Wallace Stevens had always refused to yield to Alfred Knopf’s desire for a Collected Poems; such a volume, Stevens must have felt, would impose a premature closure on his writing life. But finally, after completing a group of new poems—to be called The Rock—and fearing (with reason) that he would not live to write another book, Stevens allowed the publication of his Collected Poems, which appeared (by Alfred Knopf’s decision) on Stevens’s seventy-fifth birthday, October 2, 1954. Ten months later, Stevens died of advanced stomach cancer. During the five years preceding his death, as we can see from some of his late letters, his energy diminished and his senses became less responsive; even the coming of spring, which would always lift his spirits, was no longer a sovereign remedy. “At my ripe age,” he wrote to his friend Barbara Church in April 1950, “the world begins to seem a little thin . . . This year the coming of spring has left me cold.”1 He was struck by “the occasionally frightening aspect of the past, into which so many that we have known have disappeared, almost as if they had never been real” (L 954). After an operation disclosed terminal cancer, Stevens admitted, in the month before his death, “There is no chance, I think, of any new poems. Most of the time when I am at home, I drowse” (L 955). There are in The Rock many poems representing and enacting the interface of life and death, but here I will also mention, for completeness of description, some late uncollected poems as well as two poems preceding The Rock.
Stevens was a lawyer, and often, in a poem, he took a stance of formal argument, advancing, aspect by aspect, through his topic. His commitment to a poetry of “accuracy with respect to the structure of reality” demanded that he analyze that structure or blueprint, both as it appeared at the moment of writing and as it had changed for him over time. He was never one for a literal transcription of an event or occasion, but he had an unequaled sense of the architectonics of thought and imagination. To express the structures of being with accuracy demanded that he invent poetic structures and styles adequate to them.
In The Rock and in poems written too late for the Collected Poems, Stevens examined three chief premises about the last phase of being, when life faces death. The first two premises—that age is a paralytic stasis of the body and mind alike and that death is a biological horror—caused him anguish. His third premise, however, is that mortality confers a compensatory value on life. Stasis, horror, and an honoring of life even in the face of death: I will take up all three premises, considering the different emotional pressures exerted on Stevens by each premise, and the poet’s consequent imaginative inventions of structure and style.
In his most acquiescent mood, Stevens was instructed in his feelings about death by overhearing the last soliloquy of his muse, his interior paramour, who says to him:
Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.
We can understand why Stevens, sitting in evening solitude in a narrow upstairs room in Hartford, composing in his mind the poems that he would soon write, invented an inner muse that would reassure him of the supreme value of that “intensest rendezvous” between poet and paramour-muse. But when Stevens spoke of late life in his own voice, he often produced an altogether bleaker tone. The structure of reality, in the approach of death, sometimes seemed to him a wholly entropic one, about to come to a halt in a stasis that would be final. This premise produced a problem of representation: how can a poem allow itself to evolve dynamically as a future-oriented structure (as it always must) if its thematic duty is to enact stasis? The famous poem “The Plain Sense of Things,” in spite of its familiarity, has to be quoted here because it is the ars poetica of the poetry of stasis, replicating irreversible ruin.
The story preceding “The Plain Sense of Things” (deducible from this poem and others) would go as follows: “Once upon a time there was a great house inhabited by a turbaned ruler, an effendi; in the garden there was a great pond, pink with water lilies, next to which the effendi had in the past sat with his beloved; a greenhouse supplied the house with flowers; a chimney showed by its plume of smoke the warmth of the foyer inside.2 But now all warmth has left the house, and the speaker forces himself to make an inventory of the waste land that surrounds him, even while asking himself why he should be compelled to undertake such a mournful task. Energy has departed: the house has declined, the leaves have fallen, the pond is muddied, the lilies are dead, silence pervades the landscape, and the human speaker himself feels inanimate and inert.”
