] sea / Was merely a place by which she walked to sing." The poem's final third is customarily read as an avowal of the romantic doctrine of the mind's ultimate superiority over Nature: after all, "It was her voice that made / The sky acutest at its vanishing" and the aftermath of her song that answers to the human "rage for order." In the resounding silence that follows the song, the lights of the fishing boats Mastered the night and portioned out the sea, Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles, Arranging, deepening, enchanting night. Indeed, Helen Vendler's reading of this poem places it within the Wordsworthian mind / Nature dichotomy and reads it as asserting the romantics' sense of "the power of poetry over nature." Similarly, Harold Bloom writes that the poem "remains equivocal and perhaps impossible to interpret" because it simultaneously "affirms a transcendental poetic spirit yet cannot locate it, and the poem also remains uneasily wary about the veritable ocean, which will rise up against Stevens yet again." Placing this poem too squarely within the romantic framework of mind over Nature, however, discounts the poem's true dynamic, which does not rest solely on the dichotomy between singer and song. The two listeners themselves engage in creation (song making) by attending to sea and singer. The stimuli around the speaker--singer, song, companion, "bronze shadows heaped / On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres / Of sky and sea," night descending, lights emerging--engender in him a flow of propositions, questions, and highly charged perceptual experiences. Rather than depicting the power of poetry over Nature, the poem depicts the power of the sum of perceptual experiences created by human and nonhuman components in the speaker, whose main role in the poem may be summarized as that of creative listener. . . .The night deepens after the song has ended; the resounding silence, as it were, heightens the effects of song and what might be regarded as the visual analogues to song, the lights, boats, town, and other human productions that order and "portion out" the natural scene. This difference--the juxtaposition and interface between before and after--is more significant than any element of the experience. It is finally the speaker, not the singer or the song, who effects the enchantment of the night. From Notations of the Wild: Ecology in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens. University of Iowa Press. 38 Janet McCann If poetry is to usurp the function of religion, then there must be a theodicy for it. Such can be found in "The Idea of Order at Key West," perhaps the most anthologized poem of this group. The participants in this poem play out the drama of the creative engagement of mind and world. "She," the speaker, the sea, and "Ramon Fernandez" demonstrate how the imagination enhances reality without falsifying it. The poem begins with the unbridgeable gulf between mind and world and attempts to define the dynamics of their interaction. . . . There is a "genius" or presiding spirit to nature, but its cry is "not ours"; it is nature's own impenetrable utterance. (Compare this evocation of nature's voice with that of one of Stevens's last poems, "This Region November," in which the mind at the end of its existence in time listens in near despair to this other language.) The woman identified only as "she" sings "beyond the genius of the sea" and in so doing changes nothing but what is in the mind; her song is like reality, but it is not the same as reality. The imagination is not the voice of reality, "the dark voice of the sea." Neither is it our own understandings of reality, "her voice and ours." Rather, it is the intensification of reality that is given from the imagination's engagement with it. The tragic sense of life's evanescence is heightened: "It was her voice that made / The sky acutest at its vanishing" (CP, 129). The speaker then addresses Ramon Fernandez, whose name Stevens claimed to have chosen more or less at random but who is actually a French critic with whose work Stevens was familiar (LWS, 798, 823). Fernandez's criticism, which Stevens read in Nouvelle revue française as well as in English translation, does involve theories of perception as well as commentary on the relationship between poetry and social reality (Longenbach, 161). Perhaps, however, Fernandez, in a broad sense, is "the critic" or the theorist of poetry. He is asked for an explanation of how it could come about that those who heard the song found nature reordered or rearranged: [McGann quotes lines 46-51] It is the perceiver and not the critic, however, who provides the answer. The critic is instructed by the perceiver, who attributes the reordering of nature to desire so intense that it is designated a "blessed rage": [lines 52-56] The revision is all in the perception: the "lights" cause it. The poem uses images of geometry to show the radical change in the perceived world as a result of the woman's song. It is this "blessed rage for order," the fierce vision of the "maker," that is responsible for a life lived in full awareness. The "rage for order" causes the creation of that intense poetry ("keener sounds") of our scarcely understood origins and points of departure. These portals are vague, barely discernible ("dimly-starred"), but marked out. The blessed rage drives toward their articulation, their definition ("ghostlier demarcations"). "Ghostlier" suggests both shadowy and spiritual, as in the German geistlich. This poem includes one of Stevens's earlier suggestions that the poetic impulse is a hallowed one, sanctioned. The results of this "blessed rage" are a redefinition, or perhaps a more precise understanding, of what it is to be human. "The Idea of Order at Key West" is an 39 early articulation of the ideas that invention is discovery and insights are genuine revelations. The demarcations are there; they are the to-be-discovered to which the "blessed rage" leads. "The Idea of Order at Key West" reaches a pitch of exaltation not found in many other Stevens poems of the era. From Wallace Stevens Revisited: "The Celestial Possible." Copyright 1995 by Twayne Publishers. Pat Righelato Indeed, in the ability to express potentía, an unforced intimacy with the sublime in consciousness and nature, Stevens was to prove more ‘capable’ than Emerson. He worked through the problem of the discrepancy of scale between consciousness and nature in ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’.It is a key poem in that its engagement with the sublime is schematic, yet lyrical. In the first verse the girl singer (symbol of the lyric poet), who walks beside the sea, sings beyond the sea because the sea is incapable of expressive utterance; the sea is empty rhetoric — (what Crispin called ‘the brunt’): the sea is at once presence and absence. In the second verse the problematic relationship between humanity and nature is stated: ‘The song and water were not medleyed sound’. The elements might seem to be ‘gasping’ for utterance but utterance is human. The decisiveness of the statement ‘But it was she’ affirms human significance but also bleakly acknowledges the autonomy of the created world of art — beside and beyond but not with the sea. In verse four, the empty rhetoric of nature is only potentially sublime and meaningful: ‘the heaving speech of air’, ‘the meaningless plunges of water’ need the human voice to give them significance. There is moreover a discrepancy of scale in this theatre— the small figure of the girl and the huge ocean — but it is the girl who brings it all to bear: It was her voice that made The sky acutest at its vanishing This line again suggests intensity given by poetic expression but also nature’s escape — ‘vanishing’ — a poignant expression of the separation of humanity and nature. In verse five, the poet addresses a fellow human being, asking why it is that artistic expression (the song of the girl) has the magical effect of intensifying consciousness, seeming to order nature. In moonlight (the imagination’s symbol) the human lights seem to localise the cosmos: they ‘mastered the night and portioned out the sea’. It is an idea of order; it is the imagination’s power to communicate an idea of order. The last verse is a celebratory chant, a celebration of the powers of language and of creative desire. In the last line the ‘ghostlier demarcations’ in moonlight, the imagination’s light, are ‘ghostlier’ 40 because creations of the spirit creating its territory, its ‘demarcations’; the ‘keener sounds’ are the utterance of poetry, ‘keener’, more intense, sharper than the impotent ‘heaving’ rhetoric of nature. The final image is at once removed, shadowy and closer to us. From Righelato, Pat, "Wallace Stevens." In American Poetry: The Modernist Ideal. Ed. Clive Bloom and Brian Docherty. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Ó 1995 The Editorial Board Lumiere (Cooperative Press) Ltd. Joseph Carroll "Key West" opens with a simple assertion of the division between the mind and external reality; however, this assertion almost immediately becomes problematic: She sang beyond the genius of the sea. The water never formed to mind or voice, Like a body wholly body, fluttering Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry, That was not ours although we understood, Inhuman, of the veritable ocean. Apart from the singer and the listeners (later identified as the speaker and Ramon Fernandez), there are two agents in this stanza: the sea that is "wholly body" and "the veritable ocean." The phrase "of the veritable ocean" seems most nearly identifiable as the genitival object of "constant cry." It may also be the object of "mimic motion." The mindless water makes no sound, but it mimics the veritable ocean, presumably a spiritual force, and this mimicry either paradoxically constitutes a cry or causes a cry from the veritable ocean. Finally, "of the veritable ocean" may be a descriptive genitive modifying the "we" of "we understood." All these syntactic possibilities seem to merge in such a way that the cry, associated with mind, takes on a separate, transcendental identity while at the same time it vaguely influences or animates the sea, the singer, and the listeners. In other words, there is a spiritual presence distinct from yet somehow diffused through all the concrete elements in the scene that is being described. The cry, originating in the veritable ocean, is what in stanza two the woman hears and translates into her own song: "What she sang was what she heard." [. . .] If Stevens' problem were only to distinguish sea and singer--not to relate both of them to the veritable ocean--the poem could end with the second stanza. The "grinding water" inspires the woman's song, but she is herself the primary origin of that song: "it was she and not the sea we heard." The first three lines of stanza three draw out this separation still more sharply, so that we are brought back to where we began in line one. The singer makes her own song and the sea is merely "a place by which she walked to sing." At this point, Stevens states the main issue of the 41 poem and shows that nothing has yet been solved. "Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew / It was the spirit that we sought." We know from the previous stanzas that it is not the sea speaking through the woman, not the dumb force of the elements forming to mind and voice. We also know that though the woman is the "the maker of the song she sang," she's not the sole force responsible for her