The Auroras of Autumn, published in September 1950, was Stevens’s last collection before his 1954 Collected Poems. It gathers thirty-two poems written from 1947 to 1950. Stevens shifted the chronological order a little, so that his arrangement is worth pondering. Both individual poems and parts of poetic sequences start on separate pages, a layout that influences our reading.
The collection has a certain unity, as we might expect from a title that belongs to both the opening poem and the entire collection. A number of poems speak to each other through shared subjects or rhetoric or diction. Some of the poems have a valedictory tone, especially those working with scenes and names from Stevens’s youth. The framing poems at the beginning and end reread the heavens in very different ways. The closing poem, “Angel Surrounded by Paysans,” provides a memorable leave-taking like some swift and passing, yet powerful, benediction.
The Auroras of Autumn
Kenyon Review 10 (winter 1948); CP 411–21, LOA 355–63.
Stevens had in mind the nights of early autumn, when the aurora borealis is visible most often in temperate latitudes (L 698, 1950). He later noted the occasional strength of the northern lights in Hartford, adding that they “symbolize a tragic and desolate background” in this poem (L 852, 1954). The tragic and desolate life of the immediate postwar years for many people around the world cannot help but inform such a background. A sense of apocalypse (or “post apocalypse”) informs the sequence, on which see Woodland, Wallace Stevens and the Apocalyptic Mode (2005). Stevens’s work with the apocalyptic culminated in OE.
Scientific research into the auroras was very active during Stevens’s lifetime. (See Harald Falck-Ytter, Aurora [1999, 1983].) Until the last canto, the aurora permeates the poem (though more obliquely in II–V), notably through the language used by scientists and others to describe it (“arcs, bands, curtains, veils, drapery, rays, and clouds” [Aurora 15]). The northern lights are unpredictable in time and duration and movement. Movements of argument, rhetoric, and images in the poem both describe and resemble the aurora’s incessantly flickering light, irregular leaping and collapsing, and differing velocity. Stevens retained his favorite stanzaic and metrical form for long sequences, unrhymed iambic pentameter tercets. One of the best glosses is Dickinson’s poem, “Of Bronze — and Blaze — / The North — Tonight — ” (no. 290); see also note on VII on Ezekiel’s vision, below.
I
“This”: unspecified, like the bodiless serpent, and so extending the immediate context, where “this” is the night sky with the northern lights in “ribbon-like serpentine forms showing numerous sinuosities” (EB 11). “A fierce serpent writhed itself up over the sky … split into three … reached and passed the zenith” (Nansen, cited in Falck-Ytter, 10). The constellation Serpens (the Serpent) appears in the northern sky late in the year.
“Eyes open”: cf. Dante’s trope of the stars as eyes watching the earth.
“image at the end of the cave”: finely ambiguous, and so the darkest end of a cave or else the door out; recalling Plato’s cave as well as the human skull; cf. “The palm at the end of the mind” (“Of Mere Being”).
“a pole”: as of the earth’s two magnetic poles, on which the northern and southern auroras are centered; cf. also the sky’s apparent pole with polestar, and the zenith or pole of an auroral display.
“master of the maze” a serpent of mythic potency, as in many legends—Norse, Amerindian, etc.
“meditations in the ferns”: the ordinary snake as earthly form of the mythic serpent, desiring the sun, as we do.
“in his head”: in the appearance of his head; also as if from within his head, which perceives scenes of primitive North American life, thereby evoking centuries of history.
II
Cantos II, III, and IV open with “Farewell to an idea,” followed by an ellipsis that requires a long pause. Canto III centers on a mother figure, canto IV on a father figure, and both figures extend into canto V. With the farewell, especially in III and IV, cf. Stevens’s early declaration of independence: “I never felt free, or strong, until I had cried ‘Farewell to my elders!’ and their beastly ideas” (10 June 1910, WAS 1912).
“idea”: as in “the idea of man” (NSF I.X), etc., the meaning is wider than an intellectual concept. The relation of the idea to what follows is oblique, unlike the later ideas of mother and father. But the sense of a “farewell” leave-taking is not.
“cabin”: one of Stevens’s literal and/or metaphorical dwelling-places, context unspecified; the following poem quotes Yeats on his desired “cabin,” itself indebted to Thoreau’s cabin in Walden.
“white”: as in cabin and flowers seen late into the evening, as in advanced old age, as in the pallor of death and the abandonment of the body as dwelling-place. See L 172 (1912), on Stevens’s mother’s last illness, including her “much whiter” appearance. The northern lights are commonly white in temperate zones. More generally, see Melville’s tour de force, “The Whiteness of the Whale” (Moby-Dick, chap. 42).
“blankly”: at a loss, also evoking other powerful uses of “blank,” e.g., in Milton (“a universal blank,” with respect to his blindness, from the invocation to light, PL III.48) and Coleridge (“with how blank an eye,” “Dejection: An Ode”). Note, among other uses, “blank” in “The Plain Sense of Things,” and in contrast, “Mr. Blank” (OE XXXI).
“extremist in an exercise”: as if imitating the flickering of the northern lights and their movement up through the extreme outermost of the earth’s atmosphere, the ionosphere.
“blue-red … green”: possible colors of the aurora.
III
The canto is suffused with memories of the last days of Stevens’s mother (see L 172–74, 25 June–1 July 1912).
“dreams.”: LOA correctly provides a full stop here.
“transparence … peace”: cf. the dedicatory poem to NSF, line 8.
“She makes that gentler that can gentle be”: including even death; in 1912, Stevens misquoted Whitman on “ ‘gentle, delicate Death,’ ” repeating the word “gently” (L 174, 1 July 1912); for “delicate death,” see “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”
“she too is dissolved,” etc.: in the dissolving of memory, in the dissolution of the body, both like the dissolving of the aurora’s lines and shapes and colors.
“The necklace is a carving not a kiss”: punning gently and sadly on an embrace as a neck-lace, whose living memory has now gone.
“The windows will be lighted, not the rooms”: because the light comes from the outside only, say, from the aurora, whose rapid movements and color suggest the dissolution of house and books (l. 14).
IV
“of bleak regard”: cf. “Adam of beau regard” (“The Pure Good of Theory” III). “strong in the bushes of his eyes”: curiously combining a sense of bushy eyebrows and a memory of the burning bush whence God speaks his “I am that I am” in Ex. 3:1–14.
“bad angels”: traditionally, the fallen angels, as in PL I.
“supernatural preludes … angelic eye”: cf. NSF III.VII.
V
“The mother invites,” “The father fetches”: where and whom? The context presents a challenge for the reader, though the general plot is clear enough. Stevens offers no reason for the deterioration. The canto opens with an attempt to answer the question at the end of IV, as an apparent Prospero-like father calls forth festive hospitality. The father figure then worsens, as if falling through history into present decline. Compare the angel’s fall through time in NSF III. VIII.
“musicians who mute much, muse much, on the tales”: playing on “musemusic,” the double sense of “muse,” and several senses of “mute,” including the physical device that alters volume and tone color in a musical instrument.
“tinny time”: extending “tones” into an expected “tinny tunes,” thereby playing “time” against “tune.”
“pageants … curtains”: as elsewhere in the canto, informed by the aurora, e.g., its “curtain” effect.