In the opening view of the poem, stasis has arrived and appears unchangeable. But the poem arrives—as a poem of stasis “should” not—at a surprising change of view, in which the poet steels himself to a new orientation. At the impasse of an ending, a terminal death-recognition (of fear, of fury, of failure) is met with an evolving life-resolution (to see, to learn, to know). First, the poet, using the generalizing “we” instead of the revealing “I,” admits the collapse—after a fantastic effort—of a life’s endeavor and (perhaps recalling Shakespeare and Keats) acknowledges the carrion flies attending that collapse.3 When a stoic will to knowledge of the new state arises, some stylistic means must be found to link mourning recognition to stern resolve, since they occur within the same sensibility. Almost unwillingly, and surprisingly, Stevens concedes that his present unchanging and wintry state is not new but old. Before he possessed the house, the beloved, the pond, he actually inhabited a similar waste land. He is now returning to, not arriving at, “a plain sense of things”:
After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.
It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.
By mentioning the difficulty of choosing a suitable adjective for his scene, Stevens reminds us of the way the adjective had served him in the more affluent past—as enhancement, as incandescence, as “the amorous adjective aflame” (“The Man with the Blue Guitar”). Now Stevens forces us to note the adjectives he tries out: “blank,” “minor,” “lessened.” But to decorate the scene with adjectives at all, he knows, is to falsify its utter emotional emptiness. He will extirpate adjectives and station himself (except for the hyperbolic adjective “fantastic”) in unadorned fact:
The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.
What style is adequate to this state of affairs? The formal linguistic equivalent of emotional stasis is repetition—of phonemes, of words, of syntactic forms such as phrases in apposition, or even of larger utterances. We first see the repetition-enacting stasis in the immobile phonemes of the line “In-an-im-ate in an in-ert savoir.” Repetition continues through the figure of apposition: “this blank cold, this sadness without cause.” The subsequent details of decline are imprisoned in a repetitive syntax: four one-line sentences, beginning with “The greenhouse,” repeat the same rigid subject-predicate formulation. Finally the poem emphasizes its own technique of stasis, asserting the tautological presence of “a repetition / In a repetitiousness.”
We now encounter the characteristic Stevensian “yet” of second thoughts, asserting a determination to counter the stasis of permanent depletion. But that “yet” is not permitted to repudiate what the eye has seen, cannot artificially urge the stasis into a false renewal, and cannot invoke, as a Christian writer might, the promise of a better life to be. If the repetitiveness of end-game stasis cannot be evaded, how, then, can the dynamic and yet stoic Stevensian “yet” be made stylistically convincing? The short answer is that Stevens replaces his earlier “inanimate” and “inert” quailing in repetitive paralysis by rephrasing the end stage as a phase of enlightenment. His stance resembles, in this respect, Waller’s acknowledgment of “new light” entering the self through the wounds of age and damage. Can Stevens, while prolonging the repetitive linguistic marks of stasis, invent a stylistic force representing new knowledge? And since the mark of stasis is the impossibility of the exhausted soul’s finding a mode of utterance, what can substitute for utterance as a counterweight to the oppressed silence that has replaced voice? Stevens draws himself up to a final view of the structure of reality as it appears when his leaves of pages no longer speak. Although his imagination once found its reflection in nature’s mirror, now the formerly mirroring pond has “water like dirty glass.” He can no longer see through a glass, even if darkly: what will happen when he comes face to face with absence and silence?
Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence
Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.
The decision to insert a non-human view—in the moment when a rat, the posthumous seeing eye of the poem, succeeds the carrion flies—enables this strangely consoling rendition of a poet’s final silence. The effort to maintain the activity of cognition, even though everything physical has come to a halt, produces the wonderful and unpredictable rat. The “great structure” may have declined into a “minor house,” but the “great pond” is, the poet concedes, still “the great pond,” its expanse unaffected even though its lilies have wasted, are waste. The plain sense of things continues to generate its characteristic static repetitions: of “imagination” in “the absence of the imagination / Had itself to be imagined”; of “silence” in “silence / Of a sort, silence of a rat”; of “require” in “required, as a necessity requires.” After all this stasis of dogged repetition, the final triumph of the poem is its finding what it had been seeking, “the adjective for this blank cold,” a discovery the poet had earlier thought difficult, perhaps even impossible. Once he arrives at the adjective he has been looking for—the adjective “in-evitable” in the penultimate line of the poem—we feel it has all along been hovering in the wings, waiting to contradict “In-animate in an in-ert savoir.” The last line—with its repetition of the Latin for “seeking again and again,” re-quaerere, “Required . . . requires”—ends (as it must) by reiterating the factual life-stasis with which the poem began. But within that immutability of paralyzed external circumstance, a repeated activity of inquiry into “inevitable knowledge” keeps the previously inert imagination alive, keeps it “coming out to see,” to take its last looks, even if only to gaze upon its own displayed absence, and to live, beside the “great pond,” in its own sad silence.