song. Stevens does not give a specific answer to his question. All he can tell us is that "it was more than that," more than the voice of the sea and "more even than her voice and ours, among / The meaningless plungings of water and the wind." The song imposes meaning, but the source of meaning is something else. The rest of stanza four (after the paragraph break) gives itself over to a celebration of the Orphic autonomy of the singer. Her song masters the brute elements and assimilates them by transforming them into aesthetic meaning. The complex of forces narrows to a single point of creative freedom--the singer's. The singer seems complete unto herself. There is no world for her beyond that of her own making, and the question "Whose spirit is this?" appears to have been set aside. In the fifth stanza, however, the question reemerges, for the world does not become spiritually empty when the singer leaves. . . . Stevens had momentarily quelled his wonder by attributing sole mastery to "the single artificer." This mastery continues after the singing stops, again implying the presence of a spiritual force greater than the water and wind or the singer. It is this force that inspires her song and that deploys itself also in the perceptions of those who are walking among the lights of the fishing boats. That the force is an objective presence, something "not ours," is made evident in the externalization of these perceptions. It is the glassy lights and not the two men who master the night and the sea. Stevens only dimly apprehends the nature of the enchantment he has experienced. No conclusion is reached, and the last stanza, an extended apostrophe with no main verb, abjures the form of proposition altogether. . . . Because the rage to order concerns "ourselves" and "our origins," it refers to the speaker as much as to the singer. The order toward which the speaker strives is not, ironically, such as lends itself to any unequivocal precision of statement. The predicates of the phrase "words of" are grouped in no distinct order. The sea and the fragrant portals could be taken as separate entities; alternatively, portals could be taken as an appositive of sea. Neither the sea nor the portals stand in any clearly defined relationship to "our origins." The preposition "of" in "words of" may mean either about or from. It probably means both, and if so this dual meaning catches up the ambiguity of spiritual location that permeates the poem. The words to be ordered are about the sea, the portals, and our origins, and also from them. The fragrant portals are entranceways that have no spatial location. They are dimly starred as if they were remote passages in the night sky, but they are intended to evoke no concrete setting. They are simply the portals of mystic vision, perhaps vision into "our origins." These origins, in turn, if they are the origins of the spirit, are themselves the portals of vision. "Key West" is a tour de force of paradoxical intimation and evocative equivocation. There is no definite proposition in the poem that asserts the existence of a transcendental spirit. Nonetheless, the spirit that is present--first in song and in the sea and then in the glassy lights--sheds its 42 influence all around the men who are seeking it. Their associations and questions are themselves the "ghostlier demarcations" of the poem. The principle of order suspends itself between their ambiguous demarcations and the "keener sounds" that lend these demarcations an appearance of vivid precision. From Wallace Stevens' Supreme Fiction: A New Romanticism. Copyright ? 1987 by Louisiana State UP. Jacqueline Vaught Brogan Contrary to most criticism on this poem, it is not the supposedly eloquent and elegantly figured muse nor the assertion that "when she sang, the sea / Whatever self it had, became the self / That was her song, for she was the maker" (Stevens 1954, p. 129) that is ultimately the most striking about this poem, but rather the utterly self-conscious way in which "she" is exposed or appropriated within the fiction of the poem as a figure for Stevens himself and his "rage to order." This particular circumscription may well be the most revealing mark of the nature of the "idea of order" Stevens has in mind: at the specific moment that he breaks into the text, abruptly addressing Ramon Fernandez with the question about the "Mastering" of the night and the "portioning of the sea" (thus implicitly questioning the very idea of order that he is positing), Stevens places himself in a textual and hierarchical order above nature, above friend, and above the muse as artificer, inscribing himself as the author/authority of the world in which he sings. Here logo- and phallocentric assumptions of order coincide, forming a textual crux that glosses over the apparent exposure of the fictionality of the poetic word. It is not without significance that the muse is always referred to in the past tense: she literally is not present in the text. Thus, although the conclusion of the poem may imply that words are much like Derrida's "trace" (only "ghostly demarcations," even de-marcations), the tone of this poem is one of unwavering faith in poetic/phallic dominance. There is none of that uncertainty, reticence, or prolonged and painful questioning so characteristic of Bishop's verse. from "Elizabeth Bishop: Pervesity as Voice," in Elizabeth Bishop: The Geography of Gender. Ed. Marilyn May Lombardi. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia. On "Peter Quince at the Clavier" Robert Buttel "In "Peter Quince," with its precise emphasis of meaning and emotion supported by variations in rhythm and sound, Stevens created a remarkable example of his musical Imagism. For the musical form of this poem, he had several possible models. Grace Hazard Conkling, for example, who was a trained musician as well as a friend of Amy Lowell, had her "Symphony of a Mexican Garden" published with Amy Lowell’s support, in the first number of Poetry (1912). The poem is divided 43 into four sections ("The Garden," "The Pool," "The Birds," and "To the Moon") according to technical musical terms – "Poco Sostenuto in A Major," "Presto in F Major," and so on – and the sections have their appropriate rhythms and tonalities. The general quality of the poem is not Imagistic; it is, rather, a mixture of a lush Impressionism and tired echoes of Romantic and Victorian poetry. But nonetheless it is part of the general movement to bring music and poetry closer together, and it contains elements which could have served as hints for Stevens, such as the following: An unimagined music exhales . . . Symphonic beauty that some god forgot, If form could waken into lyric sound . . . Where the hibiscus flares would cymbals clash, And the black cypress like a deep bassoon Would hum a clouded amber melody. John Gould Fletcher’s similar but vaguely defined musical arrangements were not measurably tightened by his more Imagistic practice. Fletcher, too, was fond of cymbals in "Irradiations, I": A clash of cymbals – then, the swift swaying footsteps Of the wind that undulated along the languid terraces. Indeed, his Preludes and Symphonies (1914) contained many of the elements which Stevens was experimenting with: the arabesque, pavilions, terraces, pagodas, willows, quiverings and undulations, winds that "came clangering and clattering," clouds, the sea, and, of course, color. But Stevens, the musical imagist, created in "Peter Quince" his own more succinct "Symphony" or "quartet." In contrast to the tenderly reflective music of the beginning of the first section there is at the end the sudden intrusion of the elders" bass music. … The throbbing and pulsing are made aurally acute as well as comic by the repetition of the b and p sounds. The comic grotesqueness of their excitement is augmented by the double meaning of "basses" and by the combination of "witching" and "pizzicatti." Similarly, Susanna’s poignant and spiritual music in section II of the poem – in which the few rhymes subtly interlace thought and emotion – is interrupted by the crash of the cymbal and the roaring horns. In section III, the nervous rhythms and the couplets create a mincing, simpering music appropriate for the Byzantine servant girls. And yet there are modulations between the "noise" of their arrival and departure and the delicacy of their hushed refrain: "And as they whispered, the refrain / Was like a willow swept by rain." … The music of Section IV is stately and sweeping, and close to the grand manner of "Sunday Morning." This section also evokes a sense of the continuity underlying change, partially by the use of the series of four rhymes ending in ing and of the word "interminably," which creates a drawn-out effect … So evenings die, in their green going, A wave, interminably flowing, 44 So gardens die, their meek breath scenting The cowl of winter, done repenting. What might have been mere program music, mere effect, as it so often is in Fletcher’s symphonies, is turned in "Peter Quince" into a musical architecture which organically serves the whole thematic and emotional conception." From Robert Buttel, Wallace Stevens and the Making of "Harmonium" (Princeton: Princeton U P, 1967), 137-140. Eleanor Cook Peter Quince at the Clavier is Stevens' version of the story of Susanah, the story of how a private place is violated. Here, as in Le Monocle, there is tension, tension that is obvious in the poem's plot, its rhetoric, and its uncertainty about its own possible comedy. We have taken a long time to hear the odd disjunctions between the opening and closing lyric voices, and between the figures of Peter Quince and the red-eyed elders. Why is it that we have accepted with so little comment the analogy that follows this: "what I feel, / Here, in this room, desiring you, / Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk, / Is music." So far, so good, even if this sounds like no Peter Quince (except as the fruit of desire). It is the next parallel that causes trouble, or ought to, given the tone of the opening lines: "Is music. It is like the strain / Waked in the elders by Susanna. . . ." The simile is so astonishing that it questions itself, and becomes a query or plea: It is like. . . . It is what? Let it not remain like, or why must it be like? Stevens' word "strain" is a fine choice: a musical strain, first of all ("that strain again; it had a dying fall"); the strain of the elders' eyes, and of their desire; most of all, the strain of the simile itself. Why should thinking in desire about a woman awaken thoughts of this story? It is as if a woman, thinking in desire about a man, is reminded of the story of Hosea and his wife, or of Potiphar's wife. And to say this to the addressee, unless the poem is about to turn comic--is this Peter Quince's bumbling? In the poem's last section, Stevens contains his story of desire, as Peter Quince's drama is contained. Later, he did not contain the better-known biblical story of a woman spied on in her bath, the story of Bathsheba. In a 1924 poem, a man accuses himself, using Nathan's words to David: "You are the man." What husband, what Uriah, what shepherd, has this accused man killed? Peter Quince simply turns back to song and praise on the viol without resolving the strains of desire. From Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens. Copyright ?1988 by Princton University Press. Mary B. Arensberg 45 The myth of the dream is the Apocryphal story of Susanna and the Elders, the wife accused by two church elders of unchastity, probably because she had