“herds”: the “brute-like guests” below, recalling Caliban or Circe’s victims.
“Chatillon”: Stevens called his possible ancestor, Gaspard de Châtillon, grandson of Coligny, “one of the great Protestant figures of his time” (letter to Paule Vidal, 21 May 1945, WAS 2887). This may be the current form of the Reformation leader, naturalized, as indicated by the omission of the accent.
“hospitaliers”: Fr., cf. English “hospitallers,” also “hospitable.” As with “Châtillon,” a sense of admirable origins and present decline.
VI
Cantos VI and VII return to the auroras themselves, with two strong and different ways of reading the heavens.
“It”: the aurora borealis, in the first instance; “sometimes [a display bears] very close resemblance to illuminated detached clouds” (EB, “Aurora Polaris”).
“Wild wedges”: birds, as in Milton’s birds who “in figure wedge their way … Flying” (PL VII.425–8) or in Joseph Brodsky, “Variation in ‘V.’ ” “as of a volcano’s smoke”: cf. the description of the aurora in Seneca (quoted Aurora 46–47), and in a thirteenth-century Norwegian saga (ibid. 51–52, note “smoke”).
“palm-eyed”: a puzzling epithet.
“A capitol”: the sequence suggests that the birds are connected with emerging and collapsing capitols (hence empires), perhaps by augury.
“nameless … destroyed”: cf. NSF I.I where the sun is “washed” and “must bear no name.”
“frame”: both one’s body and the earth, as in Hamlet’s “this goodly frame, the earth” (Hamlet II.ii.298).
“he feels afraid”: cf. “I felt afraid” (“Domination of Black”) and “a fear one feels / In the great vistas of night air” (“Note on Moonlight”).
VII
“the just and the unjust”: an allusion to Matt. 5:45, thereby to God the Father in heaven, and questions of justice versus mercy (“As grim as it is benevolent,” l. 2).
“in the north and enfold itself … crystalled”: a likely echo of Ezekiel’s famous vision (Ezek. 1:4, 1:26), sometimes thought to have been inspired by a rare massive auroral display.
“Goat-leaper”: Aristotle called some forms of the aurora “dancing goats” or “jumping goats” in his Meteorologia; cf. also the constellation Capricorn, literally “goat-horn.”
“heavens adorn / And proclaim it”: an allusion to Ps. 19:1, revised; Stevens quoted Ps. 19:2 in 1906 (L 86).
“crown”: a full auroral display has a dark crown at the zenith.
“leaps”: increasingly, the canto of the goat, moving against the biblical use of sheep and goats (the latter often condemned), and against any figure like the Lamb upon the throne (cf. “enthroned”).
“dare not leap by chance”: a move past any simple dichotomy of biblical and antibiblical.
“caprice”: cf. “goat-leaper” and Capricorn, above; the aurora is regularly described as capricious.
“tragedy”: etymon tragos, “goat-song,” though this is disputed.
“flippant communication under the moon”: cf. NSF I.III.
VIII
Cantos VIII and IX, linked by a run-on sentence, move to reflections on Stevens’s theme of the essential innocence of the earth. (Cf. “Esthétique du Mal” X.) The affirmation works against any concept of an earth that fell with mankind from some blissful prelapsarian state.
“never a place”: as in Eden or a Golden Age.
“A saying out of a cloud”: as in biblical phrasing, e.g., “he [God] called unto Moses out of the midst of the cloud” (Ex. 24:16) and “a voice came out of the cloud” (Mark 9:7, in the Transfiguration scene).
“symbol of malice”: cf. “leaven of malice” in I Cor. 5:8 and the Prayer Book of the Church of England; see also note on “malice” in “Credences of Summer” X, above.
“accordion”: suggesting harmony through its etymology (cf. “accord,” “chord,” etc.).
IX
“the enigma of the guilty dream”: “of ” in two senses, so that the dream may contain the enigma, or the dream itself may be the enigma. Stevens keeps the context of “guilty” general, having affirmed the inherent innocence of the earth in human fate.
“Danes in Denmark”: northerners familiar with the northern lights; note also the convivial party of Danes in Coleridge’s recollection (cited NA 40–41, LOA 667, 1943).
“knew each other well, hale-hearted landsmen”: this group, this “we,” must be surmised through context. Stevens wrote in 1949 about always being “desperately in need of the fellowship of one’s own kind.” He then added that the need was not for intellectual companionship, but what he called “the fellowship of one’s own province … of the landsman and compatriot” (L 644, 1949). He was expressing his regret at not knowing the poet Theodore Spencer better.
“hanging in the trees next spring?”: with “disaster,” suggesting a double meaning to hanging, and breaking sharply with what precedes; in context, “disaster” takes its common etymological meaning of influence from the stars (Lat., astrum, star), recalling obsolete “disaster” as a “baleful aspect of a planet or star” (Webster).
“glittering belts”: suggesting the constellation of Orion, seen in Stevens’s latitude in the winter.
X
A change in focus and in tone separates this canto from the preceding nine. Stevens confirmed John Crowe Ransom’s observation of the lacuna between IX and X (letter to H. Weinstock, WAS 3357, 21 Sept. 1954). There are, in effect, two endings to “The Auroras of Autumn,” the endings of canto IX and of canto x. Canto X offers a much louder, sometimes funny, ending, with a fortissimo flourish in the last stanza. The tone includes a sense of longmeditated wisdom (through the rabbi figure), devoid of any solemnity. It also includes great pleasure in the moment of these words and an implicit defiance of winter and death.
“hall harridan,”etc.: raising the h sound, as if reverting to Anglo-Saxon in this stanza, where most nouns and adjectives have a Germanic origin appropriate to the northern focus of the poem; the prepositions in this stanza bear watching.
“in winter’s nick”: “nick” takes its full spectrum of meaning; note also the idiom, “in the nick of time.”
Page from a Tale
Wake 6 (spring 1948); CP 421–23, LOA 363–65.
A narrative account, as from the tale of a ship caught in ice. Like “Auroras,” this poem is focused on the north, but here the far north, hence a difficult climate for human habitation, and often fantastic to non-natives. The poem is linked to both the end of “The Auroras of Autumn” and the next poem by the act of reading; with “Auroras,” cf. also the cabin. The poem is a contrast in many ways with the opening sequence, allowing for some relaxation of tone despite the story.
“Balayne”: obsolete form of “baleen” (“whale,” cf. Fr. baleine); as ship, possibly the Baelana in 1947 when the frozen North Sea trapped ships (Shoenberg, WSJ 6 [1982]: 43–45).
“blau”: blue, azure; “lind”: soft, gentle, mild; “lau”: mild (of weather). Fragments of a poem by Heine: “Die Welt is so schön und der Himmel so blau, / Und die Lüste die wehen so lind und so lau …” (“Lyrisches Intermezzo” XXXI, “The world is so beautiful and the heaven so blue, / And the breeze that blows so soft and so mild”). The poem refers to a dead love at the end. Note the memory of “W. G. P.” sitting “with his lamp translating Heine aloud endlessly” (L 65, 1903), during Stevens’s wilderness trip in Canada, the farthest north that he ever traveled.
