Wallace Stevens

[Engleberton Crabferry]

A modernist, Stevens came to prominence in 1923 with the publication of Harmonium, by which time he was already 44 years of age.

His poetry is occasionally meta-fictional, allegorical, rarely un-enigmatic, and often concerned with themes of poetry itself. In his more feeling states, Stevens entertains (amongst other things) the nature of reality, the mind of the poet as sensual recipient (or interpreter, creator), and the topical academic questioning of Christian faith (which in his work undergoes a radical upheaval).

Famous poems of Stevens' include: The Idea of Order at Key West (a meditation on the relationship between art and life), Anecdote of the Jar (which can be read as an allegory for the so-called Artistic ready-made, or simply as humanity's industrial dominion over nature), Sunday Morning (concerning the "dissipation" of conventional religious faith), Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (invoking the perspectivally nuanced view[s] of the parallax), The Snowman (again concerned with the false dichotomy of reality/imagination), and A High-toned Old Christian Woman (a biting satirical slant; again, poetry vs Christianity)...

[Engleberton Crabferry]

The Snow Man One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter Of the January sun; and not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind, In the sound of a few leaves, Which is the sound of the land Full of the same wind That is blowing in the same bare place For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and nothing that is. The ‘Snow Man’ may be a double-entendre, meaning both a literal snow man, made of snow, as well as a man who’s feelings are “cold” (itself a metaphor for depression or isolation). ‘One must have a mind of winter’ the poem begins, meaning both that one’s mind must be winter itself, as well as that one must have a “cold” or isolated mind in order ‘To regard the frost and the boughs…’. And one must have ‘been cold a long time’, continues the speaker, ‘to behold the junipers shagged with ice’. And if the landscape here is an allegory for the feelings of the person observing it, the words “shagged” and “crusted” connote a worn-ness, the person and the landscape both “cold” and haggard over time. The ‘distant glitter / Of the January sun’ is also in keeping with the metaphor, i.e. one who is “distant” emotionally from the very start (the metaphor of January perhaps indicative of this frailty from the offset). The poem then embarks on a series of negations; the performative quality of which nonetheless conjures the things negated, and insinuates the speaker in doing so himself. ‘Not to think / Of any misery in the sound of the wind’, he says, as if reminding himself. For it is simply ‘the sound of the land’, and is devoid of emotions; ‘full of the same wind / That is blowing in the same bare place’ (presumably meaning the bare place of the listener’s mind). The poem then ends with the lines, ‘For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and nothing that is’. And thus Stevens’ complex materialist philosophy manifests in the paradox of a positive negation; the speaker reduced to “nothing”, the qualities of the environment traversing him, going through him, like a conduit, nothing both there and not there. For nothing to not be somewhere is impossible. Nothing cannot not be there. It is an eerily familiar concept, irking its readership into philosophical contemplation, wondering perhaps if in witnessing such a landscape one is the constitutor or the constituted. The significance of the poem’s one-sentence form is that both the mind and the environment seem to manifest automatically. A brilliant meditation on the experiential quality of feeling and the seasons...

[Engleberton Crabferry]

A High-Toned Old Christian Woman

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That's clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began. Allow,
Therefore, that in the planetary scene
Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,
Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,
Proud of such novelties of the sublime,
Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,
May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves
A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.
This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.

In A High-toned Old Christian Woman (1923), another short poem of Stevens’, we, this time, see the embodiment of a direct comparison between religion and art. It begins with an ambitious but plausible statement, claiming that, 'poetry is the supreme fiction'. One then wonders what will be compared with poetry in the following lines, as to elevate its status. The speaker says, 'Take the moral law and make a nave of it / And from the nave build haunted heaven'. Thus the 'conscience'/religion is converted into fiction ('palms'/psalms), providing material for comparison with the poet’s (claimed) supremacy of poetry. Taking the 'opposing law', the morally void law of a non-believer, the speaker suggests the woman should 'make a peristyle' and 'Project a masque beyond the planets', i.e. should create a work of art that, in ideology, surpasses our knowledge of the universe, in turn mocking religion’s ‘haunted heaven’. By way of a subtle comparison – a Christian design (a nave) to a Greek design (a peristyle) – Stevens pictorially asserts a manmade alternative to heaven. 'Thus', he says, 'our bawdiness, / Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last, / Is equally converted into palms'. According to the speaker, that is, heaven and art are equally fictitious. Art, in comparison to religion's 'windy citherns hankering for hymns', is heard, 'squiggling like saxophones', symbolically inaugurative of a musical continuum between the two; religion as lacking, and art as vibrant, full of energy. The speakers then states simply that, ‘we are where we began’, echoing the notion that both religion and art do not provide us with enlightenment; for we are merely ourselves, not angels nor unlimited creators. The poet then presents us, rather boldly, with a satirical image of religion’s ‘disaffected flagellants’, who are ‘well-stuffed, / Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade’. From this one may deduce that the so-called ‘jovial hullabaloo’ of religion is to be taken about as seriously as the most trivial of fictions. ‘This will make widows wince’, claims the speaker, implying that religious folk will cringe when learning of their reality. ‘But fictive things wink’, he says, personifying fiction as savvy or cunning, attributing to it human charisma. And thus, while fiction “winks” and ‘widows wince’, poetry is alive and religion is mourned by its followers. Herein Stevens delivers his most explicit promotion for the status of poetry over God, for as he declares, it is nothing short of the ‘supreme fiction’. In such a manner, as hinted above (in my introduction to the thread), Stevens acts a champion for the modernist cause, in promoting Art (in his case, of course, poetry), the status of a type of new-order; brilliant, and yet perilously close to providing fodder for the likes of Foucault and the post-structuralists, for whom the modernist period is seen as totalizing, controlling and fascistic…