“The Plain Sense of Things” is a post-elegiac poem. Everything one cared about is already gone, and in that moment we are suddenly aware that there had existed, earlier in life, a comparable blank moment before we encountered our loved places, people, and possessions. Externally, then, there is a return to that earlier blankness; but internally we experience, in comparing the blanknesses, not a simple acquiescent return to a former uninvestigated desolate condition but rather our need to name and enumerate our losses—and then to pose the required and inevitable query, seeking and acquiring a new knowledge of deprivation.
We must go back for a moment to the elegies that preceded The Rock to understand how fully Stevens understood a dynamically evolving kind of elegy before going beyond it to the stasis of “The Plain Sense of Things” on the one hand, and to the horror of “Madame La Fleurie” on the other. The most naked of Stevens’s earlier elegies is the one mourning his dead parents and his estranged wife. Realizing that such deaths and frustrations are common and occur in every life, he grimly entitles his familial elegy “World without Peculiarity.” I quote the hopeless beginning, with its recital of individual losses, each followed by an outcry of protest and pain:
The day is great and strong—
But his father was strong, that lies now
In the poverty of dirt.
Nothing could be more hushed than the way
The moon moves toward the night.
But what his mother was returns and cries on his breast.
The red ripeness of round leaves is thick
With the spices of red summer.
But she that he loved turns cold at his light touch.
What good is it that the earth is justified,
That it is complete, that it is an end,
That in itself it is enough?
After this outburst of increasing sadness, the lament ends, not wholly successfully, with the poet attempting to believe that his losses can eventually be absorbed within nature.
In another grief-saturated elegy, “Burghers of Petty Death” (concerning, I would guess, the grave of his parents),4 Stevens reports, and reproduces, the entire unimportance to the universe of any particular deaths. His parents, of Pennsylvania Dutch stock, are anonymous “burghers” buried in the cemetery that received their “petty death”:
These two by the stone wall
Are a slight part of death.
The grass is still green.
But there is a total death,
A devastation, a death of great height
And depth, covering all surfaces,
Filling the mind.
These are the small townsmen of death,
A man and a woman, like two leaves
That keep clinging to a tree
Before winter freezes and grows black—
Of great height and depth
Without any feeling, an imperium of quiet,
In which a wasted figure, with an instrument,
Propounds blank final music.
Of course to a bereft son the death of his parents is of enormous consequence. In an attempt to give equal credence to the cruel fact of cosmic indifference to death and the disabling fact of filial sorrow, Stevens (as we saw him doing in “The Hermitage at the Center”) writes two poems within one: the poem in which the petty deaths are of no great weight, and the poem in which the “wasted figure” of the son wordlessly, in “an imperium of quiet,” plays by the grave a blank and final music. An impersonal and indifferent voice speaks the “left” half of the poem, while a narrator who can read the mind of the devastated son, and can contest the indifference expressed on the left, speaks the “right” half.
As this arrangement makes evident, by the middle of “Burghers of Petty Death” the two “poems” are impossible to keep separate. The pathos of the couple’s last moments as they cling to life has been projected by the son onto the entire world, “covering all surfaces.” As the son repeats, in the fourth stanza, his early words describing his individual measure of those deaths, “Of great height and depth,” the grief that was previously inside his consciousness, “filling the mind,” is externalized into the “blank final music” of an elegy infiltrated by the chill of nature’s view. Stevens’s forensic debate, setting nature’s freezing indifference to human extinction against the filial shock of “total death,” creates an accuracy with respect to that emotional structure of reality in which the unimportance of death to the universe, and the importance of parental death to the son, are at almost complete odds. Stevens’s last look at personal relations against the stasis of the grave grants both the monumental significance of those relations to the filial mind and their meaninglessness in the natural world. In this binocular vision, the poem’s impersonal look at the passage of the seasons from green grass to black cold counters the grieving filial look at the pathos of the “clinging” couple.