“Of clay,” etc.: all the Eng. italicized words are from Yeats’s famous early poem, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”; there, in London, he longs for a cabin in his home county in Ireland (pub. 1890, collected 1893, quoted L 120, 1909).
“It might become a wheel”: Hans’s waking dream of the returning sun in the far north, shared by the men (ghosts?) on the trapped ship. As in parts of “Auroras,” the effect of an implacably hostile universe.
“Arcturus”: orange-colored, first-magnitude star in the constellation Boötes, appearing above the horizon in the far north as the winter solstice (Dec. 21) approaches, and remaining visible until August. If the “hard brightness” of line 1 is literal, the sun has reappeared; hence it is January or February, depending on the latitude.
“miff-maff-muff of water”: “miff-muff ” (OED, dial. or colloq.) means “peevish ill humor”; does the sound of stirring water in Stevens’s imitative invention suggest it is miffed? Compare lines 29–30 on water striving to speak and breaking dialect. Here the water appropriately follows the conjugation of Germanic strong verbs (e.g., “ring, rang, rung”); cf. the play on “tink, tank, tunk” in “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman” and on latinate “Pipperoo,” etc. in “On an Old Horn.”
Large Red Man Reading
Halcyon 1 (spring 1948), with “This Solitude of Cataracts,” both under the title, “Two Poems”; CP 423–24, LOA 365.
Three short opening sentences expand into one 10-line sentence, as the ghosts become blooded (and so more like the red man); the grammatical mood shifts from conditional to indicative. Compare the shades revivified by animal blood in Odyssey XI. The central trope also embodies the way that “literal characters” (l.12) or letters on the page become animated and take on feeling. The tercets have unusually long lines with much-varied rhythm. This is a powerful poem, mentioned as one that Stevens liked (L 778, 1953).
TITLE: re “Red Man,” note also that one Hebrew root for “Adam” means “to be red.” “tabulae”: (Lat.) ancient writing tablets, perhaps familiar through “tabula rasa.”
“purple tabulae”: the “blue tabulae” (l. 2) have taken on enough red to alter their color.
“Poesis”: (Gk) “a making, creation, poetry.”
This Solitude of Cataracts
Ibid.; CP 424–25, LOA 366.
The first of several poems where Stevens’s imagination is running on past and present images of death and of being, including water: e.g., biblical cataracts, the river of Heraclitus, the ocean of Hesiod, and actual rivers and mountains. Compare also Valéry’s “Le Cimetière marin.”
“Solitude”: cf. Stevens’s other solitude poems, though this one differs from most by imagining a desire for a center.
“Cataracts”: apparently in the poem’s river, though never mentioned. Figuratively connected with later recollection by its echo of Wordsworth’s memory of the “cataract” that “haunted” his youth (“Lines Composed …above Tintern Abbey” 76); as trope, suggesting a turbulence of feeling; the archaic meaning of “the floodgates of heaven” (PL XI.824) connects it with the poem’s ending.
“He never felt twice the same about … river”: playing on the textbook example of the pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclitus, “You never step twice into the same river,” i.e., the world is governed by perpetual flux.
“thought-like Monadnocks”: see L 823 (1954) on the effects of a mountain reflected in a lake, in particular, this mountain.
“an apostrophe that was not spoken”: an apostrophe as the sign showing the omission of a letter (cat’s) is not spoken, though understood; so here, with “apostrophe” as a sudden exclamatory address to a person or thing.
“buttonwoods”: the American plane-tree; cf. Milton’s platan in Eden (PL IV.478).
“released from destruction”: not completely subject to mortality.
“archaic lapis”: a blue heaven, as in an old cosmography and theology; “lapis,” used of light and sky, re-enters Stevens’s work with NSF III.vIII; cf. “Someone Puts a Pineapple Together” III, and OE XXVI.
“the oscillations of planetary pass-pass”: the way in which the planets seem to go round and round by night and by day (L 823, 1954); playing on Fr. passe-passe (“sleight-of-hand”), and also the passing of time.
“azury”: on the word “lapis,” above, note that “azure” is adapted from Arabian “lapis lazuli,” its earliest meaning.
In the Element of Antagonisms
Accent 8 (autumn 1947); CP 425–26, LOA 366–67.
Compare the wind and the north in “Auroras.”
TITLE: cf. the idiom of being “in one’s element,” and “The Owl in the Sarcophagus” i.14.
“genius”: see note to “The Idea of Order at Key West,” above.
“birds twitter pandemoniums”: with a disjunction or “antagonism” between the words “twitter” (echoing “twitter” in Keats’s “To Autumn”) and “pandemonium” (Milton’s invention); also a play against an expected object for the verb “twitter” such as “songs.”
“chevalier of chevaliers”: a revisionary echo of Hopkins’s “O my chevalier,” used of Christ in “The Windhover.”
“buskin”: figuratively associated with tragedy (“buskin,” Webster 2b and OED 2b).
Hudson Review 1 (spring 1948); CP 426–27, LOA 367–68.
Linked with several preceding poems by the north, here “the order of the northern sky.” Note the syntactic work with interrogatives, ending with three imperatives. The pronounced rhyme in lines 12–14 breaks at line 16 to address a debased muse.
“his heart’s strong core”: echoing and adapting Yeats’s “the deep heart’s core” (see note to “Page from a Tale,” above).
“Melpomene”: Greek Muse of tragedy, here “sordid” as a muse of misery.
“heliotrope’s inconstant hue”: the flower is blue; etymologically (Gk.) “following the sun.”
The Beginning
Nation 165 (18 Oct. 1947); CP 427–28, LOA 368.
One of several memorable end-of-summer poems.
“summer”: like “perceived”(l.8), a key word in Transport to Summer.
“weave / Inwoven”: the dress of summer inwoven as the grammar, alliteration, and reference to bells inweave the text and texture of these lines.
“a weaver to twelve bells”: cf. the riddling “Oak Leaves Are Hands”; also playing on the etymon of “text” (weave); so phrased as to recall old riddles on the number twelve (months, etc.).
“tutoyers”: (Fr.) tutoyer, to use the second-person singular tu; see note on “Bethou” in NSF II.VI, above. This use of person indicates that tragedy begins to speak intimately—or else that the speakers address tragedy intimately (“of ” takes its double meaning)—in either case, beginning to know it like one of the family. Compare the preceding poem.
The Countryman
CP 428–29, LOA 368–69.
Compare “country” and “countrymen” elsewhere in Auroras of Autumn. The poem is not addressed to a Muse, but to a river in Stevens’s natal state, Pennsylvania. The strong rhythms of a mostly four-beat line suggest the movement of the river and the corresponding movement of feeling elicited by this river of Stevens’s youth. The poem repeats “Swatara” or else “swarthy” ten times in all, setting up a refrain in the first line that echoes through the poem. (Contrast the different rhetorical effect of the play on “Damariscotta” in “Variations on a Summer Day.”)
“Swatara”: Stevens noted that the name is native, and that the Swatara, a stream, flows into the Susquehanna above Harrisburg (L 611, 1948). As elsewhere, he draws out the storied aspect of an American place-name; this one sounds Sanskrit, for something like “swarthy.”
