Published in a limited edition in July 1935 by Alcestis Press, then in a trade edition in October 1936 by Alfred A. Knopf, with three new poems (“Farewell to Florida,” “Ghosts as Cocoons,” “A Postcard from the Volcano”).
Stevens returned to continuous poetic activity only in 1933, as is clear from this book’s publishing history. The 1936 collection gathers thirty-six poems, twenty-eight of which were first published between 1933 and 1936; one was first published in 1932, one in 1930, and one (“Academic Discourse at Havana”) in 1923.
Stevens wrote a comment for the dust jacket of the Knopf edition, observing that the current “economic changes, involving political and social changes” are changes that “raise questions of political and social order.” Inevitably, a poet will be involved in such questions, but Ideas of Order, Stevens explained, also concerns order in a wider sense. His first example is “the general sense of order,” especially when established ideas are challenged. His second is “the idea of order created by individual concepts,” as in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” and the third is “the idea of order arising from the practice of any art.”
Stevens called Ideas of Order “a book of pure poetry” (ibid.), as he defended the role of the imagination in difficult times like the thirties. (For the full statement, see OP 222–23, LOA 997.) By “pure poetry,” he meant something wider than the strict definition of Henri Brémond in his influential 1926 book, La poésie pure. (See his discussion of Brémond in “The Irrational Element in Poetry” VI, OP 227–28, LOA 785–86, 1936.) Art or scholarship as a reminder of normal civilized life is a motif during turbulent times, including this period (see, e.g., Graham Greene, The Confidential Agent).
For the words “order” and “disorder” in Ideas of Order, see “Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz” and “The Idea of Order at Key West.” (The Concordance provides a listing for all the poetry.) There are scattered remarks on “order” and “disorder” in Stevens’s letters. They include the quotation, “ ‘man’s passionate disorder,’ ” and Stevens’s subsequent interest in disorder, though personally he disliked it (L 300, 1935). On “competent” poems as introducing order, and on an individual sense of order, see L 293 (1935). On the “order of the spirit,” that is, “one’s own fortitude of spirit” or the true “ ‘feste [sic] Burg,’ ” see L 403 (1942); lacking such fortitude, “one lives in chaos,” Stevens added. Compare also “A Collect of Philosophy” on “the habit of probing for an integration” as “part of the general will to order” (OP 276, LOA 862, 1951).
In any remarks about the word “order,” context is crucial. “Order” is a curious word in that it can evoke contrary emotions, depending on the associations. The order in a police state, the order in a well-run household, biological orders, and so on. How do we react? A good many people had ideas of order in the thirties, as Stevens knew. He had some of his own. And lest readers take a thesis-ridden approach to Ideas of Order, Stevens mentioned that the arrangement of the poems was simply “based on contrasts.” Some poems had nothing to do with “a phase of order”; “after all, the thing is not a thesis” (L 279, 1935).
Farewell to Florida
Contemporary Poetry and Prose 3 (July 1936), added to the 1936 ed.; CP 117–18, LOA 97–98.
An impassioned farewell to Florida, in which the speaker protests too much. A clause with the word “except” in stanza III shows the struggle. Poetically, this is a farewell to Florida as Stevens’s erotic muse. He testified in 1943 that he used to find Florida “violently affective” (L 450). Generically “Farewell to Florida” is a valediction (see Fowler, index), where any convention of praise is much modulated by Stevens’s ambiguity. The poem is marked by telling repetitions and a strongly pulsing ship-on-sea rhythm.
I
“Key West”: as the island at the outermost tip of Florida, one edge of the country; cf. the American seashore poem in Whitman, Eliot, Ammons, etc.
II
“Her mind had bound me round”: at the end, the poem moves toward another binding of the mind; with the conjunction of “bind” and a ship’s “deck” in stanza IV, cf. Ulysses (a Stevens persona), bound to the mast in order to hear the Sirens’ song and not die.
III
“trees like bones”: the correct text, as in LOA.
Added to the 1936 ed.; CP 119, LOA 98–99.
Written at a time when, as Stevens put it, there was a “profound desire to be released from all our misfortunes” (L 347, 1940). Both the short sentences and the variety of grammatical moods work well for this subject.
TITLE: where are the cocoons? Both ghosts and cocoons are commonly white, but a ghost is an apparition of past life, while a cocoon encloses future life; see the ghost in l. 16, and the final couplet, appropriate for bride or cocoon.
“The grass is in seed”: a trope for “Those to be born,” i.e., “the people of the future,” who, Stevens commented, “need to know something of the happiness of life” (ibid.)—not something generally apparent in 1936.
“the bride”: i.e., the poem’s “sun and music” (l. 6), which Stevens associated with love and happiness (ibid.).
“It is easy to say to those bidden—”: echoing the biblical language of the parable of the marriage feast, “Tell them which are bidden … come unto the marriage” (Matt. 22:4); the parable suggests what is broken off here, and perhaps a darker lesson as well.
“butcher, seducer”: Stevens gave as an example of the “butcher, seducer,” etc., “the inept politician”; he associated the figures with “evil and unhappiness” (ibid.), sketching his fable in broad lines.
“pearled and pasted, bloomy-leaved”: a bridal figure, also a cocoon at the stage when the chrysalis is close to emerging as a butterfly; both are figures of hope.
Sailing after Lunch
Alcestis 1 (spring 1935), with “Meditation Celestial & Terrestrial,” “Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu,” “The American Sublime,” and “Mozart, 1935,” all under the title “Five Poems”; the first poem of Ideas of Order in the Alcestis edition of 1935; CP 120–21, LOA 99–100.
Sailing and, more generally, boating often provide tropes for poetry, as in Rimbaud, “Le Bâteau ivre,” or Jay Macpherson, The Boatman. For sailing as voyage for an aging writer, contrast Emerson’s “Terminus.” For the wind as inspiration, see “To the Roaring Wind,” which closes Harmonium. Note how the sailboat trope avoids the either / or of nature or art. Sailing is an art that learns to read nature and to work with it, as in T. S. Eliot’s sailboat in The Waste Land V. The poem uses irregular end-rhyme and pronounced stress, imitating sailboat rhythms, notably in the last stanza where the wind catches the sail. Nonetheless, the poem does not appear to be fully realized.