The Rock and the poems written between that collection and Stevens’s death relentlessly expose the contrast between Stevens’s earlier poems of pathos elegizing others, and the later and harsher poems elegizing himself. The poet in “Burghers of Petty Death” could create, with an instrument, a “blank final music” for his parents, but in the November of his own life, the music of death, although loudly and deeply present, is inaccessible to consciousness, feeling, instrumentation, and language. The speaker’s mental space is a November-like region. Only the North Wind, for the moment, can transmit the music of death as it passes through the trees, and the powerful but nonverbal North Wind, withholding its revelation, seems to Stevens “like a critic of God, the world / / And human nature,” enthroned in an alien, non-human, undomesticated wilderness. The North Wind is a person; he sits in “his own” wilderness and is not available to the human world. Once more, Stevens depicts, by repetition, stasis as the only structure of reality now visible and audible. Here is “The Region November”:
It is hard to hear the north wind again,
And to watch the treetops, as they sway.They sway, deeply and loudly, in an effort,
So much less than feeling, so much less than speech,Saying and saying, the way things say
On the level of that which is not yet knowledge:A revelation not yet intended.
It is like a critic of God, the worldAnd human nature, pensively seated
On the waste throne of his own wilderness.Deeplier, deeplier, loudlier, loudlier,
The trees are swaying, swaying, swaying.
The repetitions exemplifying this stasis include five instances (including variants) of “sway,” three of “deep,” three of “loud,” three of “say,” two of “so much less,” and two of “not yet.” The poem seems unable to gain access to what the trees are “saying and saying” as they are “swaying, swaying, swaying”: if only the poet could delete their “w’s” (so to speak), he could interpret their motion as something said. Unable to decipher any meaning, he falls back on his only support, language, thinking that if he repeats the manner of the trees’ efforts in a variation of his own, he will at least have partly internalized their import. If they sway (as he first puts it) “deeply” and “loudly,” he will confer a further stylistic manner on them, twice, in “English” words new to the language, to signify that he knows that the trees are speaking nature’s foreign words, not his own; but he will force his English meanings to accommodate the trees’ wordless vocalise, trying on his new invented words deriving from the trees’ own sound: “Deeplier, deeplier, loudlier, loudlier.” The red lines drawn by my computer under these words, telling me that they are not English, make Stevens’s point; but now they have been humanized, have become part of a poem in English. By remaining defeated in articulation until the penultimate line of the poem—as he had in “The Plain Sense of Things”—Stevens maintains a high stylistic tension. What David can oppose himself to the Goliath of the North Wind? But precisely by interjecting a recognizable, if illiterate, flicker of the human into the depth and volume of the boreal effect, he has at least endorsed the hope that he can turn the repetitive static noise of swaying into something articulate approaching saying.
Stevens’s last looks, as I said earlier, were directed not only toward the stasis of the end but also toward its biological horror. If the weight of static depression burdens “The Plain Sense of Things” and “The Region November,” it is terror and anger that occasion “Madame La Fleurie,” Stevens’s poem of the interface of life and death at its most appalling. Stevens is aghast as he is granted a vision showing him that “Mother Nature” is not the flowering and benign inamorata she had seemed to him even in his middle age, when (in “The Man with the Blue Guitar”) he praised the moments when we become relatives of her flora and fauna, “when we choose to play / The imagined pine, the imagined jay.” Now Madame La Fleurie is “the waiting parent” of his end; he sees that she is a monster who will devour him, along with his mistaken perceptions, his knowledge, and his language. The “great weightings of the end,” induced by her “waiting” for her prey, are preparing to press him into an underground grave, where the attendant stars of nature will seal his coffin, and the moon will draw him into her cold sleep. The poet’s blue guitar has metamorphosed into a black instrument with thick strings, uttering guttural stutters instead of song.
“Madame La Fleurie” is at first addressed to nature’s attendant stars as the poet (spoken of in the third person) sinks toward sleep. But afterward, as he lies in the earth, he sees nature as she has become, a sexually ambiguous and cannibalistic mother:
Weight him down, O side-stars, with the great weightings of the end.
Seal him there. He looked in a glass of the earth and thought he lived in it.
Now, he brings all that he saw into the earth, to the waiting parent.
His crisp knowledge is devoured by her, beneath a dew.
Weight him, weight, weight him with the sleepiness of the moon.
It was only a glass because he looked in it. It was nothing he could be told.