The Ultimate Poem Is Abstract
Poetry 71 (Oct. 1947), with “Bouquet of Roses in Sunlight,” both under the title “Two Poems”; CP 429–30, LOA 369–70.
“abstract”: see note on NSF I, title, above.
“hems the planet rose and haws it ripe”: playing on “hems and haws,” and the ripe haws of roses; cf. speaker and rose in “Extracts from the Academy of Fine Ideas.”
“writhings in wrong obliques”: a Carroll-like resonance of “right and wrong” and of his “ ‘Reeling and Writhing’ ” (reading and writing, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, chap. 9).
“because at the middle”: “because [we were] at the middle.”
Bouquet of Roses in Sunlight
Ibid.; CP 430–31, LOA 370–71.
Another bouquet poem, here as if answering the previous poem by repeating “sense” and “enormous.” “Sense” expands to become a nonverbal “sense of things,” before and beyond metaphor. The unrhymed iambic pentameter triplets vary the accent so much that the regular last line sounds strongly affirmative.
“like a flow of meanings”: “sense exceeds all metaphor” but the poem turns to metaphor (in the form of its species, simile) to describe sense.
“as we are”: cf. Stevens’s variations on “as I am, I am” in his later work (NSF III.viii, “The Sail of Ulysses,” etc.).
Horizon 93–94 (Oct. 1947); CP 431–36, LOA 371–75.
An elegiac meditation building on Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” The poem is dedicated to the memory of Stevens’s close friend, Henry Church, who died in April of 1947; it was composed “in the frame of mind that followed” his death (L 566, 1947). That the dead are now at rest, sleeping, and at peace: these are common tropes, to which we usually want to add the right kind of good-by. Stevens personifies the sleep and peace of death, then adds a third figure, a mother figure, who “says / Good-by.” Her words near the end of canto I are direct and affecting, as is the last stanza of the entire poem on the mind as “a child that sings itself to sleep.” While some portions of the sequence are veiled, much is not; some is very moving and germane, as in the examples just given. (See Peter Sacks on Stevens’s “deep understanding of the most ancient and hieratic elements of the genre” [The English Elegy (1985), 326].) The poem often works with long appositive sentences, including three 12-line sentences.
I
“Two forms … And a third form”: two personified figures accompany Whitman, as he flees to the singing hermit thrush (pt. 14).
“sleep the brother is the father, too”: cf. “This brother even in the father’s eye” in a consolatory section of “Esthétique du Mal” (v). Sleep is traditionally the brother of death, as in Iliad XIV.231 on Hypnos and Thanatos.
II
“A man walked living among the forms of thought”: cf. “Ideas were the bread of life to him,” and Stevens’s full memorial tribute to Henry Church (L 570–71, 1947).
“twanged”: cf. the planter in NSF II.v, “Sighing that he should leave the banjo’s twang.”
“abysmal melody”: “fathomless”; cf. “abysmal instruments” in NSF I.IV.
III
“foldings”: Stevens works throughout III with “fold,” a rich word in association with sleep (the folding of the eyelids in sleep, the curling of the body, the sense of shelter as in a sheepfold, etc.); cf. Sappho on evening bringing us “home to the fold” (quoted L 248, 1926).
“weaving”: extending “folds” to fabric, also recalling texts (see iv, below).
“peace, the godolphin and fellow”: how do we personify the peace of death, “cousin by a hundred names” (i)? It is something very familiar and one of us, a fellow, but also strange, as in Stevens’s strange noun, “godolphin”—perhaps generalized from a name well known to racing and horse-breeding circles, the famed eighteenth-century Godolphin Arabian, one of three stallions from whom all Arabian thoroughbreds descend (EB, “horse”: “history”). If so, this figure of peace is another species, dead yet still alive in its progeny, elite, and familiar chiefly to a small circle.
“its cloth / Generations of the imagination,” “stitchings,” “thread,” “weaving”: the garment for “peace after death” recalls older elegies, where tropes of sewing and weaving also evoke the act of making a text, as of mourning.
“doom”: including its old sense of “destiny.”
“A bee”: we burrow like bees in the sewn flowers that embody a life now ended; also punning on B (“an alphabet”), and cf. “bee … be” in NSF II.II.
“in the summer of Cyclops / Underground”: an unusual combining of a sense of the cave of Cyclops, the one-eyed giant who imprisoned Ulysses, and Pluto’s underworld, where Persephone must live during the winter months. In both legends, those imprisoned get out, at the least for a season. So combined, the legends catch effectively the ongoing life in memory of our cherished dead.
V
“exhalation”: recalling “the syllable between life / And death” as in a last breath; contrast “inhalations” (“Credences of Summer” I) and “inhale a health of air” (OE VIII).
“fling without a sleeve”: cf. “a body wholly body, fluttering / Its empty sleeves” (“The Idea of Order at Key West,” ll. 3–4).
VI
A canto that opens with a strange phrase in a lexis that calls attention to itself: “monsters of elegy.” The phrase requires the reader to choose a definition of “monster” in accord with the poem. In a nonpejorative sense, a monster is a legendary creature combining attributes of different natural species, like the sphinx or griffin (both ancient tomb-guardians). As the canto continues, Stevens expands on these “monsters of elegy” and, in the very moving closure, they become one with the “people … by which it [the mind] lives and dies.”
Modern American Poetry, ed. B. Rajan (London: Dennis Dobson, [May] 1950, with “Credences of Summer,” “Imago,” and “Celle Qui Fût Héaulmiette”; CP 436–37, LOA 375–76.
A remarkable debate-poem on the question of pain, still in need of good exegesis.
“Saint John”: unspecified (the Baptist? the Evangelist? the Divine?); probably the putative author of John’s Gospel. (In 1922, Stevens described the title, “Klenken’s Presse Evangelium Sancti Johannis,” as the “sweetest line of poetry,” adding how much he would like to have the book [LFR 401].)
“The world is presence and not force”: for any St. John, world as presence is associated with the presence of God, as through the biblical books or in the Eucharist.
“Kinder-Scenen”: (Ger.) literally, “scenes from childhood”; the old spelling (not modern-szenen) indicates an allusion to Schumann’s well-known piano sequence. If “Presence is Kinder-Scenen,” literally, then the Back-Ache is scoffing at its significance as mere “scenes from childhood.” But the allusion undercuts his assertion by implicitly conceding how far (and how) such presence might work, when confronted by the force of pain. How far (and how?) does music help with pain? How far (and how) does a music that might be called “scenes from childhood” help?
“I speak below / The tension of the lyre”: St. John as poet, in a memorable sentence. As with all stringed instruments, the tension of the strings determines the pitch; a string with no tension makes no sound. Compare also St. Paul speaking on his own “and not of commandment” (I. Cor.7:6).
“turtle”: possibly the turtle on whose back the world rests, in Amerindian legend.
Celle Qui Fût Héaulmiette
Ibid.; CP 438, LOA 376.