“pejorative”: Stevens noted that people tend to speak of the romantic in “a pejorative sense.” But, he added in 1935, “poetry is essentially romantic,” though the romantic of poetry must be continually renewed (L 277, and see L 279). See also remarks on the romantic in “A Poet That Matters” (on Marianne Moore, OP 217–22, LOA 774–80, 1935) and in SPBS 31 (1934); “Sailing after Lunch” and “A Poet That Matters” are said to express the same thing (L 282, 1935). Stevens later abandoned the term, “romantic,” arguing forcefully for the imagination as “one of the great human powers,” and setting the romantic against it. “It is to the imagination what sentimentality is to feeling. It is a failure of the imagination precisely as sentimentality is a failure of feeling” (NA 138–39, LOA 727–28, 1948).
“My old boat goes round on a crutch … under way”: because there is no wind or a different tack is needed?
“hear the poet’s prayer”: cf. Pope on Orpheus, “He sung, and hell consented / To hear the Poet’s prayer” (“Ode on St. Cecilia’s Day” 83–84).
“The romantic”: see note on “pejorative,” above.
“my spirit”: again, recalling etymologically the wind that a sailboat needs, and the inspiration that a poet needs (Lat. spiritus, “breath”).
“pupil”: close to a pun on the pupil of the eye, given the wheel; the “peoplepupil” punning is a little distracting.
“transcendence”: with the renewed romantic, “the most casual things take on transcendence” (L 277, 1935); the adjective “slight” modifies an Emersonian use of the word.
Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz
New Republic 83 (22 May 1935); CP 121–22, LOA 100–101.
A strong elegiac lyric, echoing and referring to Stevens’s earlier writing, and indicating new directions for his work more persuasively than “Farewell to Florida.” The poem ends on “shadows,” a weighted word for Stevens.
TITLE: compare the use of “strain” in “Peter Quince at the Clavier.”
“desire … empty of shadows”: cf. “What I feel … desiring you, / Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk, / Is music” (ibid.).
“mountain-minded Hoon”: see “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”; Hoon, a visionary self for Stevens, is now identified as a solitary, hardly surprising for someone of his gifts.
“sudden mobs … sudden clouds”: cf. “Farewell to Florida,” stanza IV.
“Requiring order beyond their speech”: cf. “ ‘But play, you must, / A tune beyond us, yet ourselves’ ” (MBG I).
Dance of the Macabre Mice
New Republic 83 (5 June 1935); CP 123, LOA 101.
One of Stevens’s statue poems, heavily ironic in the “hungry dance” of these 1930s mice over the Founder of the State.
Meditation Celestial & Terrestrial
Alcestis 1 (spring 1935); see note on “Sailing after Lunch,” above; CP 123–24, LOA 101–2.
A poem on returning spring, like “The Sun This March,” where exaltation and joy indicate a personal as well as a seasonal return.
TITLE: note the effect of the unusual ampersand rather than “and.”
“in the jungle”: in the tropics of Central and South America, where many warblers spend the winter.
“hilarious trees”: given the next line, a strong etymological sense of “cheer, hilarity” (Lat. hilaritas), and thereby a memory of a standard epithet for Aphrodite, “laughing” or “laughter-loving Aphrodite” (e.g., Homer, Iliad XIV. 211).
“the drunken mother”: punning on “drunken” as intoxication with life and providing food (cf. “In the Carolinas” for a very different view of the earth-mother).
Lions in Sweden
Alcestis 1 (Oct. 1934), after “The Idea of Order at Key West,” followed by “Evening without Angels,” “Nudity at the Capital,” “Nudity in the Colonies,” “A Fish-Scale Sunrise,” “Delightful Evening,” “What They Call Red Cherry Pie,” all under “Eight Poems”; the first seven were dispersed throughout Ideas of Order, and the last (OP 68, LOA 561) omitted.
A discourse on majestic images that affect us, cast as an address to one Swenson (see below). Stevens takes a lion as the prototypical such image. He is recalling Dufy’s illustrations for the original edition of Apollinaire’s Le Bestiare, 1919.
“Swenson … bank”: the name is probably adopted from one known in 1934 because of a banking scandal. Eric P. Swenson, CEO of the National City Bank of New York, was the son of a prominent Swedish financier (Filreis [1994], 70); the scandal may have been the starting-point for this poem.
“sovereigns of the soul / And savings bank”: a conjunction like R. H. Tawney’s in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, punning on “sovereign” as a ruler and a coin.
“Fides”: (Lat.) “Faith,” one of the three Christian virtues, along with hope and charity. Fides, sculpted for a savings bank, has a different kind of faith in mind, as with any financial institution using words derived from fides (e.g., “fidelity”).
“Justitia”: (Lat.) justice, one of the four classical virtues, along with (usually) prudence, temperance, and fortitude (“Fortitudo,” l. 7).
“Patientia, forever soothing wounds”: the Lat. root (patio, patere, passus, to suffer) gives us the words “patience” and also “passion” in the sense of suffering (known chiefly through the Passion of Christ); both meanings are in play here.
“Still hankers after sovereign images”: cf. “Some Friends from Pascagoula.”
“Monsieur Dufy’s Hamburg”: referring to Apollinaire: “O lion, malheureuse image, / Des rois chers lamentablement, / Tu ne nais maintenant qu’en cage / A Hamburg, chez les Allemands” (O lion, unhappy image, / Lamentably, of dear kings, / Now you are born only in a cage / In Hamburg, among the Germans” (Le Bestiare).
How To Live. What To Do
Direction 1 (spring 1935); CP 125–26, LOA 102–3.