repelled their advance. Daniel exposed their treachery, and as a result, she was vindicated, and they were put to death. The retelling of the myth occupies the central portion of the text, over which is superimposed a musical structure that empties into the famous coda. As in a dream, time and space are eclipsed, and as the poem moves back and forth in time, the two events of the poem (Quince at the clavier and Susanna and the elders in the garden) seem to occur simultaneously. When reading "Peter Quince," we enter into the landscape of the dream where the artificial limits of linearity, history, and time are erased. In its deep structures, the myth itself is grounded in sexuality, betrayal, and death, while the manifest imagery consists of varied symbols: the clavier, the garden, the woman, and the portal. Throughout the dream-text too, there is a chain of metonymic signifiers that lead from touch, to desire, to language; and they form a kind of erotic bracelet between desire and death, arousal and climax. . . . In these stanzas, Susanna's autoerotic explorations are thinly disguised as ablutions, but they are also tropes for poetic "imaginings." As a figure for the muse, Susanna submerged in the green water is herself a locus amoenus, self-possessed and participating in the pleasure of her own creation. Her solipsism, here, has been noted by harold Bloom, and as Meyer and Baris suggest in a more recent reading of the poem, Susanna in this archetypal setting provides Stevens with "the garden [and] its dual theme of caritas and cupiditas, celebration and danger, realization and ravishment. Linking all the variations of the garden motif is the double strain of sensual and spiritual." Yet the muse-virgin can never be ravished by the poet, because she is the poet, the mirrored "self-object" of his own femininity. The elders inhabit the space of Otherness in the dream: they are both the poet who would gaze on the primal scene of poetic invention and the principle of thanatos or the fall of language from myth into time and history. Here the brief glimpse of female sexuality is a link to the center of generative myth, which is, metaphorically, the precursor of language and poetic voice. The "presence" of the Elders in the dream-text also registers the voyeurism of the repressed poet, whose superego permits him to gaze on the onanistic activity of the muse but prevents him from entering her garden. Her discovery of the Elders' gaze, troped into the catachresis of "roaring horns" and "clashing symbols" is equivalent to the death of poetic vision that is killed by the intrusion of the reality principle. Like the child in a crib, exiled from the scene of his own origins yet seeing the source of his being enacted, the poet can only gaze at but never participate in the primal scene of creation. from Wallace Stevens and the Feminine. Ed. Melita Schaum. University of Alabama Press, 1993. Janet McCann "Peter Quince at the Clavier" is another poem of male and female--this time, Susanna and Peter Quince are elements of the poet--that seems to recommend a form of paganism, in this case implicitly. Traditionally, the poem is seen as a reinterpretation of the notion of art's permanence, 46 an inversion of clich? Peter Quince, as the director of the naive troupe of tradesmen-players in Midsummer Night's Dream, is a comic figure, another of Stevens's comedians; the title gives us the ironic image of Peter Quince at the delicate instrument, his rough hands attempting perhaps a sonata. (Several critics have suggested that the poem imitates the sonata form.) The somewhat awkward would-be lover at his instrument wishes to find some adequate chords to communicate his desire, which he compares to the lust of the elders in the story of Susanna, whose tale is told in those later additions to the book of Daniel that are collected in the biblical Apocrypha. Peter Quince suggests that desire is the origin of art; beauty plays on the spirit of the perceiver just as the perceiver plays on the keys of his instrument. There is a correspondence between the dynamic of arousal and that of artistry. Just as my fingers on these keys Make music, so the selfsame sounds On my spirit make a music, too. (CP, 89) The poem develops the theme that "music is feeling" by combining the poetic devices of alliteration, assonance, and consonance with puns on musical terms to suggest the sounds of the musical instruments mentioned, as in this passage describing the feelings of the lascivious elders: The basses of their beings throb In witching chords, and their thin blood Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna. (CP, 90) "Basses" fuses "base," suggesting both "low and unworthy" and "foundation," with the musical term "bass." Musical tone then becomes moral tone. The line "Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna" mimics the plucking of strings but also may suggest the sexual itch. This turning of music into words, and words into music, continues throughout the poem, becoming metaphor as well as genuine verbal music. In the Apocrypha, Susanna is a beautiful and chaste young wife desired by the elders of the church, who tell her that if she will not grant them her favors, they will claim to have witnessed her committing adultery. She refuses, and they accuse her; she is sentenced to death, but God hears her prayers and arranges for Daniel to acquit her by cleverly trapping the elders into giving conflicting narratives. As he usually does, Stevens uses only those elements of the story that fit into his plan. The poet-pianist-player's desire transcends that of the elders. He cannot possess his beloved physically, but he can hold her in his mind in a platonic and permanent sense. Susanna is moved from the world of facts to the world of forms, where her beauty continues to exist. B.J. Leggett, however, has pointed out that the problems of this poem have not been resolved by commentators. They have not dealt with the fact that Stevens's Susanna is not the innocent wife of the Apocrypha but a sensual, even lusty virgin; nor have they addressed the abrupt gaps in tone and logic within and between parts of the poem. Using Nietzsche's distinction between Appollonian and Dionysian as intertext, Leggett pulls the poem together as a medication on the question: "How does the lyric speaker's own subjective feeling, his desire, transcend the merely personal, the individual?" (Leggett, 67). The poem's answer is that through the power of music he 47 "surrenders his subjectivity to the Dionysian process" (70), a surrender that happens to Peter Quince and in a sense to Susanna herself. Leggett's interpretation brings the various elements of the poem into balance: the elders, the evocative/provocative Susanna, and Peter Quince all have self-consistent roles in this parable of the creation of lyric poetry through the dissolution of the self in music--through, in fact, a Dionysian ecstasy. Thus, another form of paganism appears, deeper and more sophisticated than the "natural religion" Stevens identifies as belonging to "Sunday Morning." "Peter Quince" shows an effort to find transcendence by elevating the artist to the stature of a god, allowing him to break out of the limitations of self in his creative frenzy. Ultimately, the idea of the loss of self through the transformative process will not "suffice" either but will prove one of a series of efforts to find transcendence. From Wallace Stevens Revisited: "The Celestial Possible." Copyright ? 1995 by Twayne Publishers. Mark Halliday His most convincing expression of sexual desire, though, is in "Peter Quince at the Clavier," where the red-eyed elders are bewitched into a dissonant concerto of yearning by the sight of Susanna bathing. Does this poem endow Susanna with human identity? Is she more than just an attractive shape beside a garden pool? She at least has a name, which is more than can be said for the other beauties referred to so far (except Ursula). It is true that in section II of "Peter Quince" Susanna is given a point of view. Her thoughts, though, are awfully nebulous: She searched The touch of springs, And found Concealed imaginings. She sighed, For so much melody. So nebulous that we are certainly not encouraged to think of her as a particular woman with a particular personality. Meanwhile, it is easy to overlook the fact that the poet's reverie about Susanna is apparently stimulated by the beauty of another woman, a present woman: what I feel, Here in this room, desiring you, Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk, Is music. It is like the strain Waked in the elders by Susanna. As I will explain later, I don't think the mere attribution of a blue garment to this present figure (blue being associated with the imagination in Stevens' oeuvre) suffices as proof that the "you" is 48 an aspect of the speaker's mind rather than a woman, nor can I believe that Stevens intended us to hear the passage only in that way. When the poet informs the woman in the blue dress that what he feels for her is music, she might be forgiven if she replied, "Oh, is that so? Does this mean we won't be going to bed together?" Also she might be wise to wonder whether this lover who claims to be thinking not exactly of her but of her blue-shadowed silk will be able and willing to give her the kind of personal attention she deserves. Such thoughts on her part would, one feels, be unlikely to please Mr. Stevens (or Mr. Quince), if she were to voice them. Here I think it is apposite to quote a reminiscence by Naaman Corn, who was the chauffeur for the Stevenses on family outings: He didn't carry on any conversation with Mrs. Stevens much about something. She wouldn't talk on account of he would snap at her quickly. So she got where she just went in a shell, and she wouldn't say anything. One time I thought she couldn't talk because she never did say nothing, but I found out why. If every time you say something to a person, you're going to snap at them, they quit talking. They go underground. You could hear that, and you figured that's the reason why she clams up. With no one to help her in her victimization except "simpering Byzantines," Susanna has no chance to make her case against the guilty elders; trapped in a poem controlled by Peter Quince, she can only clam up and go underground. By being so attractive, Susanna causes a lot of trouble, for the elders and for her Byzantines as well as for herself (even though "The fitful tracing of a portal" is a lullingly cleansed way of alluding to rape fantasies). The very simplicity and clarity of her appeal make her alarming, an unavoidable disturbance of the peace. In situations when our poet, or his male speaker, cannot for some reason commit himself to a decisive, simple sexual response to such a woman's appeal, he is inclined to propose revisions of her behavior, or reconceptions of her nature, so that her appeal will not be so bluntly sexual in its impact. . . . Stevens himself would perhaps disdain my literal-minded argument on behalf of the actual human women glimpsed in his poetry. He would feel amused pity for readers who find the wrong kind of solace in his "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour." Readers who worry about the strength and value of their love relationships with other people feel a powerful attraction in the matching of the word "together" with the word "enough" in the poem's ending: "We make a dwelling in the evening air, / In which being there together is enough" (CP 524). Alas, it is not a man and a woman who live together in this