Stevens wrote that the poem was suggested by Rodin’s sculpture, Celle qui fût la belle heaulmière (She Who Was the Helmet-Maker’s Beautiful Wife), a work that Rodin sometimes called “Winter” (Lensing [2001], 256; Baird, The Dome and the Rock [1968], 87n.). Villon’s Testament includes two series of poems called “Les regrets de la belle Hëaumière” (“The Regrets of the Helmet-Maker’s Beautiful Wife”) and “Ballade de la belle Hëaumière aux filles de joie” (“Ballad … to Women of Pleasure”); for the original Hëaumière, see François Villon, Poésies, ed. Dufournet (Paris: Gallimard, 1973). Stevens owned a copy of Villon’s Poésies (sold at auction by Parke-Bernet in 1959).
TITLE: (Fr.) “She Who Was Héaulmiette”; a héaume is a helmet; the l indicates Old Fr., as in Rodin; Stevens’s “-iette” and his text suggest a young girl, perhaps the daughter of la belle héaulmière or the woman herself when young.
“gilderlinged”: with “entinselled,” suggesting “gild” as “gold-washed,” and a gilderling as one who does this (cf. “worldling”); evoking Old Eng. rather than Old Fr.; “-ling” is sometimes a pejorative suffix, so here leads into the defensive irony of “American vulgarity.”
“native shield”: cf. “nature,” “natives” in “A Primitive Like an Orb” (viii.5–6); “shield” adds to her helmet.
“a mother with vague severed arms”: resembling Rodin’s figure less than the Venus di Milo; Venus is sometimes a universal mother, source of all generation.
“a father bearded in his fire”: cf. “The Auroras of Autumn” iv.
Imago
Ibid.; CP 439, LOA 377.
Linked with the preceding poem by stanzaic and rhythmic forms, as well as the interaction of early-spring landscape and the imagination.
“Who can pick up the weight of Britain,” etc.: echoing the questions in Job, chap. 38, appropriately asked about countries still recovering from the ravages of World War II.
A Primitive Like an Orb
Printed for the Gotham Book Mart as a pamphlet (New York: Banyan, 1948); CP 440–43, LOA 377–80.
The poem considers and expands statements about “the essential poem” and “the central poem.” Stanzas VII through IX consist of one 24-line sentence, ending with both a child’s and a high sublime delight. The combination of “whirroos” and “the serious folds of majesty” is typical of Stevens’s tone, and of his convictions. Familiar tropes from earlier poems help to focus the concerns of this one. The iambic pentameter is more regular than usual for Stevens.
“primitive”: as a noun, usually an aborigine, an ancestor, or a pre-Renaissance (or else naïve) European painting; at the end, all three meanings converge in the giant.
“fiddlings”: submerged pun on “fidgetings” (cf. OE XXXI), and a slight disjunction from “arias” (usually sung).
“gorged the cast-iron of our lives” etc.: literal cast-iron makes a good cooking pot, by which we may gorge our stomachs; if we are fortunate, our stomachs are like cast iron; Stevens is considering spiritual food.
“pale air”: cf. the “pale head” of “To the One of Fictive Music.”
“as it was / Oh as”: cf. the play on “As it is” in OE XXVIII.
“The lover, the believer and the poet”: another allusion to “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact,” etc. (A Midsummer Night’s Dream V.I.7–8).
“a light apart, up-hill”: as, e.g., in Matt. 5:14.
“virtue”: echoing latinate “vis” (force, power) earlier and “virtuoso” later; linked thereby with “power” at the end of the same stanza.
“eccentricity”: playing against the poem’s concentration on “centre,” “central,” etc.
Metaphor as Degeneration
American Letters 1 (Apr. 1949); CP 444–45, LOA 381.
The poem questions its title, which thereby hangs as a reproach or challenge at the start. Stevens’s main affirmation comes in the opening 9-line sentence, and culminates in lines 8–9. Most stanzas have two assonantal or other rhymes.
“brooding”: as transitive verb, “to brood,” as eggs in a nest.
“Swatara”: see note on this name in “The Countryman,” above.
“round the earth and through the skies”: recalling Oceanus, for which see note on the last line of “The River of Rivers in Connecticut,” below.
“flock-flecked river”: cf. the “flecked river” of Heraclitus in “This Solitude of Cataracts.” Stevens’s compound invention gives him a spondee in the line, as do other compounds here.
The Woman in Sunshine
Written by August 1948 and submitted for publication, with the next four poems, under the title “The Bouquet” or else “Poems from Hartford”; apparently not published (L 609n., 615); CP 445, LOA 381–82.
“image”: cf. “images” in the preceding poem.
Reply to Papini
Ibid.; CP 446–48, LOA 382–84.
A defense of poetry, paying the fictitious Pope Celestine VI the compliment of responding seriously to his supposed procurator’s directive. This is a poem that should be better known, especially for its precision, directness, and intelligence. It includes some memorable formulations (see, e.g., lines 5–6 on “the way through the world” and “the way beyond it” and “a politics / Of property”).
EPIGRAPH: “Papini”: Italian essayist and philosopher (1881–1956); the epigraph translates excerpts from his 1946 Lettere agli uomini del papa Celestino sesto, chap. X, “To the Poets,” which differs slightly from the 1948 translation (Letters to Mankind from Pope Celestine VI). Pope Celestine VI is invented, though the name is valid for a new pope.
“Celestin, the generous, the civilized”: in accordance with Papini’s description in his preface.
“angry day-son clanging at its make,” etc.: the change in diction itself clangs and also echoes, as the poet, son of the day, sounds out like a clarion, carillon, tocsin, etc.; cf. “angering” in “Nomad Exquisite”; note the double sense of “clanging at” (at the time of, against); “make”: (Middle Eng.) “mate.”
The Bouquet
Ibid.; CP 448–53, LOA 384–87.
One of several poems where a bouquet is closely observed and sensuously apprehended, while also providing the focal point for a meditation and/or an inferred plot. The few stage properties are revealed gradually, as if being seen in a play or a painting. The diction includes a number of words unusual enough to sound like neologisms. In Stevens’s early “Bowl, Cat and Broomstick,” a poem called “Le Bouquet” parodies extreme Imagist effects (OP 174, LOA 630–31, 1917).
“medium nature”: not “major” but equally, not pejorative; cf. “medium man” in “Imago”; playing against “extreme.”
“apparitions”: cf. the behavior of the “apparition” in the final poem of The Auroras of Autumn.
“the other eye”: gradually defined in what follows.
“meta-”: (Gk.) “beyond,” as in “metaphor” (ll. 4–5); “para-”: (Gk.) “beside,” as in “parallel,” and note echo of “apparitions” (l. 6).
“prevents”: also in the etymological sense of “anticipates,” as in Eliot’s theological use in East Coker iv.
“choses of Provence”: (Fr.) “things,” unspecified except by contrast; Eng. “of ” rather than Fr. de breaks the phrase oddly.
“centi-,” “mille-”: literally, “hundred-” and “thousand-” in continuing play with the prefix or “the fore” (next line), so to speak.
“a sovereign of souvenirs”: cf. work with these two words in “Lions in Sweden.” “real … seen in insight”: cf. the philosopher, H. D. Lewis, “If I am right, the essence of art is insight of a special kind into reality” (quoted in NA 99, LOA 703, 1948).
“facture”: note also the meaning, “the quality of the execution of a painting.” “farced, finikin … flatly”: extending the pronounced effects of earlier f words; the adjacent adjectives have contrary associations; cf. “finikin” elsewhere in Stevens’s poetry, especially in OE XXXI, and “finical” used of Marianne Moore’s work (NA 97, LOA 702, 1948).