A poem on the true heroic, centered on the image of a rock. In 1935, Stevens called it his favorite poem from Ideas of Order, “because it so definitely represents my way of thinking” (L 293); cf. note on “Anglais Mort à Florence.” It is not a general favorite, however, partly because of its doctrinaire tone and somewhat weak troping. Stevens called “A Fading of the Sun” “in a way, a companion piece” to this poem (L 295, 1935).
“No chorister, nor priest”: as elsewhere in the poem, Stevens makes clear this is a rock without any religious connotation, whether from the Hebrew Scriptures, the Christian Bible, or elsewhere.
Some Friends from Pascagoula
CP 126–27, LOA 103–4.
A genuine “sovereign” image (unlike those in “Lions in Sweden”) for two African-Americans from Mississippi. The subject is like Tennyson’s in his well-known “The Eagle,” filtered through the experience of two human fellow-creatures of the habitat, with stage directions. The poem is “neither merely descriptive nor symbolical,” Stevens wrote. If someone lives “without existing conventions (beliefs, etc.),” such a person “depends for ideas of a new and noble order on ‘noble imagery.’ ” This poem tries to provide such imagery “in a commonplace occurrence” (L 349, 1940). In 1942, Stevens reflected on the word “noble” in “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” (NA 1–36, LOA 643–65).
TITLE: Pascagoula, Mississippi, at the mouth of the Pascagoula River, on the Gulf of Mexico, a likely setting for a bald eagle (see their range in Peterson, A Field Guide to the Birds, and elsewhere); one of the few references to American place-names in Ideas of Order, in contrast to Harmonium.
“kinky clan”: the tone precludes irony in what is probably an attempt at local color, but is distracting at best.
Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu
Alcestis 1 (spring 1935); see note on “Sailing after Lunch,” above; CP 127–28, LOA 104.
A more memorable poem of Stevens’s way of thinking than “How To Live. What To Do.” One evening, Stevens decided “to describe a deathbed farewell under the new regime.” He was very pleased with the result, he said, then added cautiously, “for the moment” (L 273, 1935). Note the skilful use of participles and gerunds.
TITLE: “Adieu”: a final good-bye, as against an everyday good-bye, which is “au revoir.”
“the ever-jubilant weather”: not in the least symbolic, as Stevens affirmed.
Human beings “are physical beings in a physical world.” We enjoy the weather as “one of the unphilosophical realities,” and the “state of the weather soon becomes a state of mind” (L 348–49, 1940).
The Idea of Order at Key West
Alcestis 1 (Oct. 1934); see note on “Lions in Sweden,” above; CP 128–30, LOA 105–6.
The title poem for this collection and its most powerful, marking Stevens’s return to poetry with a new, strong voice. The poem lays old ghosts and spirits, including old views of a genius loci (see note on “beyond the genius of the sea,” below), moving beyond the relation of art and nature in Harmonium’s opening poems. It also repossesses Florida as a place of voice, after Stevens’s troubled relation with her, recalled in the opening poem of Ideas of Order. Stevens wrote that in this poem, “life has ceased to be a matter of chance,” in contrast to “The Comedian as the Letter C” (L 293, 1935). The first three stanzas each open with a declaration that is a thesis, emphasized by making sentence coincide with line. Their argument is tight, their rhythm is ocean-like. The poem then settles into two longer verse paragraphs, expanding on the opening theses, before addressing the auditor in two stanzas marked by increasing intensity.
“She”: an unknown singer, happily appearing as if she is a pure force of nature (cf. Wordsworth’s singing Highland Lass in “The Solitary Reaper”) but rejected as such at the start.
“beyond the genius of the sea”: genius loci or spirit of the place. On the history of the word “genius,” from an “attending spirit” whether for good or ill, through a “spirit of a specific place,” to the modern attenuated meaning, see C. S. Lewis, Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1966), 169–74. Line 1 moves at once against one romantic view of nature and art, as in Byron’s stanzas from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, beginning “Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean—roll!” (IV, stanzas 179–83).
“Like a body wholly body, fluttering / Its empty sleeves”: not a spirit without a body, but an inverse ghost, recalling death’s traditional wide-sleeved garb.
“ever-hooded”: descriptively, the shape of a large wave cresting and about to break, as in Hokusai’s famous print; iconographically, again recalling death’s traditional garb (cf. “Time is the hooded enemy” in “The Pure Good of Theory” I); conceptually, reminding us we cannot absolutely know outside reality, here “the veritable ocean.”
“The sea was not a mask. No more was she”: moving against any symbolic or sacramental reading of sea or woman as charged with hidden significance; moving even against sea or woman as persona (Lat., actor’s mask).
“medleyed sound”: moving against any hearing of human song and sea-sounds as one medley, partaking naturally in this form.
“grinding water”: on the shore, as in “I heard the shingle grinding in the surge” (Tennyson, The Holy Grail 808); also recalling (through similar sounds) Arnold’s well-known sea in “Dover Beach” with its “grating roar,” while moving against his melancholy late-Romantic stance; cf. other tropes for the sound of the sea earlier in, e.g., “Hibiscus by the Sleeping Shore,” “Fabliau of Florida,” and also in “Doctor of Geneva.”
“gasping wind”: cf. all the tropes for wind in Harmonium, and note how Stevens avoids any ready tropes here, especially any involving inspiration.
“She was the maker”: moving against the idea of the poet as inspired bard and prophet, and to an old description of the poet as maker, whether as Gk. poietes (maker, poet) or from OE sc(e)apan (to shape); cf. “artificer” later, and the repeated uses of “maker” and “made.” In 1947, Stevens wrote that a friend’s poems disclosed “your character as a Schöpfer, as they say down home” (letter to Byron Vazakas, 7 Mar. 1947, Beinecke Library).
“Whose spirit is this? we said”: as the singer sings and walks alone, without benefit of an inspiring wind or other such breath, her listeners might well ask.