poem; it is not two persons; the title of "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour" makes this clear. Note, however, that if the poem is looked at without its title, a reader can justifiably feel invited to think of two persons who have joined in love. And in many Stevens poems, including those I have discussed thus far and most of those I will soon speak of, the female lover is not so decisively dehumanized, nor the idea of an actual human lover so firmly repudiated, as the title of this particular poem requires. I think we are wrong to so readily accept the notion that Stevens can evoke a beautiful "woman" in poem after poem and mean "only" an idea, a conception, an attitude, a principle, but not an actual 49 woman. My argument is that you cannot describe something as "a woman" without meaning something about actual women. Metaphors are not innocent in either direction. When you say that A is like B, you reveal something about your sense of A and your sense of B as actualities in your experience. Stevens' critics, fascinated by the metaphysical meaning of his female presences, have indulged him too gently in accepting them as only metaphysical. Critics sometimes go to absurd lengths to let Stevens escape from moral implications in this way. Here, for example, is Eugene Paul Nassar on "Peter Quince at the Clavier": "Peter Quince" is really a poem about the imaginative faculty, its seasons and its value. It is not a poem about love between the sexes, nor in any way about relations between people. It is, rather, about the poet in solitude carrying on his sometime love affair with his "interior paramour," she who brings forth each "spring" children of desire that of necessity must be raped in "autumn." "Peter Quince" is an "amoral" poem in that it does not deal with moral problems at all, but with the inevitable cycle of creation and destruction that is the life of the poetic mind. The skeptical poet has his own obligations to his poems, the "Susannas" he creates, which are antithetical to the obligations that obtain in the love of one person for another. To some extent, I'm afraid, Stevens would endorse Nassar's rather repellent interpretation. Yet consider: Stevens knew perfectly well, when he was writing his stanzas about Susanna and the elders, that he was causing us to think about (among other things, yes, but first and most vividly) an actual vulnerable woman and actual lustful old men and actual sexual molestation. Stevens was choosing to affect our ways of thinking about such people and such events. If he tells us the story of an attempted rape in an imaginative context that guides us toward accepting the event as inevitable and even conducive to poetic creation, as Nassar suggests, then Stevens is doing something that has moral implications for which he bears some moral responsibility. Similarly, whenever he speaks to us metaphorically in terms of romantic love, sexuality, or femininity, one of the things he is doing is describing, and influencing (or seeking to influence) our understanding of interpersonal love, actual sex, and real-life women. When he writes in "Adagia" (OP 165), "A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman," he proposes to explain something about the relation between poet and world by analogy with what he assumes to be the more obvious relation between a man and a woman. A sexually desirable woman? The analogy doesn't explicitly include this meaning but does deliberately call it to mind. Stevens' confidence in the analogy, and his tone of approval, are not shaken by the fact that the analogy locates all human subjectivity and agency in the male hero. As before, whether he encourages us to focus on this truth or not, Stevens is partly writing about people. It is on that basis that I have seen fit to discuss Stevens' habitual failure or refusal to present images of mutual love or two-way relationship between individual men and women; and on that basis I maintain that my point is not vaporized by the objection that Stevens does not (primarily) intend to refer to real women in many of his references to femininity. Besides, as Helen Vendler has persuasively argued, Stevens' veiling of his references to sex and love has hidden his study of sexual desire and romantic/sexual emotions more effectively than he himself ultimately must have intended. 50 The pattern I have shown is one of consistent failure by Stevens to describe the female other as a fully human individual, as a separate subjectivity, an independent actor and perceiver outside his own mind. This has held true across a spectrum of attitudes toward love, from aggressively candid sexuality at one extreme to ontological mystery at the other extreme. Stevens is not inclined to pay steady attention to real women in writing of romantic/sexual love. Real women cause problems; they impinge. They impinge upon the male poet's freedom by exciting an animal desire which is too simple and vulgar, unimaginative and therefore deathly, or by calling for delusory romantic revisions of desire, which are also deathly when they pull him too far from reality. From Stevens and the Impersonal. Copyright ?1991 by Princeton UP. W.B. Gerard In the poem "Peter Quince at the Clavier," by Wallace Stevens, the narrator's mention of "blue-shadowed silk" (line 7) triggers a scene characterized by vivid physical imagery. Stevens uses carefully selected and arranged colors to frame the physical and temporal context of two very different segments of the poem.(1) These sections present juxtaposed ideas of beauty: one resplendent and fleeting, the other without the polychromatic intensity of perception, but fixed and eternal. The image of "blue-shadowed silk" begins the scene of Susanna's bath, a segment of the poem that places particular significance on color. The narrator goes on to describe the "green evening" (10) when the "red-eyed elders" (12) watched Susanna "in the green water" (16) of her bath.(2) The simple, direct colors, the fabric of our everyday perception, connote a symbolic importance to the subjects they modify. "Blue-shadowed silk" implies a sensual fabric viewed in a dimly lit environment, heightening the erotic connotation of the color blue. The "green evening" and "green water" paint an environment that is natural, serene, and latently fertile, making the color an extension of Susanna herself.(3) The "red eyes" of the elders immediately convey an impression of an unnatural state, that of anxiety and agitation. Individually, the colors are symbolic of character attitude: the narrator's aesthetic/sexual desire, Susanna's quietly beckoning fertility, the elders' lustful envy. Even before any interaction has taken place, the colors set up a framework for plot development. With their emphasis on the physical, the appearance of colors conveys an idea of a realistic and specific moment in time that is separate from the poet/speaker's meditations. The colors help frame this capsule of time and stress the importance of the visual in its perception. Color reappears at the conclusion of the poem in more circumscribed form. "So evenings die, in their green going" (56) associates the measure of time with the course of life, recognizing the fleeting nature of life and beauty; green was closely associated with Susanna earlier in the poem. In contrast are the "white elders" (63), who, satisfied of anxious lust, are no longer "red-eyed," but are instead drained of color and warmth; they form an opposite to the green of life.(4) 51 Susanna's "music" (which the reader comes to understand as her beauty) is last described "in its immortality" (64) as playing "on the clear viol of her memory" (65). The ambiguity of language allows two meanings of "clear." Musically, the "clear viol" would produce a pure, uncompromised sound. The "clear viol of her memory" becomes a physically and psychically transparent instrument that does not alter or "color" memory of Susanna and her beauty, but disinterestedly continues it. The sections delineated by color represent two portrayals of beauty. The effusion of earthly color in the first scene emphasizes the reliance on the senses to construct an initial idea of beauty; but this beauty is "momentary in the mind" (52), a trick of the senses. The contrasting lack of color in the later section indicates a beauty removed from the senses to immortal memory. "The body dies; the body's beauty lives" (55) indicates the persistence of memory where the frail body has failed. The enduring memory of beauty is drained of th intensity of immediate perception, yet assumes the clarity of the eternal. The poem explicates these ideas while it performs the function of the "clear viol of memory," immortalizing the beauty of Susanna in verse. 56.3 (Summer 1998) from The Explicator On "Sunday Morning" J. Hillis Miller If the natural activity of the mind is to make unreal representations, these are still representations of the material world. "The clouds preceded us / There was a muddy centre before we breathed"; matter is prior to mind and in some sense determines it. So, in "Sunday Morning," the lady's experience of the dissolution of the gods leaves her living in a world of exquisite particulars, the physical realities of the new world: "Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail / Whistle about us their spontaneous cries; / Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness." This physical world, an endless round of birth, death, and the seasons, is more lasting than any interpretation of it. Religions, myths, philosophies, and cultures are all fictions and pass away, but "April's green endures." "Sunday Morning" is Stevens' most eloquent description of the moment when the gods dissolve. Bereft of the supernatural, man does not lie down paralyzed in despair. He sings the creative hymns of a new culture, the culture of those who are "wholly human" and know themselves. This humanism is based on man's knowledge that "the final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly." There is "nothing else"--the alternatives are to be nothing or to accept a fiction. To discover that there never has been any celestial world is a joyful liberation, and man says of himself: "This happy creature--It is he that invented the Gods. It is he that put into their mouths the only words they have ever spoken!" From Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers. Copyright ? 