“splashings in a penumbra”: as in seeing the aurora (“splashed,” “The Auroras of Autumn” vi).
“A car drives up”: the cryptic closing cinematic scene recalls this poem’s postwar date.
World without Peculiarity
Ibid.; CP 453–54, LOA 388.
Stevens divides the tercets of this simple, forceful, memorable poem in the 4/3 proportions of an Italian sonnet, with the turn coming after stanza 4. He allows a rare glimpse into things close to his heart, albeit abstracted and disciplined by the demands of his art. One response (to “she that he loved”) does an astonishing amount of work in eleven syllables, encompassing a subject for an entire short story or novel.
TITLE: cf. the possible title, “A Poet without Peculiarity” (Lensing, Southern Review [1979], 889, and 1986, 174).
Our Stars Come from Ireland
CP 454–55, LOA 389–90.
I.
EPIGRAPH: an oblique dedication; “Tom McGreevy” (1893–1967) was a correspondent and friend, a writer, and the director of the Irish National Gallery.
II. The Westwardness of Everything
TITLE: “Westwardness”: McGreevy commented on his own westwardness because of living close to the Shannon Estuary. Stevens was interested because his boyhood house faced west, and he instinctively tried to pull any house he lived in later “round on an axis” to make it straight (L 618, 1948).
“Mal Bay”: north of Tarbet (l. 8), mentioned in McGreevy’s poem “Recessional” (1934).
“Over the top of the Bank of Ireland”: see Stevens’s comments on McGreevy’s “High above the Bank of Ireland / Unearthly music sounded, / Passing westwards,” from his “Homage to Hieronymus Bosch” (L 596, 1948).
“Tarbet”: McGreevy’s birthplace in Ireland.
“Swatara // And Schuylkill”: rivers in Pennsylvania; see “The Countryman” and “A Completely New Set of Objects,” etc.
“fitful-fangled”: invented compound like “new-fangled” (see note on “firefangled,” “Of Mere Being,” below).
Puella Parvula
Voices 136 (winter 1949); CP 456, LOA 390.
Another poem that should be better known, of great force and directness. The opening stanza is a tour de force. The poem embodies the necessary and enabling struggle of a powerful sense of vocation. Stevens’s imperative to the “wild bitch” introduces utterly unexpected diction, even though the term of abuse is not the primary meaning.
TITLE: (Lat.) a very small girl, either a child or a young woman (Catullus calls his lover puella).
“caterpillar … devoured”: one of nine names in the English Bible translating grasshoppers of the family Acrididae, order Orthoptera, that can indeed “devour” parts of Africa and elsewhere; more familiar as “locust” (see OED or Webster, “locust,” and Joel 1:4).
“elephant,” “lion”: cf. NSF I.v.
“Write pax across the window pane”: (Lat.) “peace”; pax is on a window in Harvard’s Memorial Chapel, and doubtless in other similar settings.
“summarium in excelsis”: (Lat.) “abstract (or summary) in the highest,” echoing familiar liturgical Latin like “hosanna in excelsis,” but using a noun that is unfamiliar in this combination.
The Novel
Privately printed (L 617n., 1948); CP 457–59, LOA 391–92.
“Mother was afraid … away”: the italicized words quote or closely paraphrase José Rodríguez Feo’s letter to Stevens of 21 Sept. 1948 (L 617n.).
“Olalla blanca en el blanco”: (Sp.) “Eulalia white in the white,” from Garcia Lorca’s “Martirio de Santa Olalla” (“Martydom of Saint Eulalia” III.22), a vivid evocation of the saint’s grisly martyrdom; cf. Eulalia in “Certain Phenomena of Sound” iii.
“the Arcadian imagination”: the ideal imagination, Arcadia being the projected ideal place for classical writers of pastoral; “Who inhabited Arcady?” (L 120, 1900).
What We See Is What We Think
Botteghe Oscure 4 (autumn 1949), with the following five poems, all under the title “A Half Dozen Small Pieces” and accompanied by Italian translations; CP459–60, LOA 392–93.
Stevens’s title for the grouping implies that the six poems are slighter than his most concentrated work. See L 642–43 (27 July 1949), which confirms this, while noting that the poems “came into my head” and pleased Stevens. The six poems are linked, chiefly by tropes of sun or sunny days and moon or moonlit nights. All six take the same form of six tercets with iambic pentameter lines, nearly all unrhymed.
“phantomerei”: a coinage with the Ger. suffix “-erei” (cf. “Schwärmerei,” NSF I.vii), based on “das Phantom” and meaning “things concerning or brought about by phantoms.”
A Golden Woman in a Silver Mirror
Ibid.; CP 460–61, LOA 393–94.
“Au Château”: the first of three stage directions for different golden women. At the Castle. A Salon. Gawks of hay.
“Augusta Moon”: a personified August moon or a woman like that, with memories of “the old Lutheran bells / At home,” like Stevens’s own memories and his wife’s.
“belle Belle”: beautiful Belle or Beauty.
“Abba”: transliteration of Aram. for “father,” familiar from the New Testament (e.g., Mark 14:36), used in direct petition to God the Father.
“Ababba”: playing on “abba”; “ab” is Heb. for “father”; see also OED, Webster, for similar words; setting up an echoing play on the first letters of the alphabet, and a mirroring relation (ab ba). On the desire for a queen to appear, cf. “Depression before Spring” and “Description without Place” i.
The Old Lutheran Bells at Home
Ibid.; CP 461–62, LOA 394.
Title from previous poem, hence as if hummed by a character. In 1922, Stevens thanked a friend for his letter, which, he said, reminded him of attending the Evangelical Church in Reading, and hearing the pastor “preach in German on the text ‘Ich bin der Weg, die Wahrheit, und das Leben’ ” (LFR 401; “I am the way, the truth, and the life”). A little later, he wrote that Martin Luther could not really be called a Pennsylvania Dutchman, but was nonetheless “a native element of the Pennsylvania Dutchman’s [soul?]” (LFR 405, on receiving a copy of John’s Gospel in German, clearly from the standard German Luther Bible; see also L 602, 1948, and NA 100, LOA 704, 1948).
“Paul” etc.: The references are to St. Paul the apostle, author of most epistles in the New Testament; probably St. John the Evangelist, author of the fourth Gospel (see title-note to “Saint John and the Back-Ache,” above); St. Jerome, Church Father and translator of the Bible into the Latin Vulgate; St. Francis of Assisi; Martin Luther; the Spanish St. John of the Cross.
“scrupulous Francis”: because of “those bells … around his ankles to warn crickets and other creatures” (to Sister B. Quinn, 2 Oct. 1950, courtesy of Dartmouth College Library), thus another bell-ringer.
“fortress”: cf. Luther’s well-known hymn, “Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott,” often translated as “A mighty fortress is our God,” and quoted by Stevens in 1942: “one’s own fortitude of spirit is the only ‘fester [sic] Burg’ ” (L 403). His German was a little rusty, so that the shortened feminine article ein’ is misread as masculine ein (followed by masculine fester); he was perhaps confusing eine Burg and ein Berg (“mountain, hill”).