It was a language he spoke, because he must, yet did not know.
It was a page he had found in the handbook of heartbreak.
The black fugatos are strumming the blacknesses of black.
The thick strings stutter the finial gutturals.
He does not lie there remembering the blue-jay, say the jay.
His grief is that his mother should feed on him, himself and what he saw,
In that distant chamber, a bearded queen, wicked in her dead light.
How has the last look into death’s horror—into what the poet “saw, / In that distant chamber”—been reproduced stylistically? The first thing one notices on the page is the sheer weight of the unfamiliarly long lines;5 and the second is that the last stanza has five lines, rather than the four of the preceding two, so that the damning vision of the mythical and monstrous mother is held off until the moment after the poem “should” have finished. I have said that this is Stevens’s poem about the horror of death, a horror of a live burial so unimaginable that he can confront it only obliquely and symbolically, by remembering legends like that of Bluebeard’s Castle. To sustain ghastliness throughout the silent burial, he stages successive destructions, line by line, of what he has believed about his life and work. He was wrong about his relation to where he lived, when he believed that earth was the mirror of thought. He was wrong about nature as fostering mother, as he sees his crisp knowledge devoured by her. He was wrong about the objectivity of his insights: “It was only a glass because he looked in it.” He did not truly know the very language he spoke, and when he begins to speak it in the wake of such deadly admissions, his shattered state deforms his words, twisting fugues into “fugatos,” “final” into the visual “finial.” His music becomes a tautological speechlessness, enunciating “the blacknesses of black.” His final double grief is, yes, that the earth will (in an echo of Shakespeare’s “Poor soul”) feed on him, but also that he will have had to learn the excruciating “extra” single-line truth: that nature is wicked, unnatural, a “bearded queen” like Macbeth’s witches, and that the light in her under-earth chamber is a dead light. Stevens’s brusquely phrased sentences take look after look at the worst, as almost every line in the poem shows something being destroyed, while the stanzas prepare for the cumulative vision; and the slowness of the weighty lines ensures that we register, one by one, every single destruction.
Yet there are two voices to this poem. One, as we have seen, speaks the dreadful facts in crisp dismissive sentences: “It was only a glass because he looked in it. It was nothing he could be told.” That factual voice sustains the evil of the end. But the other voice sings an incantatory lullaby, “Weight him down, O side-stars, with the great weightings of the end. . . . / Weight him, weight, weight him with the sleepiness of the moon.” This is the musical and elegiac voice of the strumming of the black fugatos, of the gutturals of the thick strings. The last three lines, after the final mention of music, impute a consciousness to the poet’s corpse; these lines are not themselves song, not even a memory of the song of the blue jay, but commentary. At last the man knows the whole truth, of his own earth-burial and of nature’s monstrous appetite for human bodies. Surprisingly, instead of the rage, or fear, or abjectness that he has so far expressed, Stevens meets this truth with grief. “Grief ” is an unexpected word to find here; yet when we hear it, we recognize it as the response that can harbor not only the destructive dimensions of the mother but also the lullaby cadences (suggesting her persistent maternity) of the final song.
The horror, that second grim premise of the end-stage in Stevens, appears again when the dove of “The Dove in Spring” finds itself in a dark dungeon, “deep beneath its walls.” The dove, for Stevens, is always an amalgam of the dove of Venus and the dove of the Holy Spirit, symbolizing the poet’s two sources of energy, the libido and the imagination. The now-imprisoned dove wonders whether there is another, better world, where there would exist a great outer bush in which it could perch and coo; but even as it speculates, it doubts. The “stripes of silver” created by its prison bars are like strips, like slits of a dungeon window, allowing only a straitened view of a possible alternate “place / And state of being large and light.” (One is reminded of Waller’s “chinks” that admit light.) The dove is too miserable to coo; it can only howl. It howls against its fate—“that in which it is and that in which it is established”—asking how it can maintain an identity as a dove without a dove’s necessities—light and air and a bush to nest in. The pressure of the last days, and the certainty of perpetual imprisonment “deep beneath” the level of natural life, drive Stevens to describe himself as both dove and man, to represent an overlap in which spirit and body are separate but identical:
Brooder, brooder, deep beneath its walls—
A small howling of the dove
Makes something of the little there,
The little and the dark, and that
In which it is and that in which
It is established. There the dove
Makes this small howling, like a thought
That howls in the mind or like a man
Who keeps seeking out his identity
In that which is and is established. . . . It howls
Of the great sizes of an outer bush
And the great misery of the doubt of it,
Of stripes of silver that are strips
Like slits across a space, a place
And state of being large and light.