1966 by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 52 Merle E. Brown "This final movement of the poem, in contrast to the stasis of its beginning, is bridged by a passage at the very middle of the poem: nor cloudy palm Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured As April’s green endured; or will endure Like her remembrance of wakened birds, Or her desire for June and evening, tipped By the consummation of the swallow’s wings. Taken it itself, the passage is truly beautiful. In autumn, when the swallows are sweeping through the air, gathering for their flight away from "their warm fields," the woman experiences a desire "for June and evening," for the time when she could take for granted the presence of "awakened birds" the next morning. Thus the joy of "June and evening" which she desires and the joy of "April’s green" are torn by the poignancy of her sense that what she desires is absent and that the birds in autumn are about to be gone. The fixed spread of the cockatoo’s wings upon a rug has been transformed to a true consummation, the spread of the swallow’s wing as it reaches the peak of its upward movement. Implicit in this consummation is her recollection of birds that were just beginning to fly, wakened birds, testing "the reality / Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings"; and ominous in this consummation is her sense that it will be followed by the movement at the end of the poem, a movement "Downward to darkness, on extended wings." Every passage in the poem, for that matter, is pregnant with the sense that one can experience beauty, can love a thing or person, only if he at the same time experiences the painful sense that the loss of that thing or person is imminent, that its mortality is a quality immanent in its living presence. It is Death that makes the willow shiver in the sun For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet. These maidens have been caught up in the dreamy daze of the immediate present, very like the woman who was taking her "late / Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair." They sat upon the grass, their arms about their knees, gazing at the grass at their feet, relinquished after they had gathered it or simply because they are forgetting it in their dreaminess. The shiver of the willow, willow, willow, however, brings the chill death into their presence and even the sun turns cold with the imminence of death. Unlike the woman in her sunny chair, they are ripe for love, they will taste not late oranges but new plums and pears offered them by their lovers, and they will "stray impassioned in the littering leaves," loving and loveable because feeling their oneness with "the leaves of sure obliteration." Even the chant of the ring of supple and turbulent men, expressing their boisterous devotion to the sun, is quite different from any primitivism or barbarism based upon a mere acceptance of sensual 53 indulgence as an ultimate good. Their devotion to the sun, unlike the comforts of the sun cherished by the woman in her sunny chair, is dependent on their mutual sense of frailty, on their constant sense that they will perish, on their feeling that their strength is as fragile, as delicate, as transient, as the dew upon their feet. They chant in orgy, it is true; but a part of their chant is the echoing hills "That choir among themselves long afterward." And those choirs of dying echoes establish a oneness between the men with their chant and the pigeons in their descent "Downward to darkness on extended wings." From Merle E. Brown, Wallace Stevens: The Poem as Act (Detroit: Wayne S U P, 1970), 160-162. Mutlu Konuk Blasing Stevens's search for a rhetoric more than fiction and a nature less than an external fate begins with "Sunday Morning" and its realignment of the Emersonian and romantic dualities. The poem mourns at once the loss of Christian and romantic mythologies, which offer versions of the same fusion of temporal and eternal realities. "Sunday Morning" does not judge religion to be a fiction and Christ to be but a man in order to exhort us to a species of nature worship. For Stevens portrays the world of sense impressions as a fantastic play of surfaces. The painterly interior, the various trees and fruits, "April's green," and the cockatoo, swallows, and pigeons—birds represented, literary, or "observed"—all become equally phantasmal, passing like "things in some procession of the dead." In these terms, the sun-worshippers of stanza 7 reduce to mere "personae of summer" (CP, 377 ), their bookish status reinforced by Biblical imagery, for pantheism would be as foreign as the religion of Palestine when the sky itself is "isolated" and appears as alien as the "icy Elysee" (CP, 56) seems to a temporal speaker. The poem proceeds by contrasting the surfaces and the depths of things: the surfaces of nature—its false flicks and forms, its rhetoric—contrast with its depths, which turn out to be internal to the subject. A "wide water" silently flows below the welter of visible and audible phenomena, and, in contrast to the sensory experience of surfaces, this archetypal river of the unconscious carries the truth of "blood." The river of meditation courses to death—the "dominion of the blood and sepulchre"—and to erotic reveries of "supple and turbulent" men; Christian and romantic mythologies only code its natural course. Thus Stevens dislocates the Emersonian alignment of nature with fate and the mind with freedom. The imagistic contrast of light and dark in the first stanza corresponds to the thematic contrast of freedom and fate, life and death, rhetoric and truth, the claims of the life of the senses and the life of the mind. It is nature and its sensuous attractions that are free, and their extravagant, ornamental "rhetoric" cannot satisfy the mind. For the mind and its course of meditation give us access to the truth of Eros and Thanatos. In Stevens's realignment, the mind alone knows nature: an undomesticated nature that is more than "a widow's bird" (CP, 18) is accessible only in the meditation of the "virile" poet. When Stevens announces, "Death is the mother of beauty," he is talking not only about the changes in nature that constitute its rhetorical appeal to the senses—senses equipped to register and take pleasure in change—but about the truth of the mind. For the seasonal repetitions of nature are temporal changes and intimate death only to the human 54 consciousness, and these temporal changes open up the mental space of remembrance and anticipation, of memory and desire (stanza 4), of poetry and its measures. Death is the mother of the imagination—of the mind and memory, the "muttering" that engenders "myths" in the "burning bosom" of a destructive mother. The final stanza reaffirms this alignment: We live in an old chaos of the sun, Or old dependency of day and night, Or island solitude, unsponsored, free, Of that wide water, inescapable. [CP, 70] Our dependence on the "chaos" of natural processes, our "freedom" from sponsoring deities, and our being constituted "of that wide water" are grammatical appositives and substantive equivalents. The "wide water" is the "wide water" of stanza 1—the inseparable and inescapable concourse of Eros, death, and meditation that constitutes us and our freedom. In linking the mind with death, Stevens is able to displace the terms of the Emersonian debate: freedom and fate are no longer aligned with the subject and object. Stevens's existential project is to show that our freedom is our fate, our discourse is our nature, our imagination is our destruction. "Sunday Morning" also marks the beginning of Stevens's stylistic development beyond the reductive dichotomy of rhetoric and meters that arrested Emerson's growth as a poet. In Stevens, the discursive and the Orphic modes are not polar opposites but inflections of the same conventional, exoteric, poetic voice. The range and flexibility of Stevens's diction and blank verse enable him to incorporate the course of nature and the discourse of the mind in the same internal monologue. In the first stanza of "Sunday Morning," for example, he signals the shift from observation to meditation with a switch in diction from polysyllabic, Latinate words to one- or two-syllable, Anglo-Saxon words; with vocalic modulations from front or "light" vowels to back or "dark" vowels; with metrical variations like the increased use of trochees and spondees; and with an insistence on alliteration, assonance, and repetition: Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice. She dreams a little, and she feels the dark Encroachment of that old catastrophe, As a calm darkens among water-lights. The pungent oranges and bright, green wings Seem things in some procession of the dead, Winding across wide water, without sound. The day is like wide water, without sound, Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet Over the seas, to silent Palestine, Dominion of the blood and sepulchre. [CP, 66-67] 55 The fatal truth has been internalized as an inflection of a poetic language that traces the course of an explicitly eccentric and inherently rhetorical meditation. The language of "Sunday Morning" remains nostalgic, however, and Stevens has difficulty in developing a form that does not rely on the "magnificent measure" (CP, 13) of the English romantics yet can register the truth of rhetoric, the centrality of an explicitly eccentric poetic language. His development of a language both exoteric and central leads through an excessively rhetorical style that remains merely exoteric and thus is ironic about its decorative excesses. "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle," for example, engages this issue. Isabel G. MacCaffrey writes that the methodology of the poem, as well as its subject, addresses the "relationship between opaque, visceral depths and dazzling verbal surfaces," and she suggests that the poem rejects its own rhetoric as "inadequate, bombastic, bland, or self-deceiving," so that another, counter "meaning" can be apprehended "behind the words," which is the "wordless world" of Eros and Thanatos. Stevens's rejection of his own rhetoricity comes in the lines, Last night, we sat beside a pool of pink, Clippered with lilies scudding the bright chromes, Keen to the point of starlight, while a frog Boomed from his very belly odious chords. [CP, 17 ] which pass judgment, in Harold Bloom's words, on "all amorous diction." Nevertheless, however inadequate it may be to Eros, rhetoric remains the necessary substitution by which love becomes love, for even the chords of the frog's mating call are natural substitutions for the "foremost law": If sex were all, then every trembling hand Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words. But note the unconscionable treachery of fate, That makes us weep, laugh, grunt and groan, and shout Doleful heroics, pinching gestures forth The "foremost law" is itself apprehended in and as substitution. If we are fated, we are fated to substitute one thing for another, to remain at the edge, and to play with words—"le monocle de mon oncle"—stringing together metaphoric or phonetic substitutions. For the poem demonstrates that no one language is more natural or less rhetorical than another. from American Poetry: The Rhetoric of Its Forms. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987. Copyright ? 