“her voice that made / The sky acutest at its vanishing”: “acute” is a strong word for Stevens; in his edition of Horace’s Odes, T. E. Page says that acuta (Ode III.iv) is the Lat. equivalent for the standard Gk. epithet for the muses, ligeia. Stevens refers to Horace (L 104, 1907; 377, 1940) and quotes him (SP 143). Cf. “the power of the acutest poet” (NA 32, LOA 663, 1942), “the acute intelligence of the imagination” (NA 61, LOA 681, 1943), the degree of perception where the real and the imagined are one “possibly accessible to the … acutest poet” (“Adagia,” OP 192, LOA 906). Here, note also that an acute angle in geometry vanishes altogether at its acutest.
“Ramon Fernandez”: although Ramon Fernandez was a well-known critic, published in France and in T. S. Eliot’s New Criterion, Stevens claimed that he did not intend to refer to him. He did know of him and had read some of his work, but (he said) simply “chose two everyday Spanish names” (L 798, 1947, and see 798n., 823).
“the lights in the fishing boats … Mastered the night,” etc.: in 1911 Stevens observed a similar effect by the docks in New York, with the stars and “the lanterns on the masts [that] flickered” (L 171). Note the use of ordinary working boats in this visionary scene—another type of sailing craft to add to those that open Ideas of Order.
“Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles”: on the fishing boats; also as seen against the sky and the sea, and so fixing the earth’s zones and poles.
“Oh! Blessed rage for order”: one of Stevens’s best-known phrases, at first sounding like an oxymoron, but hardly so, as the next line makes clear (“rage to order words of the sea”). Stevens’s passion for his art remained fierce, and he did not take tepid artists (or tepid anyone) seriously. In his work with the word “rage,” a word for the sea biblically and elsewhere, Stevens turns his back on Crispin’s timidity in the face of nature at its most forceful. See note to Ideas of Order for other possible contexts for the phrase.
“ghostlier demarcations”: the context suggests for “ghostlier” the root meaning of “spiritual” (i.e., “of the spirit”), a strong word in Stevens; cf. also the poem’s earlier ghostly figures. The lines of latitude and longitude that mark the earth’s “zones” and “poles” are also “ghostly,” for they are seen neither on land nor on sea. Yet they are crucially connected with reality, for they help us to master it, as those on the fishing boats well know. So also with a good poet’s words.
“keener sounds”: also associated with keening, as it might be, by a ghost.
The American Sublime
Alcestis 1 (spring 1935); see note on “Sailing after Lunch,” above; CP 130–31, LOA 106–7.
By way of contrast with the preceding poem, a slight, sardonic poem on the lack of an American sublime. A sublime landscape is all very well, but the true sublime rests in the spirit.
“General Jackson”: General Andrew Jackson (1767–1845), later president, whose statue in Washington is on Lafayette Square, facing the White House; Stevens’s opinion of the statue was low (“there is not the slightest trace of imagination,” NA 11, LOA 648, 1942), but here it represents at least some attempt at an American sublime.
“wine … bread”: the food of the Eucharist or communion, and also traditionally simple, basic sustenance.
Mozart, 1935
Ibid.; CP 131–32, LOA 107–8.
The poem, said Stevens, concerns “the status of the poet in a disturbed society, or, for that matter, in any society” (L 292, 1935)—a subject close to his heart. Paradoxically, the need for art during times of crisis becomes more pressing. Mozart was not a personal favorite (L 604, 1948), but he is needed here for, e.g., the paradox of young and old (see below). “Mozart, 1935” provides an oblique partial answer to the preceding poem.
“hoo-hoo-hoo,” etc.: four echoic sounds, evoking thirties music.
“Be thou the voice”: anaphoric repetition recalling Shelley’s “Be thou me, impetuous one,” from “Ode to the West Wind,” also echoed in NSF II.VI, but here a wintry wind rather than Shelley’s autumnal one.
“Not you. Be thou … Be seated, thou”: the artist qua artist takes on the mantle of a “thou,” an older and more formal “you,” asserting the possibility of an American sublime.
“We may return to Mozart. / He was young, and we, we are old”: the ever-young and ageless music of Mozart, in contrast to the ongoing, grinding burdens of the Great Depression.
Snow and Stars
New Act 2 (June 1933); CP 133, LOA 108.
Attempted humorous invective against often-admired winter effects, somewhat wearing in its ill humor. The tetrameter tercets come with with banging rhymes and rhythms.
“grackles sing”: the discordant sounds of grackle song are not happy in Stevens (cf. “Banal Sojourn,” “Autumn Refrain”).
“avant”: (Fr.) “before.”
“spiss … spissantly”: obs. “spiss” (thick, dense); cf. rare “spissitude” (density) and “inspissation” (used by T. S. Eliot, “Dante,” 1929, Selected Essays 240).
The Sun This March
New Republic 62 (16 Apr. 1930); CP 133–34, LOA 108–9.
A remarkable poem on returning poetic voice, troping on light and sound. The closing petition, in imperative mood and a full rhyme, is especially memorable.
“conceive”: also with an intimation of physical conceiving.
“turn … turning … returns”: see note on the word “turn” in “Domination of Black, above.”
“Cold is our element”: echoing Shelley’s Prometheus, “Pain is my element,” but not the full context: “as hate is thine; / Ye rend me now: I care not” (Prometheus Unbound I. 477–78).
“Rabbi, rabbi”: see biography on the rabbi figure in Stevens’s work.
“fend”: “defend,” an archaic or poetic use (Emerson, “Boston Hymn,” 1863).
“savant”: as rabbi, and because “poetry is the scholar’s art” (“Adagia,” OP 193, LOA 906).
Direction 1 (Oct. 1934) with “Hieroglyphica” (not in Ideas of Order), under “Two Poems”; CP 134–35, LOA 109–10.
The botanist makes a happy persona for a poet, as the botanist also “live[s] by leaves” (see note on “leaves” in “Domination of Black,” above). Stevens added the following poem in 1935, so as to make one of his paired exercises. Here: place a poet-botanist on the top of a high mountain in 1934, and examine the results of that examination. This poem explores yet further the possibility of an American sublime.