There is this bubbling before the sun,
This howling at one’s ear, too far
For daylight and too near for sleep.
Five times the howl of inarticulate pain sounds out, five times afflicting the poet’s ear, keeping him from sleeping yet not ushering in any dawn. If “The Plain Sense of Things” and “Madame La Fleurie” occur in deathly silence, and “The Region November” in a place of inhuman sound uttered by unintelligible trees, “The Dove in Spring” takes place in the moment of torture when only a wordless cry of misery can burst from the spirit, in a howling recurring again and again until consciousness itself is only that animal outcry of the imprisoned libido. There is no ending of the cry, neither by sleep nor by the arrival of dawn. No bird is supposed to “howl”: it is a violation of its vocation to musical utterance. Stevens’s dove of the spirit has no chinks and no light in her bodily dungeon; hers are only imagined chinks, stripes and strips and slits of another space, an inaccessible region large and light. The howling of the dove “makes something of the little there,” but “something” has the same unintelligible linguistic indefiniteness as the howl.
We have seen Stevens’s last look at the repetitive stasis of age in “The Plain Sense of Things” and “The Region November,” and his last look at the horror of live burial in “Madame La Fleurie” and “The Dove in Spring.” Even in these last looks at the worst, life demands that the poet, because he is still alive, intuit some cognitive mitigation: the rat comes out to see, life is taught the new tree-language of “deeplier, loudlier,” the stars evoke a lullaby of requiem, and the dove yearns for her lonely imaginings of a better place. Besides the two Stevensian premises of the end-stage already described, stasis and horror, there is, as I mentioned earlier, a third premise, a third structure of reality imagined by Stevens’s last looks. Against the worst moments—of absence, stasis, wordlessness, and horror—Stevens calls on life and the memory of life for a compensating structure more powerful than the rat, the maternal star-requiem, or the dreamed-of great bush. My example of Stevens’s entropic structure and compensating counter-structure is Part I of “The Rock,” Stevens’s title poem for the last grouping of verses in the Collected Poems. Stevens entitled Part I of “The Rock” Seventy Years Later. This is Stevens’s seventieth-birthday poem, a retrospective examination of his biblically long life. At first, he colorlessly reviews his past—the house of his parents (still extant, but empty, the inhabitants dead), his animal freedom in childhood, his music on the guitar, his early poems, and the embrace of marriage; in retrospect it all seems distant, unreal, impossibly removed. Who knew, in youth, that falling in love was not one’s own doing but merely an evolutionary imperative, the sun’s way of keeping itself content? The rescue by love seemed so lucky: you made your way from your parents’ house to the edge of your field, and your beloved found her way from her parents’ house to the edge of her field, and at the border you fell into each other’s arms. Or so it seemed at the time; but now? Is there a truer description descried by age?
The past that had seemed so certain and solid is now declared, by the poet at seventy, to be wholly deceptive, an illusion invented to deny actuality. Stevens’s theme generates here the first of two sorts of sentences in the poem. The first set is brittle, aphoristic, and brief:
It is an illusion that we were ever alive,
Lived in the houses of mothers, arranged ourselves
By our own motions in a freedom of air.Regard the freedom of seventy years ago.
It is no longer air. The houses still stand,
Though they are rigid in rigid emptiness.Even our shadows, their shadows, no longer remain.
The lives these lived in the mind are at an end.
They never were. . . . The sounds of the guitarWere not and are not. Absurd. The words spoken
Were not and are not. It is not to be believed.
Having denied the reality of his childhood and his music, the poet extends his denials even to romantic love, but as he speaks of love, the sentences, instead of shrinking as they had done earlier, begin to lengthen:
The meeting at noon at the edge of the field seems like
An invention, an embrace between one desperate clod
And another in a fantastic consciousness,
In a queer assertion of humanity:A theorem proposed between the two—
Two figures in a nature of the sun,
In the sun’s design of its own happiness. . . .