1987. John Timberman Newcomb Harmonium offered readers a very different version of "Sunday Morning" from the one they had seen in Poetry in 1915. In Poetry, the fifth and final stanza, now recognized as the seventh stanza, had expressed the exalted paganism of "a ring of men" chanting "Their boisterous devotion to the 56 sun." This ecstasy of human physical feeling, the only divinity of humankind, would then be recreated and sustained by echo throughout the environment. In Harmonium, however, this ringing affirmation of human and natural coexistence was no longer the poem's final emphasis. It was followed by an eighth stanza in which Stevens's persona massively qualified his own construction and brought his divine concept of death down to earth with a resounding thud. Just as the tomb of Jesus was only a cave "where he lay" in physical death, the earth was merely a place where humans live and then die, "an old chaos of the sun" in which the processes of life, embodied by deer and "casual flocks of pigeons," went on oblivious to the echoing chants of human meaning. The imposing position of "Sunday Morning" within Stevens's oeuvre made this subversive ending more than simply another assertion of the world's chaotic meaninglessness. The poem's subject matter, formal precision, and glorious blank-verse line all fostered the expectation of a strong affirmation of man's existence and artistry. The last stanza then functioned to do just the opposite, implying that such an affirmation was no more than an invention of the human mind which tended to vanish once the field of vision was broadened to include the inhuman realities of the earth. To confront the poem's last stanza thus is to understand better why the eight-stanza version of "Sunday Morning," submitted to Poetry in 1915 as it would appear in Harmonium, had disturbed Monroe into editorial butchery. It must have been incomprehensible to her that the poet would have meant to end on such an anticlimactic note. At that time, Stevens's extreme newness on the scene (and his personal unfamiliarity to her) no doubt enabled her to see his arrangement as the odd fruit of artistic inexperience. Following her own muse, which counseled ending with those triumphantly echoing human chants, she placed Stevens's seventh stanza last. [. . . .] The disturbing effects of ‘Sunday Morning" also produced Arthur Davison Ficke’s bizarre and often quoted remark: "‘Sunday morning’ tantalized me with the sense that perhaps it’s the most beautiful poem ever written, or perhaps just an incompetent obscurity." The total incommensurability of these two alternatives indicated Ficke’s sense of the extent to which the poem challenged readers’ conventional dualisms of form and meaning. Whatever else he meant by it, Ficke certainly implied, as Fletcher and Kreymborg later openly acknowledged, that "Sunday morning" eluded the understanding--which a poem of spectacular affirmation should not do. From Wallace Stevens and Literary Canons. Copyright ? 1992 by the University Press of Mississippi. Janet McCann "Sunday Morning" offers one of Stevens's first substitutes for Christianity: natural religion, or paganism. Stevens said very little about this poem after writing it, other than to note in 1928 that "the poem is simply an expression of paganism" (LWS, 250) and later, in 1944, to indicate that Hi Simons was correct in assuming that the poem suggests "a naturalistic religion as a substitute for supernaturalism" (LWS, 464). Stevens tended to dismiss questions about or interpretations of this poem. His offhandedness about what remains perhaps his most anthologized work may suggest that he thought the poem's interpretation to be clear and obvious. His dismissiveness may also 57 have implied that the poem's propositions did not preoccupy him further or later. And yet they clearly did: the "Sunday Morning" questions recur in various guises on through the writing of his last work. One of the more traditional in form of Stevens's poems, "Sunday Morning" consists of blank-verse sections of varying lengths. The poem develops as an argument between two voices: the tentative, questioning tones of the woman, whose enjoyment of the pleasures of this world is cut by the awareness of death, and another, more authoritative voice that seeks to reassure her that the world is enough to satisfy, that in fact it is all the satisfaction there is. . . . In the first section, the woman is enjoying "complacencies of the peignoir, and late / Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair" (CP, 66), but the very enjoyment of life leads her to realize its transience, to remember her church--which she is nor attending at the time--and to allow fear and guilt to disturb her pleasure. The second section picks up the argument with the other voice, which asks, "Why should she give her bounty to the dead?" Should not this world provide compensation for the lost heaven? She should embrace her own divinity, the other voice suggests, and let herself be a mirror of the nature that engendered her and of which she is a part. . . . One with nature, she should not try to separate herself from it and redefine herself as something unnatural or supernatural. The third section takes up the hiistory of divinity, tracing godhead from the totally inhuman Jove through the partly human Jesus to the fully human god suggested by the poem. To invest the human with the divine would make earth into paradise, the sky becoming fully our own rather than a division between earth and heaven. The fourth section returns to the woman's perspective. She is not entirely willing to accept the argument because she realizes that the paradise offered is not permanent. The other voice then assures her that there is a permanence, a permanence of the human, although not of the individual. To her claim in part 5 that she needs individual continuity, the other voice offers the consolation that "Death is the mother of beauty" (CP, 69): the cycle of ripening, fruition, and decay causes desire, which would not exist without the realization of transience. The sixth section hypothesizes a static heaven in which the ripe fruit never falls; such a place would be boring, not beautiful. Only change causes beauty, and change entails beginnings and endings; hence, "Death is the mother of beauty." The alternative to Christianity is suggested in part 7--"a ring of men" chanting "their boisterous devotion to the sun" (CP, 70). Human energy should recognize the source of nature's energy as kin; this recognition would reestablish the participation of humans in nature, which is not so much mystical as actual. This argument is presented as a conclusive one, and the woman accepts it. Her recognition that Jesus is a historical figure and that she is alone, a part of "unsponsored" nature, frees her from the prison in which her traditional beliefs had locked her, The conclusion, a merging of the woman's perception with that of the other voice, is a Wordsworth-like picture of the sweet earth, with overtones of an elegy for the notion of personal immortality. The joined voices proclaim that we are no different from the "casual flocks of pigeons" (CP, 70) whose flight is not patterned but casual, and whose indecipherable movements or "ambiguous undulations" (CP, 70) are nevertheless a form of untranslatable language, a kind of inscription or self-definition that 58 is natural rather than superimposed. Stevens's later work is preoccupied with the notion that true order must be found in nature rather than forced on it, but he later finds orders different from the simple natural rhythms. This poem uses the figure of the woman to work through the objections to the discarding of Christianity. Stevens himself is both the woman and her opponent. "Sunday Morning" is the first full presentation of Stevens's lifelong central motif, the search for a sustaining fiction. But the answers he provides are clearly problematic to him as well as to the reader. Parts 7 and 8 both seem to be conclusions, but they do not cohere. "Boisterous devotion" characterizes part 7: the reborn pagan males seek to merge with the life source, yielding their individuality to its larger identity. Part 8, however, is muted. The lushness of nature affords no participation mystique but rather suggests isolation and separation. The freedom the woman has won by relinquishing her Christian faith provides no real compensation except a sense of the vulnerability of all nature. Stevens allowed Harriet Monroe to publish the poem with part 7 last, embedding part 8 earlier in the narrative (LWS, 183-84). It would seem that be did not know exactly where he wanted the poem to go or how seriously he wanted the paganism to be taken. Paganism does offer a form of transcendence, whereas simple identification with the natural cycles does not. His choice of elegy over energy seems to negate the scene of the sun worshipers, which then appears artificial and contrived in contrast with the poem's ending. From Wallace Stevens revisited: "The Celestial Possible." Copyright 1995 by Twayne Publishers. Beverly Maeder . . . "Sunday Morning," . . . though it rings with memorable language and sober reflection, . . . ironically inverts heaven's reward and earth's satisfactions, the top and bottom of the hierarchy, rather than devising a new structuring principle. The poem's several subject positions all confront the divine and spiritual with the earthly and bodily. . . . Section I illustrates the drift from an appreciation of the here and now to an eschatological-oriented belief. "Complacencies of the peignoir, and late / Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair" first instigate a metonymical and spatial movement. The epicurean woman's whole being is drawn toward another realm, as her "dreaming feet" lead her to the "silent Palestine" of Christ's sacrifice. The final "Dominion of the blood and sepulchre," however, can also be seen as the transformation of the opening coffee and oranges and "sunny chair" induced by the resemblances of metaphor. The woman's sensuous comfort thus finds its analogue in a theological symbol that also has its origins in a bodily life—the wine-and-bread celebration of the Last Supper and the Son's interment. Picking up the strand of Christ's "blood" and humanity, section III inserts Christ's birth into a double structure. On the one hand, it contains three implied narratives of each of the three divine engenderings. On the other hand, it is a condensed "history" of the evolution of religions: from 59 Jove's motherless "inhuman birth," to the virgin birth of Christ and its "commingling" of our blood, to the possibility of a totally human version. Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be The blood of paradise? And shall the earth Seem all of paradise that we shall know? The sky will be much friendlier then than now, A part of labor and a part of pain, And next in glory to enduring love, Not this dividing and indifferent blue. (III, 9-15) On the surface one might say with Adelaide Kirby Morris that given this pattern, the woman "must then admit the possibility of evolution from 'the thought of heaven' to a divinity that 'must live within herself"' (CP 67) of section Il. Yet even Jove is measured by the "human" standard of the "king," the negation of "inhuman" and "no mother," and the pun in "Large-mannered" (reutilized in "The Man With the Blue Guitar" IV). The narrative of the evolution of religion depends on personification. In addition, the human "hinds" situate Jove hierarchically. They return to recognize the "commingling" (a seemingly nonhierarchical word) of human and divine that defines Christianity, and thus reinforce the hierarchy of earth and "virginal" blood below, and "star" and "heaven" above. The third stage projects an anthropomorphized paradise into the future, leaving "earth" and "sky" in an ambiguous relation. The hierarchical bias of religious metaphors seems most confining, however, in the implied narrative of each divinity's engendering. These are clustered around the series of representations of human motherhood that ends by integrating "labor" and "pain" (of both working the land and giving birth) into the speaker's imagined "paradise." The vocabulary of this final vision is redolent with double registers that point to a metaphorical contamination of what Kirby calls the divine "within" by a concern with divine origin in the "sky" and "blue" (Mary's color) of heaven, and the "glory" of paradisal splendor. The semantic organization of the entire section keeps returning to the mutual imbrication of physical and divine, even as the section's statements tend to reject past versions of the birth of divine figures because of their vertical perspective. On the other hand, such verticality imbues the stanza's temporal logic. In the story of the expulsion from the earthly Garden of Eden, paradise is origin and first home, while in the