“pastors … shepherds … sheep”: biblical pastoral language, also used elsewhere by Stevens.
Questions Are Remarks
Ibid.; CP 462–63, LOA 394–95.
“enfantillages”: “childishnesses” in a more elegant Fr. form, leading into “infant” (l. 18).
“grandson”: reference to Peter Reed Hanchak, Stevens’s grandson, then aged two.
“voyant”: a perceiver, someone who sees (not a voyeur); on 3 Dec. 1948, José Rodríguez Feo addressed Stevens as “My dear Voyant” (LWSJRF 145).
“aetat.”: short for Lat. “aetatis,” or “of the age …”
Study of Images I
Ibid.; CP 463–64, LOA 395–96.
First of a linked pair with painterly titles, the first on images of the sun, the second on images of the moon.
“bella”: (It., fem.) “beautiful,” and so a beautiful woman.
Study of Images II
CP 464–65, LOA 396.
“drop / From heaven”: cf. “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle” viii.
“mannequins”: figures of the moon often include “pearly women” and “witches,” but figures for a “brown” moon are less frequent (cf. “brown moon,” in “God Is Good …”).
“ice-month”: the Dutch used to call January Lauw- maand (“frosty month”) (Brewer).
“Rose—women as half-fishes of salt-shine”: the Venus image modulates by the dash into mermaids, reflecting the moon in the sea.
“bearing birth of harmony”: Harmonia or Concord is a daughter of Venus and Mars.
An Ordinary Evening in New Haven
Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 38 (Dec. 1949), a shortened eleven-canto version, differently ordered (see LOA n. 397.1): I, VI, IX, XI, XII, XVI, XXII, XXVIII, XXX, XXXI, XXIX; CP 465–89, LOA 397–417.
A meditative poem that is set in New Haven, though this is not apparent for some time. An evening walking-poem, in which physical characteristics of New Haven may be ascertained (once-plentiful elm trees, the Long Island Sound, chapels and schools, statues) and one professor, Professor Eucalyptus. The sequence includes a walk with various sounds and sights (such as seeing the evening star and hearing the rain), time in a hotel room, memories of the day, retiring to bed, thoughts of other cities compared with New Haven as well as the earthly paradise, and a summing up in an autumnal vision (xxx), a vision that is like “an evening evoking the spectrum of violet” (XXXI).
These are all seen through a mind meditating on the reality that informs them, including the historical reality. What is the reality of New Haven now?Older New Haven built itself on a biblical perspective that culminated in the vision of the New Jerusalem in Revelation. That was their ultimate reality. Thus the “heaven” / “New Haven” pun in xv, Alpha and Omega in vi, the “Eucalyptus” / “apocalypse” pun in XIV and xxii. This poem, however, is antiapocalyptic, though not by simply reversing direction and going down instead of going up. Stevens’s “serious reflection” moves away from apocalyptic thinking and turns to the wisdom of the “ordinary” and “commonplace” (xvii). That too has biblical roots. Hence the appearance in canto XIX of the Ecclesiast or Preacher, author of Ecclesiastes and Proverbs, i.e., biblical wisdom literature. The last four cantos move toward a new, contemporary sense of reality for Stevens’s “poetry of the earth.”
Stevens stated that his desire in this poem was “to try to get as close to the ordinary, the commonplace and the ugly as it is possible for a poet to get.” It was not a matter “of grim reality but of plain reality.” Then, in an important use of the verb “purge,” he added that the aim was “to purge oneself of anything false” (L 636, 1949). On the concept of purging as an artistic discipline, cf. remarks on how poets “purge themselves before reality, in … saintly exercises” (OP 227, LOA 790, 1936).
The poem must be read as slowly as “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction.” While sometimes dense, it is also often rich, with some memorable lines and phrasing. It is also sometimes relaxed and funny. Readers are especially drawn to many of the earlier cantos (e.g., I, V, VI, VIII–XII) as well as the closing ones (XXVIII–XXXI).
TITLE: Ordinary: An “ordinary day” did more for Stevens than an “extraordinary day,” just as “the bread of life is better than any souffle” (L 741, 1952).
I
Cantos I through V look at the “actual scene” with a “never-ending” question of what ultimate reality informs it. A biblical sense of reality provides one older point of reference (e.g., the biblical text, “I saw a new heaven and a new earth” [Rev. 21:1, etc.]). Canto VI works out from “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end” (Rev. 21:6). After this, the poem’s persona begins to look more particularly at aspects of New Haven, and begins his walk.
“eye’s plain version”: a packed opening sentence, requiring thought, as do the various qualifications of “and yet, and yet, and yet—”; note the later poem, “The Plain Sense of Things.”
“apart”: apart from ultimate reality (which is unknowable); the Heb. word for holy, godesh, like Lat. sacer, means “set apart”; note both the likeness and difference here.
“vulgate”: written in the common or vulgar tongue, hence accessible; recalling the Vulgate, Latin translation of the Christian Bible, especially Jerome’s; so called because Latin was for centuries the common language for literate people in Western Europe and beyond. “The eye’s plain version” is always some kind of translation, but what kind?
“house”: in the widest sense, including the body as house, house as a structure of belief (“house built on sand,” Matt. 7:26), etc., here with actual houses before the mind’s eye; see also OP 258, LOA 840 (1951) on “dwelling-places” and “abodes of the imagination.”
“composed … of the sun”: with Stevens’s long-standing sense of “compose” as “put together” in various contexts, and his longstanding use of the sun as origin and ultimate cause of life.
“Mythological form … beard,” etc.: cf. the description of Jove, OP 259–60, LOA 841–42 (1951); on “giant,” note the description of the old gods as “giants” and remarks on the end of the gods (ibid.), a useful gloss on i.
II
The sole one-sentence canto, examining the hypothesis that reality is defined by radical idealism of a Platonic or Christian kind, which Stevens treats as radical subjectivism. Shaped like a standard geometrical or Euclidean hypothesis (“Suppose that X …”), canto ii repeats diction from I (“compose,” “come together,” “apart”), but changes the context. Here houses are composed, not of the sun, but of ourselves. Unlike I, this canto moves away from palpable time and place. Grammar, rhetoric, and logic flow easily, with no “and yet,” unlike most of the other cantos.
“point / Of the enduring, visionary love, / Obscure”: “point” as in Dante’s punto, or “point,” which is God, or Plato’s vision of the Good. The word “obscure,” emphasized by enjambment, darkens this vision, recalling Dante’s selva oscura or “dark wood” (see note on “Esthétique du Mal” v, above).
III
Redefining the “point / Of the enduring, visionary love” (ii) by including desire, rather than excluding it as Eliot does (see Burnt Norton v). The canto comes to focus on the word “desire” as a spiritual hunger, in language as passionate as its subject.
“hill of stones”: cf. “dilapidate” (etymon “stone”) in I.
“If it is misery …”: cf. “So that he that suffers most desires / The red bird most,” etc. (“On the Adequacy of Landscape”).
“next to holiness … next to love”: cf. NA 171, LOA 748 (1951) on the imagination as “the next greatest power to faith: the reigning prince.”
“cannot / Possess … Always in emptiness”: cf. “The Poems of Our Climate.”
“A porcelain as yet in the bats”: porcelain as a work of art, also figuratively as what human clay may become.