“Claude”: the painter Claude Lorraine (1600–1682), as Stevens confirmed (L 293, 1935); Claude’s classical ideas of landscape beauty were dominant until the time of, e.g., Constable and Turner in England.
“apostrophes are forbidden on the funicular”: Stevens could use apostrophe himself (“An Apostrophe to Vincentine”). To forbid an apostrophe like “O Muse” while surveying a standard sublime panorama is another matter. The tone is mixed, but the argument clear, in this funny memorable line.
“Marx has ruined Nature, / For the moment”: through Soviet control of art that likes capital- n Nature, and more widely through political judgments inappropriately applied to such art. See L 292 on how Marxism might “destroy the existing sentiment of the marvelous.” If this should happen, Stevens believed that Marxism would create another such sentiment; he was right (1935).
“in Claude … pillars … arches … composition”: his invention, the Claude glass, provided a framing device like the viewfinder in a modern camera; his paintings emphasized the panoramic effect (cf. line 1) by including framing structures like pillars and arches.
“riva”: (It.) bank, shore.
Botanist on Alp (No. 2)
CP 135–36, LOA 110.
By way of contrast, a somewhat doctrinaire poem on the familiar theme of leaving behind religious views of heaven and earth, and finding “earthier” satisfaction. Glittering crosses lose their symbolic meaning and become “merely … a mirror of mere delight,” in a pronounced series of puns corresponding to “tum, tum-ti-tum” and introducing the first “de-light” pun in Ideas of Order. Note the different forms of the two paired poems.
Evening without Angels
Alcestis 1 (Oct. 1934); see note on “Lions in Sweden,” above; CP 136–38, LOA 111–12.
Revisiting the argument of “Sunday Morning,” sometimes insistently. As in the preceding poem, light is purely earthly light, from the sun, with no religious connotation whatever, in a world entirely bare of angels. Old ghosts and spirits are also laid, as elsewhere in Ideas of Order.
Mario Rossi: contemporary Italian philosopher; the epigraph is from Rossi’s “Essay on the Character of Swift” (1932) in his Life and Letters (SPBS 34–35), though Stevens did not at first remember where he found it (L 347, 1940).
“where the voice … moon”: cf. the last two lines with the opening poem of Transport to Summer, “God Is Good. It is a Beautiful Night.”
The Brave Man
Harkness Hoot 4 (Nov. 1933), with “A Fading of the Sun,” under “Two Poems”; CP 138, LOA 112.
A striking personification of the sun and by implication of night-time fears. The fourth stanza on “fears of my bed” describes the common enough night experience, where things look much worse than on waking. The poem’s five sentences coincide with its five tercets.
A Fading of the Sun
Ibid.; CP 139, LOA 112–13.
The point of the poem, Stevens wrote, was that “we should look to ourselves for help,” rather than crying to the gods or to God. He disliked any sense of the “abasement” of human nature, even such crying for help (L 295, 1935). See note on “How To Live. What To Do,” above. The poem uses occasional pronounced rhyme and simple diction, as if offering a lesson. It is the first of three somewhat didactic, somewhat weaker poems.
Westminster Magazine 23 (autumn 1934), with “Gallant Château” and “Polo Ponies Practicing” (the latter uncollected during Stevens’s lifetime), under “Three Poems”; CP 140, LOA 113–14.
Stevens reluctantly and a little clumsily abstracted the sense of the poem: “everything depends on its sanction, and when its sanction is lost that is the end of it.” But, he added quickly, the poem is what is printed on the page. The absent archbishop personifies or embodies a world (L 347–48, 1940). The poem emphasizes gray through repetition and rhyme.
“robes folded in camphor”: to preserve the stored robes from being eaten by moths.
“Among fireflies”: a tiny, flickering, natural light, as against divine light or earthly light given by God in “Let there be light” (Gen. 1:3); as against Milton’s great invocation to light, PL III.1–55; as against the archbishop’s view of things.
Winter Bells
CP 141, LOA 114.
As the strength of the church declined, Stevens thought that it might come to mean simply propriety for many people—about on a par with a capon and Florida as part of living. The Jew was conceived as a man of “exacting intelligence” who nonetheless “drifts from fasting to feasting.” Stevens added that “it is a habit of mind with me to be thinking of some substitute for religion” (L 348, 1940). In light of the last sentence, “Winter Bells” may be seen as an exploration of the subject of “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,” though a rather ineffectual one.
“To be flogged”: figuratively, as in “fasting” in Stevens’s commentary above, but also a reminder of times when Jews were flogged for their beliefs.
“mille fiori”: (It.) a thousand flowers, also a kind of glass.
“regulations of his spirit”: “an allusion to Descartes” (L 348, 1940), the first of several references and allusions to Descartes in Stevens’s poetry and prose, here to Regulae ad directionem ingenii. Descartes is a figure for human reason in NSF I.IV, though he was also a sufficiently orthodox Christian, and so an appropriate figure here. See also “Life on a Battleship” (OP 106–9, LOA 198–201, 1939) and “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet” (NA 55–56, LOA 677, 1943). (Note with respect to the latter that Boileau’s remark on Descartes is not from Freud’s The Future of an Illusion as Stevens supposed. It comes from F. W. Bateson, English Poetry and the English Language, 56; Stevens made a note of it in his copy, now at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Library.)
Academic Discourse at Havana
Broom 5 (Nov. 1923), as “Discourse in a Cantina at Havana”; under this title, Hound and Horn 3 (fall 1929); the earliest version, submitted on request but without result, was longer (L 335, 1938); CP 142–45, LOA 115–17.