Stevens’s unqualified assertions at the beginning of this poem are the most extreme he has ever made, doing violence to life, his own above all: “It is an illusion that we were ever alive.” He has been speaking in a posthumous voice, seeing even his past marriage as a theorem: a geometric hypothesis that two things equal to a third thing, marriage, are equal to each other—or something of that sort. Everything now is denatured, stripped of vitality, emptied out. The style that Stevens evolves to express this absence of life juggles with words such as “illusion,” “no longer,” “emptiness,” and “at an end”: these combine with the copulas “were not and are not” to extirpate from existence any nouns—houses, freedom, shadows, lives, sounds, words—as soon as they move into visibility on the page. The sentences are curt; the commentary scornful: “Absurd”; “It is not to be believed.”
But this poem—the most nihilistic in Stevens’s work so far—begins to wake into a peculiar momentum as soon as the poet entertains the idea of the sun’s cosmic sponsorship of marriage. Stevens begins to think of the universe’s impersonal nothingness as having a will. It wills to create, against its own eternity, transience; against its own lifelessness, life; against its permanent cold, warmth. It is the mobile universe itself that sponsors the illusion he has been denigrating: the universe, by means of the sun, creates spring, and leaves, and lilacs, and blooming, and the musk of sex, until its own cold permanence is kindled into spring activity, “an incessant being alive.” The man and his wife were
Two figures in a nature of the sun,
In the sun’s design of its own happiness,As if nothingness contained a métier,
A vital assumption, an impermanence
In its permanent cold, an illusion so desiredThat the green leaves came and covered the high rock,
That the lilacs came and bloomed, like a blindness cleaned,
Exclaiming bright sight, as it was satisfied,In a birth of sight.
As Stevens recalls his youth—the ecstatic flowering and sexual warmth of spring, the cleansing of his earlier blindness of adolescent isolation, the brightness and satisfaction radiating as he beholds the beloved—his former retrospective dismissals vanish, and he is once again, even at the canonical age of seventy, deep in the moment of embrace, the past moment now not looked at from a frigid distance, as before, but conveyed in the heady immersion of recovered sensation, an ecstatic instance of recollected emotion.
The sentence generating this resurrective memory contends passionately against the desiccation of the earlier syntax of non-existence. Beginning with the meeting at noon, a single long sentence cascades down the page, gaining momentum as it goes, with explanatory phrases, multiple objects, nouns in apposition, successive verbals (“came and covered,” “came and bloomed,” “exclaiming bright sight”), and continued repetition now not static but dynamic (“Exclaiming bright sight . . . / In a birth of sight”). The transformation will not stop until it is finished, until the formerly despised “desperate clods,” male and female, are restored to their youthful senses. Once the feelings of the ardent past have resuscitated themselves, the poet can judge the aliveness of sexual desire differently, not with the “Absurd” of chilly contempt, but with a participatory reprise:
The blooming and the musk
Were being alive, an incessant being alive,
A particular of being, that gross universe.
The universe is no longer “nothingness” but being, a “gross” universe offering flowering, the scent of sex, fertility, beauty, and abundance. There is no better example in lyric poetry of the recapturing of kindled emotion as one relives the sense of being young and being in love; and as Stevens reenters that moment, he revives his consciousness from its former remote and almost posthumous state; the knowledge of death is for a moment eclipsed, not by further illusion (as of an afterlife) but by actual sense memory. The gratitude with which Stevens realizes that he can still feel his past, not merely survey it, closes his seventieth-birthday retrospect. Style has respected—by its mutation around the hinge of repudiated but then resuscitated marriage—both the aridity of age and the elasticity of regained vitality. This last look can hold at its interface both contempt and joy.
There are many more last looks in the collection called The Rock, and they crowd my memory asking for a recognition that space will not allow. When Stevens said, “Farewell, my days,” in the poem “Farewell without a Guitar,” he was repeating, with the word “farewell,” a diction echoing his English predecessors. But in the poems I have singled out here, he finds, in the tragic end-stage of life, modern and disturbing styles of farewell, both structural and stylistic, which delineate not only the stasis, horror, and unreality of that end-stage but also its inquisitive appetite for knowledge, its lullabies in the midst of burial, and, even in its worst mental rigor mortis, the unexpected and solacing sensual warmth of memory.