promise of a return to God's presence, paradise is heaven but also end as purpose, not only Montaigne's bout but the but he disputed. The reverie of the eschatological "Dominion of blood and sacrifice" that closes section I foreshadows the absorption of the mothering metaphor of section III into a vision of end, in a final hope that the "sky will be much friendlier than now." The course of an individual human life, the fertile engendering by and of "our blood," is made subordinate to the eschatological "enduring love" to which it is compared but can no longer attain. The palliative to "all our dreams / And our desires" is given by the adage "Death is the mother of beauty" in section V. This formulation is so hypnotizing that it imposes the "need for some imperishable bliss" even on maidens' love, the prelude to mothering. Death "makes the willow shiver in the sun," mingling the promise of death with the maidens' love here on earth. When the phrase "Death is the mother of beauty" is taken up again to close section VI, it introduces another 60 conceptual difficulty: death is a "mystical" mother "Within whose burning bosom we devise / Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly." Thus, although the section's image of paradise is an image of earth frozen in a stilled moment, the transcendent, not the earthly, is what preconditions the focus of our desires on the sensuous lives embodied in "Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly." If the personification of death as a mother is a "bosom"/matrix for actual ("earthly") mothers, it creates a vertical tautology equating death as mother of transformed versions of earth with the earth as the engenderer of stilled figurations of (death's) paradise. Each seems the superfluous mimesis of the other. Paradise is earth malformed just as "Malformed, the world was paradise malformed" ("The Pure Good of Theory" III, CP 332). Neither do the dynamic relationships that follow in section VII seem to develop alternative metaphors or an alternative structure. Helen Vendler calls this section Stevens' "poem of the Gotterdammerung," a representation of "anachronistic primitivism" in which "prophecies of a new divinity are wistfully and even disbelievingly made." Supple and turbulent, a ring of men Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn Their boisterous devotion to the sun, Not as a god, but as a god might be, Naked among them, like a savage source. Their chant shall be a chant of paradise, Out of their blood, returning to the sky; (VII, 1-7) The archaism of the scene brings us back to our ancestral source as well as to a possible archetypal image of sun worship (already latent in the "sunny chair" of section I). Although Harold Bloom praises this section for the "new order" created out of its "metaleptic reversals of the poem's prior figurations," an order in which followers of the Nietzschean god among man manifest both "origin and purpose," the "return" to the sky can also be read as a repetition of the impeding structure of hierarchicalness found in Stevens' other religious metaphors. The chant denotes idolatry, the submissive worship of a "lord." Its figures are derivative of ancient myth and Judeo-Christian successors of it insofar as they enact stories of "blood," the blood of sacrifice in the chant "of paradise, / Out of their blood, returning to the sky," and the blood of reproductive transmission. Blood seems to be the "natural" but male metonymy of the sensuality and sensuousness of maternal "desire/s" of sections II and VI. The section is an ingrown expression of the larger poem's central figures. But the chief impediment to creating a new structure, it seems to me, is the tautological end implied in this disguised eschatology. Indeed, "returning to the sky" closes the circle of the chant's being "of" paradise—a chant about but also from paradise. For the returning chant originates in paradise as well as in the men's blood; it originates, in sum, in the metaphors men have constructed to form paradise. Thus not only in minor poems but in this major work in Harmonium we find Stevens mining the old theological metaphors even as he tries to debunk them. This metaphor-making depends on "using religious forms to deny religious forms." Stevens' figures rely on anthropomorphism since earth provides the analogues for the divine order. Attempts in "Sunday Morning" to give form to a human-centered vision of sensuous pleasure end up relating them to engendering and dying and to 61 God-centered, transcendent value. The religious metaphors tend to merge the implicit life-narrative into a circle or tautology. Jove and paradise in section II and the return of "men that perish" in the sun's "summer morn" are products of our collective metaphor-making ability or our ability to create ensembles of resemblances. The earth's pleasures are imbricated in rhetorical substitutions that never form any independent pattern but can only deplete the divine by taking an ironic view of the earth as model, as in section VI, or by conceding domination to a metaphor of transcendent power that closes the trope in on itself, as in VII. To sum up, the family of metaphors centering on motherhood and unfolding to include earth-birth and paradise-death itself illustrates the repeated linkage of questions of origin with questions of end. Sections III, V, and VI exploit metaphors of motherhood, but since the coherence is built on earthly and human figurations in relation to heavenly value, and since the poem's initial female dreamer desires yet doubts the adequacy of the earth, the value of the very concepts of earthly and heavenly paradise are contaminated. The euphoric section VII, on the other hand, turns the speaker's metaphors back around heaven and summer, as though bound to a "source." On the rhetorical level, the rivalry between two hierarchies locks the figuration of death into tableaux that leave the hierarchies intact. from Wallace Stevens' Experimental Language: The Lion in the Lute. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. Copyright ? 1999 by Beverly Maeder. On "Study of Two Pears" Charles Altieri "The title establishes the new space abstraction must explore, a site between art and perception, while also suggesting the basic problem that such exploration must face. I take it that the "study" refers to a painting, which in turn affords us an opportunity to study how we go about seeing in a vital way. Yet the very framework of the study may eventually prove as limiting and self-mocking as the Latin pedagogy that sets the scene. For as we become aware of how our attention becomes vital, we may feel trapped by the frames that reward its visual orientation. … Realization represents, but what is represented is not a world of ordinary objects and conventionalized vision, Indeed, once the process begins it soon exceeds the object eliciting it. So in the central stanzas we move from specific negations and sharpened attention to what must be taken as purposive aspects of appearance. We think of a modeling will. But then the will quickly leads to grounds beyond the subjective maker through Stevens" remarkably inventive use of the clichéd metaphor "flowering." As perception becomes active, and especially as it comes to recognize a dynamic principle at work in eliciting its activity, straightforward names must yield to metaphor if they are to be at all adequate to the situation. Stated this baldly, however, we find ourselves making an observation which would hold true of any intense situation. Stevens" specific metaphor complicates matters considerably. Up to this point the poem had relied on a presentational movement but had not sought an abstract situating – quite the contrary. Now the action shifts from seeing to reflecting upon one’s seeing. As the pear becomes most fully itself before the eye. It must become 62 something else: the fruit must act as a flower does if the mind is to appreciate fully its appearance as a fruit. Then, as flowering seems to capture the particular act of emergence, we recognize that the term applies to a good deal more than the pear. The flowering is also a process of the mind’s own blossoming within a world formerly perceived as only from a distance. The painting brush, the writer’s recasting, and the observer’s attention all here flower, suggesting that when the mind too becomes fully itself it must at the same time become other, must take on an identity that no perception qua perception can register. Perception at its most intense requires our entering the order of metaphor, requires the intensification of art. This indeed is why we need a painting to learn how to see a pear. From Charles Altieri, "Why Stevens Must be Abstract, or, What Poets Can Learn from Painting," in Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism, ed. Albert Gelpi (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985), 97-98. B. J. Leggett A number of the poems of Parts of a World record the moments in which conventional seeing is destroyed through reduction of the commonsensical to a kind of obscurity. Although "Study of Two Pears" is not usually read in this manner, it is in part an exercise in freeing the world of conventional meaning, reducing the pears to "blobs." The exercise begins by resisting the impulse to see the pears through analogy with familiar objects, which would domesticate them, rob them of their uniqueness: "The pears are not viols, / Nudes or bottles. / They resemble nothing else." The temptation to think of them in terms of paintings of pears is also resisted ("They are not flat surfaces / Having curved outlines"), and the result is to convert them to form and color--"yellow forms / Composed of curves" . . . "touched red" . . . "round / Tapering toward the top." The farther from the conventional descriptions of pears the poem retreats, the more unpearlike the objects become. They reveal uncharacteristic "bits of blue," and the pear-yellow now "glistens with various yellows, / Citrons, oranges and greens." The final stage in this reduction is that of a formlessness in which the object loses its familiar look and resists the mind's attempt to dictate its appearance or meaning: The shadows of the pears Are blobs on the green cloth. The pears are not seen As the observer wills. Properly obscure, the pears are now presumably ripe for the "early" or "first" seeing, a result not of the will or intelligence but of what Stevens [in "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction"] calls "candid" seeing, an "ever-early candor" by which "Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation." From Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory: Conceiving the Supreme Fiction. Copyright ? 1987 by the University of North Carolina Press. 