A poem from the era of “The Comedian as the Letter C,” with a similar tone in places (e.g., III, “Jot these milky matters down”) and a similar disjunction between exuberant rhetoric and thematic despondence. As such, the poem is rather disruptive in this collection. Litz quotes an unpublished letter to R. P. Blackmur of 18 Oct. 1930, saying that the poem was omitted from the 1931 Harmonium, “since it seems to be cramped” (143). Stevens later called the poem “rather pulpy” and lacking “siccity” (Tate’s word), which he liked (letter to Allen Tate, 1943, see SPBS 33). Stevens visited Havana twice in 1923 (L 234–36, 1923; 483–84, 1945).
TITLE: another generic title; cf. the kind and degree of irony with that in, e.g., “Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas.”
I
“A difference from nightingales, / Jehovah and the great sea-worm”: as in, e.g., T. S. Eliot? A parodic glance at older sublime themes, e.g., of “the great sea-worm” or biblical Leviathan.
II
“Life is an old casino in a park”: cf. Laforgue on existence as an abandoned casino: “Hier l’orchestre attaqua / Sa dernière polka. // Oh! L’automne, l’automne! / Les casinos / Qu’on abandonne / Remisent leurs pianos!(Yesterday the orchestra attacked / Its last polka. / Oh! autumn, autumn! The casinos / We abandon / put back their pianos! “Légende”).
“swans”: as in “Invective against Swans,” a bird emblematic of an old and stale perspective.
“Rouge-Fatima”: Elder Olson recalled from 1951: “He told me that he had originally intended to put in something like Helen of Troy but decided the poor girl was overworked, especially in poetry, and so he thought of another beautiful woman” (the last wife of Bluebeard). Stevens corrected Olson’s mistaken pronunciation to “Fátima.” To a query about “Rouge,” he is said to have replied, “Oh, that’s just to dress her up a bit” (Brazeau, 210).
III
“goober khan”: peanut king; “khan” is an honorific title, once imperial, as in Kubla Khan, whose empire was centered on Mongolia. (Stevens noted the many Chinese in Havana in 1923, including a Chinese peanutvendor [L 235].)
“wench / For whom the towers are built”: probably a variation on the archetypal princess in a tower, familiar from fairy-tales (e.g., “Rumpelstiltskin”) and lyric poems.
IV
“Waken, and watch the moonlight on their floors,” etc.: see the later powerful development in NSF I.III.
“an incantation that the moon defines … an infinite incantation of ourselves”: “cantina” modulates into “incantation” by sound, not etymology (OED “cantina,” “canteen”); re “incantation,” note the old association of moon and enchantment (see Frye, “Charms and Riddles,” Spiritus Mundi [1976]).
Nudity at the Capital
Alcestis 1 (Oct. 1934); see note on “Lions in Sweden,” above; CP 145, LOA 117.
See Stevens’s explication in L 347 (1940). At the end he commented, “The extension of this into statements of principle ought not to be difficult” (L 347, 1940). The last sentence also describes the function of a good epigram. The poem shows masterly, compact play with sound effects.
Nudity in the Colonies
Ibid.
See note on the preceding poem.
“nouveautés”: (Fr.) novelties, innovations.
Re-Statement of Romance
New Republic 82 (6 Mar. 1935); CP 146, LOA 118.
With the opening argument, cf. the opening of “The Idea of Order at Key West.” The strong use of enjambment between stanzas 1 and 2 introduces a “you” quite unexpectedly.
TITLE: as “Re-Statement,” note the “pale light” in the last line and the moon of romance earlier in Stevens’s poetry.
The Reader
New Republic 81 (30 Jan. 1935); CP 146 – 47, LOA 118.
Stevens later observed that he often had in mind “an image of reading a page of a large book” when he was writing a poem (L 642, 1949). With the scene here, cf. “Domination of Black.” This is the first of a series of impressive reader poems.
“shrivelled forms”: cf. autumn’s “scène flétrie” in “New England Verses” XV.
Mud Master
CP 147–48, LOA 119.
Cf. “Frogs Eat Butterflies….” for a similar scene. Note again Stevens’s use of the negative.
“bulging green … Sky-sides of gold”: cf. “Nomad Exquisite.”
“snarls”: both growls and tangles as with a line (also a line of poetry?).
“pickanines”: Stevens thought this form of the word reflected its Spanish root, pequeño, small (Lensing [2001], 219n.).
Anglais Mort à Florence
CP 148–49, LOA 119–20.
A powerful elegiac poem, starting with the memorable one-line opening sentence in regular iambic pentameter. Stevens slowly lengthens the line and introduces repetition, as if within the mind of an aging man. “Most people stand by the aid of philosophy, religion … but a strong spirit (Anglais, etc.) stands by its own strength. Even such a spirit is subject to degeneration” (L 348, 1940). A thrice-repeated line in the last three stanzas acts as a refrain, like a refrain of memory within the Englishman’s brain.
TITLE: (Fr.) An Englishman Dead in Florence.
“the naked moon / Was not the moon he used to see,” etc.: also true for Stevens; a theme best known from Wordsworth’s “Ode: On the Intimations of Immortality,” though experienced there by a younger man.
The Pleasures of Merely Circulating
Smoke 3 (spring 1934); CP 149–50, LOA 120.
On a spectacle of order so huge that it looks like disorder or the fortuitous, see L 348 (1940). Stevens affirmed that, for all its “apparent fortuitousness,” it holds together (ibid.). The light-hearted rhyming effects have a Gilbert-and-Sullivan air, especially given the song, “For he is an Englishman” from H. M. S. Pinafore (“He might have been a Prussian,” etc.). The pleasing, light-hearted effects play against ominous reminders of the thirties, including the different fates of Swedish, German, and Spanish babies.
Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery
Poetry 45 (Feb. 1935); CP 150–58, LOA 121–28.
A fifty-part series of epigrammatic poems, each standing singly, unlike the paired poems of “New England Verses.” Stevens said that most were composed during his walks to and from his office (L 272, 1934). His gift for epigram may be seen especially in III, XVIII, XXV, XXVIII, and L. The series is chiefly unrhymed, though see the effective aaa rhyme in XIV. The poem includes a rare dedication, to Stevens’s Southern friend (see note on title); Powell rightly called the series an olio (a medley or a hodgepodge), thus connecting the form with the title (Brazeau, 100–101).