[Engleberton Crabferry]

And possibly my favourite of his poems (without analysis this time, I'm afraid - too long!)...

Sunday Morning

1

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.

2

Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measure destined for her soul.

3

Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.
He moved among us, as a muttering king,
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
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.

4

She says, 'I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?'
There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured
As April's green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow's wings.

5

She says, 'But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss.'
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

6

Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

7

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;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest.

8

She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, 'The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.'
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.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

[Cleanthess]

Wallace Stevens, the poet of bric-a-brac, at least according to Robert Frost, wrote many fascinating, mysterious lines. Among my favorites is:

Men Made Out of Words

What should we be without the sexual myth,
The human revery or poem of death?

Castratos of moon-mash – Life consists
Of propositions about life. The human

Reverie is a solitude in which
We compose these propositions, torn by dreams,

By the terrible incantations of defeats
And by the fear that defeats and dreams are one.

Now, to me this reads like a cross between Auden's Horae Canonicae and the plot of End of Evangelion?!?!

from Horae Canonicae

There should be monuments, there should be odes,
to the nameless heroes who took it first,
to the first flaker of flints
who forgot his dinner,
the first collector of seashells
to remain celibate.
Where should we be but for them?
Feral still, un-housetrained, still
wandering through forests without
a consonant to our name,
slaves of Dame Kind, lacking
all notion of a city...

As for the End of Evangelion plot, it tells of this group of 4 combat pilots (two young men, two young women) who battle on a regular basis against alien entities who are trying to invade Earth and destroy humankind, the Angels. The young pilots lead lives of constant fear, as one after the other they are crushed or torn apart by the Angels. In the end, the Angels win and humanity is reduced to some massive pink goo mashed halo floating around the Moon, while the collective consciousness of mankind, solitude transcended forever, is caught on a sexual reverie with the objects of their hearts' desire. And, by the way, the angels adopted the appearance of the ones desired most for each human being, before killing them in lethal sexual embraces, thus our defeat became our dreams and our dreams became our defeat.

I wonder if Hideaki Anno had Wallace Steven's poem in mind while creating his mind-bending epic opus.

[Gregg H.]

Thanks for this thread. Stevens is the most interesting poet I've ever encountered. I read him in small doses, because I need to retread most of his poems multiple times before I feel I've arrived at an understanding.
I'd be interested in your take on "Of Mere Being."

[Cleanthess]

Thank you for your reply, I also greatly admire Wallace Stevens' poetry. I'm particularly glad that you mentioned that beautiful poem, Of Mere Being.

Of Mere Being

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.

Now, I'm a Schopenhauerian, of the Western Iccha-matra branch of Buddhism (our sister branch being the more well-known Citta-matra of the yogacarins). Funny thing about Schopenhauerism: we believe that the universe is a broadcast dream that our minds, like TV sets are reproducing. The original source of this dream is something beyond our minds, perceptions and illusory selves: the Universal Will. This thing, the Will, has no feelings, no meaning, no consciousness or thoughts of Its own, no reason. The Will just is and It is something completely foreign to us, and yet It is so close, right behind the back end of our minds, singing Its song: the universe.

Just like a fish, a six pointed star, the full moon, the crescent moon, and the sun disk, maybe a golden bird atop a bronze palm would be a great symbol.

[Gregg H.]

Well, Cleanthess, when I started to read your post I thought you were completely bonkers. As I read on I knew you understood the poem. High style, man!