63 Bonnie Costello The problem of Modernism's negations (especially Cubist negations) is again the subject of "Study of Two Pairs," whose title clearly invokes visual arts. The concerns of the body of the poem - shape, color, outline, resemblance - also derive from painting. As does Cubist painting, the poem suggests both a struggle to see reality as it is and to create and imaginative reality. The poem ends ironically, for while the pears are not seen as the observer wills (not as viols, nudes, or seen. The poem seems to move in this direction bottles), it is only these willed images that are toward the last two stanzas where the reality of the pears is entirely elusive - a glistening at bests. Even their shadows are only defined as "blobs on the green cloth." The dull, flat language of "Study of Two Pears" may reflect the dullness of bandage to visual fact. Such objectivism is only an "opusculum paedagogum." But the poem also perhaps testifies to the failure of language to represent adequately the allure of visual fact (it "glistens"). Without metaphor (without viols, nudes, or bottles) language is nothing, and yet metaphor implies an evasion, a removal from positive direct experience. Stevens' ambivalence about the eye centers, then, on his allusions to painting. Here his own stance as observer/describer seems inadequate to capture observation. The poem does not offer an equivalence in language to Cubist concerns and techniques, but rather a description of those concerns and techniques, a substitution rather than an apposition. from "Effects of an Analogy: Wallace Stevens and Painting. In Albert Gelpi (ed.) Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism. Cambridge University Press. Anthony Whiting Stevens undermines a single, reductive point of view again in a later poem, "Study of Two Pears." . . . . . . the speaker of the poem is the reductionist. The speaker insists that pears are unique natural forms that have no resemblance to anything else. "The pears are not viols, / Nudes or bottles. / They resemble nothing else" ( CP 196). And the poem ends with the words, "The pears are not seen / As the observer wills" (CP 197), which can be read as a final assertion that the pears resist the observer's will to transform them into something else through resemblance. Stevens writes in "Three Academic Pieces" that ''as to the resemblance between things in nature, it should be observed that resemblance constitutes a relation between them since, in some sense, all things resemble each other" (NA 71). He goes on to discuss resemblances between things in nature and things of the imagination, and he comments that "Poetry is a satisfying of the desire for resemblance" (NA 77). In denying that the pears resemble anything else, then, the speaker of "Study of Two Pears" takes a decidedly antipoetic stance. But it is a stance that the speaker unknowingly subverts. In the process of defining what the pears are not, the speaker creates resemblances between them and other things in nature (viols, nudes, bottles), and between them and artistic representations of them. . . . In trying to define the pears by excluding everything else, 64 the speaker shows us that it is impossible not to relate the pears to things in nature and to things created by the imagination. Ironically, the speaker's attempt to eliminate resemblances results in a "satisfying of the desire for resemblance." . . . In "Study of Two Pears," the speaker's attempt to describe the pears by denying their resemblance to other things results in showing us how many things they do resemble. The centripetal force of reduction and exclusion becomes the centrifugal force of differentiation and dispersion as, through resemblance, the contexts in which Stevens presents the pear expands. from The Never-Resting Mind: Wallace Stevens' Romantic Irony. Copyright ? 1996 by the University of Michigan. Wallace Stevens: Excerpts from Letters to Harriet Monroe 6 June 1915 Provided your selection of the numbers of Sunday Morning is printed in the following order: I, VIII, IV, V, I see no objection to cutting down. The order is necessary to the idea. ... from Letters of Wallace Stevens, selected and edited by Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1966), 183. to Harriet Monroe 6 June 1915 No. 7 of Sunday Morning is, as you suggest, of a different tone, but it does not seem to be too detached to conclude with. The words "On disregarded plate" in No. 5 are, apparently, obscure. Plate is used in the sense of so-called family plate. Disregarded refers to the disuse into which things fall that have been possessed for a long time. I mean, therefore, that death releases and renews. What the old have come to disregard, the young inherit and make use of. … from Letters of Wallace Stevens, selected and edited by Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1966), 233. To His Wife 65 (from Long Key, Florida, 30 January 1923) … I have about decided to go to Key West on Thursday or Friday and cross to Havana on the ferry and spend a day or two there sight-seeing. I shall have to pay for that myself but I cannot feel that it would be a great sin to indulge myself now that I am so near. Tomorrow several of the crowd are going out in boats for the big fish but I do not intend to go along. One day is enough. Besides I got so burned by the sun on Monday that another day of it so soon might blister my skin. The beauty of this place is indescribable. This morning the sea was glittering gold and intense deep blue. When it grew cloudy later the sea turned to green and black. Later in the morning it faired off, as they say, and by noon there was not a cloud in the sky. The sky is perfectly clear and the moon full tonight. The palms are murmuring in the incessant breeze and, as Judge Powell said, we are drowned in beauty. But with all that, there are a most uncalled for number of mosquitoes. My knees and wrists are covered with bites. from Letters of Wallace Stevens, selected and edited by Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1966), 233. To William Rose Ben閠 (Hartford, Conn. 6 January 1933) I think I should select from my poems as my favorite the Emperor of Ice Cream. This wears a deliberately commonplace costume, and yet seems to me to contain something of the essential gaudiness of poetry; that is the reason why I like it. from Letters of Wallace Stevens, selected and edited by Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1966), 263. To Hi Simons Hartford, Conn. 12 January 1940 … A few months ago, the universal fear (I use the word fear, because I have no sympathy with communism, instead of expectation) was that the world would go communistic, if in fact it had not already done so without realizing it, except in the matter of putting it into effect. Communism is just a new romanticism. I am going to include in this comment a comment on your statement that I am on the right. Of course, I believe in any number of things that so-called social revolutionists believe in, but I don’t believe in calling myself a revolutionist simply because I believe in doing everything practically possible you improve the condition of the workers, and because I believe in education as the source of freedom and power, and because I regret that we have not experimented a little bit more extensively in public ownership of public utilities. What really divides men into 66 political classes in respect to these things is not the degree to which they believe in them but the ways and means of putting their beliefs into effect. There are a lot of things that the workers are doing that I do not believe in, even though, at the same time, I want certainly as ardently as they do to see them able to live decently and in security and to educate their children and to have pleasant homes, etc. I believe that they could procure these things within the present frame-work. … I suppose that, from the point of view of common usage, I am against the CIO and with the AF of L. But this is all most incidental with me and rather a ridiculous thing for me to be talking about. My direct interests are with something quite different; my direct interest is in telling the Archbishop of Canterbury to go jump off the end of the dock. … from Letters of Wallace Stevens, selected and edited by Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1966), 351. To Oscar Williams Hartford, Conn. 4 December 1944 … I wonder if the war has not ceased to affect us except as a part of necessity, as something that must be carried on and finished, with no end to the sacrifice involved. But I think that even the men in the Army etc. feel that it is no longer anything except an overwhelming grind. The big thing in the world today, the thing that really involves the future, is not the war but the leftist movement. Just at the moment it seems clear that the proletarian politics of the New Deal and its efforts to improve the condition of labor, have created in the labor movement a force quite as great as the force of war, which will survive the war, so that, in that sense, it is definitely the great thing in the world today, or so it seems to me. from Letters of Wallace Stevens, selected and edited by Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1966), 479-480. To Jos?Rodriguez Feo Hartford, Conn., 29 July 1949 Midsummer is a suffocating time and I long, not for Cuba, but for a cottage, say, in Sweden on a lake surrounded by dark green forests in which all the trees talk Swedish. The repetition of one’s experiences in a single spot year after year is deadly. But, then, so too is a life without the need of a job and without the plans that one is constantly making to amuse oneself. Even the scholar must have a subject for his life and however suffocating this time of year may be it has always been a time when I am happiest, as if the world had become composed at last. 67 Today I had lunch at the Canoe Club, with three Martinis. Richard Eberhart of Cambridge was here a week or two ago and I took him there. From him I was able to find out something about the death of Theodore Spencer. It seems that Spencer had had a heart attack a year ago. Thus, he must have known when the fatal attack came on how serious the situation was. When the taxi stopped in front of his house and the driver opened the door Spencer’s big foot fell out. While I never knew him well I wish I had. We came from the same part of the world. We must have had much in common. And one is always desperately in need of the fellowship of one’s own kind. I don’t mean intellectual fellowship, but the fellowship of one’s province: membership in a clique, the fellowship of the landsman and compatriot… from Letters of Wallace Stevens, selected and edited by Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1966), 644. To Joseph Bennett Hartford, Conn. 8 February 1955 … In order to comment on Walt Whitman conscientiously, I ought to re-read him and this is more than I have the time to do at the moment. Last Sunday I read him for several hours and if a few offhand remarks as a result of that reading would be of any interest to you, here they are. I can well believe that he remains highly vital for many people. The poems in which he collects large numbers of concrete things, particularly things each of which is poetic in itself or as part of the collection, have a validity which, for many people, must be enough and must seem to them all opulence and elan. For others, I imagine that what was once opulent begins to look a little threadbare and the collections seem substitutes for opulence even though they remain gatherings-together of precious Americana, certain to remain precious but not certain to remain poetry. The typical elan survives in many things. It seems to me, then, that Whitman is disintegrating as the world, of which he made himself a part, disintegrates. Crossing Brooklyn Ferry exhibits this disintegration. … It is useless to treat everything in Whitman as of equal merit. A great deal of it exhibits little or none of his specific power. He seems often to have himself to write like himself. The good things, the superbly beautiful and moving things, are those that he wrote naturally, with an extemporaneous and irrepressible vehemence of emotion … from Letters of Wallace Stevens, selected and edited by Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1966), 870-71. 68