TITLE: Referring to “the litter that one usually finds in a nigger cemetery”; the phrase was used by Judge Arthur Powell during the preceding winter in Key West (L 272, 1934). The “litter” may have significance, though not to outsiders, for which see, e.g., Faulkner, “Pantaloon in Black” from Go Down, Moses. “Nigger” was a term more widespread at the time, sometimes colloquial, but chiefly disrespectful or contemptuous when used outside African-American English or an imitation of it. The respectful form at the time was “negro,” also in Judge Powell’s reminiscences (Brazeau, 100–101). “Negro” is Stevens’s more usual, though hardly invariable, term in his letters. The poetry uses both, depending on context. See also “Prelude to Objects” and “The News and the Weather.”
III
“eccentric”: note also the mathematical meaning, hence the implicit difference from any view of the world that emphasizes a center.
IV
“rules of the rabbis”: “another allusion to regulations of the spirit” (L 348; see note on “Winter Bells,” above).
VI
In Stevens’s explication, he confirms that “two unrelated ideas” about death are brought together here. First, “we do not die simply.” We are attended, Stevens said, by a figure from which we might well turn away. Second, people should not die like what Stevens calls “a poor parishioner”; people should meet their death “for what it is” (L 349, 1940).
XI
On “the ubiquitous ‘will’ of things” (ibid.).
XII
“Ananke”: the goddess Anagke, or Necessity, in ancient and classical Greek. Stevens made the connection with Horace’s “Necessitas” in Odes I.35 (SPBS 35). Freud uses the word in The Future of an Illusion, and Stevens annotated his 1928 copy in the margins (“
= external reality,” p.93), as well as on the dust-jacket (SPBS 35n.). In a 1934 letter to Stevens, Rossi (see note on “Evening without Angels,” above) talked of the “imperscrutable Ananke” (a “magnificent” adjective, Stevens thought [ibid.]). The word “Ananke” also turns up several times in “Owl’s Clover” (1936, see the Concordance).
“stride”: see note on “striding” in “Domination of Black, above.”
“horror of the frost … hair”: Lat. horreo (whence “horror”), when used of hair, means “to stand on end”; also an echo of “hoar-frost.”
“Gemütlichkeit”: good nature, geniality, as in social gatherings of a backslapping kind.
XV
“a page of Toulet”: Paul-Jean Toulet (1867–1920), author of Comme un fantaisiste (1918) and Contrerimes (1921); Stevens owned his Le Mariage de Don Quichotte (1922) and Journal et Voyages (1934), and copied a 1934 extract on him in SPBS (49, 49–51n.).
XVIII
“grapple … muscular poses”: evocative of the famous statue of Laocoön grappling with the sea-serpent.
“museums”: as elsewhere in Stevens and in others, the repository for past works of art, invaluable though also potentially stifling for current art. The “destroyers” who “avoid the museums,” including literary museums, would not recognize skilled reworkings of a tradition.
XIX
Stevens is hard on his favorite word, “portals.”
XXII
“Clog”: dance in clogs in a country dance, sometimes requiring considerable skill (first citation in OED and Webster from 1925 in Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, chap. 7).
XXIV
“Tweedle-dum … Tweedle-dee”: for the history of the pair best known from Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, see OED, “tweedle.”
XXV
“Oriole, also, may be realist”: Stevens insisted that nature’s pleasing effects constitute reality to the same degree as its harsh effects. For example, a bird singing on a sunny day is “the same thing as a dog barking in the dark” (L 693, 1950; the point is developed throughout “Esthétique du Mal”).
XXVI
“Cochon!”: (Fr.) “Pig!”
XXVII
“Academy”: The Royal Academy of London, famed arbiter of paintings for its exhibitions.
“iron dogs”: Stevens was greatly taken by “the castiron animals on the lawns” when he came to Hartford (L 349, 1940, wrongly ascribed to XVII).
XXIX
As elsewhere, ghosts can embody the spirit of the past for Stevens. He was firm about rejecting a spirit that one has merely inherited and finding a spirit of one’s own—a spirit “based on reality” (ibid.).
XXXII
“finikin”: for the tone, cf. “finical phraseology” re Marianne Moore (NA 97, LOA 702, 1948) and “finikin” in OE XXXI.
XXXVI
Too cryptic for most readers. Stevens tried to help, saying that death could be like a child that dies “halfway to bed.” He identified “the phrase … spoken” as the voice of death, and the “starry voluptuary” as the child in heaven (L 349, 1940).
XXXVIII
Stevens noted that this part and others use figures of autumn but are not concerned literally with autumn (ibid.). They offer advice not to show pictures of a season, even Corot’s paintings, when the season is still flourishing. These are much better seen when the season has gone. His one-word summary, “Despair” (ibid.), may be incorrectly numbered.
XL
“in line”: both as standing in line and referring to a poetic line.
On an anthropomorphic god, which Stevens calls “a projection of itself by a race of egoists” (ibid.).
XLV
“Encore un instant de bonheur”: (Fr.) “Once more, a moment of happiness.”
L
The aphoristic opening sentence of this last epigram is memorable in itself, and introduces the word “wisdom” into the series. In retrospect, the series may be read as a wisdom collection, like Stevens’s private collection, “Adagia.” The words “wisdom” and “wise” are key words in Stevens.
A Postcard from the Volcano
Smoke 5 (summer 1936); CP 158–59, LOA 128–29.
The first of five remarkable closing poems, each valedictory and each with its own sense of closure. This is a powerful poem on the passing of generations, noting what lives on, even when a younger generation is unaware of it and living by means of it. It is no tourist’s postcard, but the voice of the Stevensian persona from within the volcano addressed to future generations, as if after his death; cf. Yeats’s late poems. The skilful syntax, in intricately rhymed tercets, is appropriate to this narrative of inheritance.
TITLE: turning on the central trope of a volcano as a powerful image of voice, a longstanding trope (on its history and possibilities, see Cook, 1988, 193–94).
“shuttered mansion-house”: one of Stevens’s dwelling-places for the spirit.
“weaving budded aureoles”: literal and/or figurative; like weaving daisy-chains, but here making a halo-like wreath of buds, appropriate for children.
Autumn Refrain
Hound and Horn 5 (winter 1932); CP 160, LOA 129.
A tour de force of sound and sense, moving on from Keats’s “To Autumn.” This is a refrain poem appropriately working with echo and allusion, and thereby engaging with the forerunners of this topos of birdsong in an earthly paradise, chiefly Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” also Milton (echoed by Keats) and Whitman. If a writer’s fear of silence is evident, so also is a fear of false voice. Again, this is a poem of leave-taking and loss, yet with a “residuum” left. It takes the form of a sonnet (varying the Miltonic sonnet, with the turn in mid-line 7, not mid-line 8), with irregular mid-line and end rhymes, and two extended lines (6 and 14).
TITLE: “refrain”: given the argument about stillness and voice, a likely pun on the noun and the verb (“to cease”); for the specialized meaning of “refrain” as “birdsong” in several languages, see Leo Spitzer’s long note in Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony (1963), 180n.
“skreak”: variation of “screak,” now chiefly dialectic.
“grackles”: even the parodic or ironic voice of “Banal Sojourn” is no longer available; note, however, the vigor of the language, a constant paradox in writing about loss.
“the yellow moon of words about the nightingale”: see head-note, above; suggesting Whitman’s mocking-bird song in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” with its repeated “yellow half-moon”; for a personal memory, see L 149–50 (1909), where, in a letter to his future wife just before their marriage, Stevens creates at length an ideal spot, or locus amoenus, with nightingales, moon, and a “sweet outpouring of liquid sound”; the letter includes reference to “what we have never heard” (cf. l. 7).
l. 7: in 1932, followed by the line: “The stillness that comes to me out of this, beneath”.
“stillness”: note here, and in repetitions of the word, that stillness is not the same thing as silence.
“grates these evasions”: note the omission of a preposition: grates out or on or up? Possibly, given Stevens, all three, as a refrain makes sound (grates on an instrument or on the ear) and also breaks etymologically (grates up); with the earlier scr-gr sound, “grates” echoes Milton’s “Their lean and flashy songs / Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw” (“Lycidas” 123–24, describing false preachers).
“residuum”: cf. usage in L 508 (1945).
A Fish-Scale Sunrise
Alcestis 1 (Oct. 1934); see note on “Lions in Sweden,” above; CP 160–61, LOA 130.
Stevens informed his friend, James Powers, a fellow lawyer at the Hartford, that he had put him and his wife into a poem. “I know that you do not read poetry, except on doctor’s orders,” he wrote; still, the poem would “be a souvenir, not so much of the bat we went on in New York as of the distorted state in which that bat left me” (L 301, 1935, cf. ibid., 269–70, and see Brazeau 90–91 for a charming reminiscence by Margaret Powers). The firmly stressed tetrameter second lines help to anchor the long first lines of the unrhymed couplets.
TITLE: presumably a mackerel sky (cirrocumulus clouds), perhaps a similar feeling in the stomach, as also in the last line.
“instruments of straw”: pastoral wind instruments; cf. note on “grates these evasions” in “Autumn Refrain,” above.
“La Paloma”: (Sp.) “the dove,” title of “perhaps the most popular Spanish song ever written” (Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians), composed 1859 by Sebastien Yradier; apparently the song requested at the New York club (Brazeau 90).
Gallant Château
Westminster Magazine 23 (autumn 1934); see note on “Gray Stones and Gray Pigeons,” above; CP 161, LOA 130.
Printed with the circumflex accent on “château” on the Contents pages of Ideas of Order and CP. (In both books, titles over the poems are printed in capital letters and accents are omitted, as is customary.) The accent is omitted in LOA without explanation. The word is partly assimilated, so that the accent is optional. Stevens uses both “chateau” (CP 263, LOA 236) and “château” (CP 460, LOA 393). A French title would read “Château Galant.” Stevens reverses the French word order, just as he reverses the standard quest plot where the knight arrives at the palace and claims the princess.
“curtains”: with the lack of wind, breath, spiritus or inspiration, cf. “The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad,” etc.; here the quest has been accomplished, even though the ending is unexpected.
Delightful Evening
Alcestis 1 (Oct. 1934); see note on “Lions in Sweden,” above; CP 162, LOA 131.
Stevens’s farewell poem for Ideas of Order is appropriately an evening poem, punning on “light” and “night.” It is a little good-bye wave to Stevens’s volume and to a head-holding philosopher who is having trouble with metaphor. (For a true “savant,” see the rabbi in “The Sun This March.”) It is also a light-hearted good-bye to Stevens’s own pensive Germanic self, when it gets out of line.
TITLE: the first line wishes Herr Doktor a “felicitous eve,” rather than the conventional “good evening”; the title encompasses this wish (“delightful”) and the reaction to it, which puns on “de-light-full”; cf. the punning at the end of “Botanist on Alp (No. 2).”
“Herr Doktor”: Stevens identified his character as any philosopher, “particularly one of the German type” (L 347, 1940).
“grieve // At the vernacular of light”: the causes of Herr Doktor’s grief become fully apparent only at the end; “the vernacular”: in contrast to Latin or a similar studied language, since the response to light is deeply instinctive rather than taught.
“twilight overfull / Of wormy metaphors”: a surprise to end the poem and the volume; figurative language as wormy, i.e., wiggling, hidden in the dark, turning, and eating up good, substantial food as well as good, substantial philosophical language. Herr Doktor presumably seeks enlightenment through reason, and so sees the waning of actual light into twilight as grievous. Note the later development of the twilight-metaphor association in “The Motive for Metaphor.”