IV
Returning to the word “plain” in I, and positing an unexpected definition of it as “savagery.” In turn, “savagery” is developed unexpectedly. See “savage” and “barbarian” as describing Stevens’s own intense desire in 1948 (L 624). The canto focuses on the fight against illusion, as Stevens continues clearing the ground for his meditation to proceed.
“a savage assuagement”: not an oxymoron in some contexts, e.g., sexual.
“children’s tale of ice … a sheen of heat romanticized”: if a specific tale, perhaps like Andersen’s fairy tale, “Snow Queen.”
V
Linked with IV by the word “romance,” now “Inescapable romance,” as Stevens’s quest enlarges its sense of human reality. Here, it includes things of our common earth and also our search for some majesty for our lives. The long opening sentence accepts romance, dream, and illusion as part of our reality, at least for the nonquesting or “inexquisite eye” (played against “inquire”). Stevens works with the preposition “in” (plus the negative prefix “in-”)and tropes of inside and outside.
“glassy ocean”: Long Island Sound, and cf. the “sea of glass” in the Apocalypse (Rev. 4:6).
“hanging pendent”: echoing Milton: “hanging in a golden chain / This pendant world” (PL II.1051–52, adapting Homer’s trope of the earth on a golden chain, Iliad VII.19); modified in various ways by “in a shade”; free-floating grammatically, without a main verb.
“Who has divided the world”: e.g., Satan? Descartes?
“entrepreneur”: a divider of sorts, playing on the literal Fr. meaning, “one who takes [something] between”; properly “one who undertakes.”
“No man”: perhaps Stevens’s favorite, Ulysses, in his punning answer to the Cyclops in Odyssey XIX, often rendered in English as “Noman” and “no man.” If so, this should be read two ways, with Ulysses as one “chrysalis of all men” who “held fast … in common earth” (Ithaca and Penelope) and also “searched out … majesty.” Ulysses is appropriate in this canto as hero of the archetypal romance of Western literature.
“chrysalis”: usually the symbol of a temporary human state that will finally discard “common earth” (cf. Tennyson, In Memoriam LXXXII). Not for Stevens.
VI
In the shortened version, this was number ii; it initiates a new movement, vi–ix. The canto rewrites Christ’s saying, “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end” (Rev. 1:8, 21:6, 22:13). Alpha (A) and Omega (Ω) are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. Here Alpha represents beginnings, not the beginning, while Omega or English Z represents teleological ends, not the end. As against the Book of Revelation, this canto locates reality in the beginning, not the end; it favors Alpha and tests Omega, while acknowledging that both have due place.
“infant A”: as in any new beginning (cf. depictions of the New Year as an infant in diapers); as in the letter A, which looks like a baby’s legs when it is learning to walk. The letter Z resembles a “twisted, stooping” aged man.
“characters”: both personified dramatic characters and characters meaning letters, hence encompassing the full alphabet and thereby all words.
The architecture of New Haven revisited, both in its actual and symbolic form, and as a trope for mental structures. There is a play throughout of the miraculous embodied in the commonplace, as indicated by Yale’s and New Haven’s architecture.
“such chapels and such schools”: in Yale University, as well as the New Haven Green, etc.
“antic symbols”: perhaps architectural; possibly gargoyles, as on Yale’s Law School.
“new mornings and new worlds”: cf. “a new heaven and a new earth.”
“The tips of cock-cry pinked out pastily”: a crowded line, drawing together cock-cry as heralding “new mornings” and the cock as church-spire decoration (“pinked out”); “pastily” is not in OED or Webster: like a “pasty” or “pastil”?
VIII
One of the most accessible cantos. The real is personified as a beloved, with the lover of the real passionately desiring to speak to her. The 11-line sentence ending the canto is among Stevens’s most moving on desire and true intimacy (artistic desire is troped as erotic). The canto works with tropes of breathing, for poetry is “not some breath from an altitude” (NA 45, LOA 670, 1943), but essential as actual breath.
“this form”: presumably “credible day” (vii.18), hence “the real” (viii.3).
“inhale a health of air”: see L 423 (1942) on Stevens walking to the office in an October morning, when “it was easy to inhale health.”
“our sepulchral hollows”: our lungs, cave-like places where we would die without air; cf. “the marriage of / Flesh and air” (“Life Is Motion”); eventually, the tomb of our dead spirit.
IX
Both cantos IX and X show how aware Stevens is of the pitfalls of his subject. Canto IX works against one hazard of antiapocalyptic writing, the shearing off of all ideas of heaven, saints, etc., if the human spirit needs them. These too may be part of our imagined reality, and they are troped expansively in the last sentence.
“pure reality, untouched / By trope or deviation”: impossible, but an ideal by which to test tropes; “deviation”: astronomically a swerving of the eccentric, and so related to the eccentric/center/point troping of the poem.
“alchemicana”: a neologism, including “alchemy-can,” “all-chemi[stry]-can,” and inviting more.
“The coming on of feasts”: reality here includes the “festival” of cantos I and x; “movable … feasts” (16–17) are feasts whose calendar date changes (e.g., Passover, Easter).
“the habits of saints”: both their practices and their garments.
X
Written against any idea of constant change, even if the “permanence” and “faithfulness” here are not those of the old faith. The moon is commonly a trope for changefulness and mutability. As in “The Man with the Blue Guitar” and elsewhere, Stevens also tropes it as unconnected to reality (the sun’s world) and so possibly hazardous.
“fatal”: cf. Crispin’s journey from romance through disillusion through realism to fatalism (L 352, 1940), including his time with the “book of moonlight” (“The Comedian as the Letter C,” III.1); on going to the moon, cf. “Extracts to the Academy of Fine Ideas” vii.
“allons”: (Fr.) “come on,” “nonsense.”
“hallucinations in surfaces”: here as elsewhere, Stevens works against the stereotyped metaphor of surfaces as shallow and depths as profound, hence of mere appearance with a hidden underlying reality; cf. Valéry, “le plus profound, c’est la peau” (“the deepest thing is the skin”), cited Deleuze in Textual Strategies (ed. Harari [1979]), 281.
XI
A vigorous and accessible walking canto in the “metaphysical streets” of New Haven. It grows out from the biblical phrase below, ending with the human need that this phrase once addressed.
“Lion of Juda”: the Lion of Judah is a figure for Christ in Rev. 5:5 (cf. Gen.49:9); Stevens took the phrase from an Easter card from Sister Bernetta Quinn (L 634–35, 1949); hence the unusual spelling, which follows the Vulgate’s Latin. (Latin was still the language of worship in the Roman Catholic Church in 1949.) More generally, a powerful spiritual leader (cf. C. Bronte, on seeing Lawrence’s portrait of Thackeray: “And there came up a Lion out of Judah!” [Gaitskell, Life of Charlotte Bronte, chap. 12]). The lion, kept strong by purging it “of anything false” (see head-note, above), becomes a type of the great cat of poetry (cf. the endings of “Poetry Is a Destructive Force” and “Montrachet-le-Jardin”).
“clou”: central idea (OED), point of chief interest (Webster), literally “point” or “nail” (Fr. clou).
“majesty”: associated with the lion; cf. the last line of V and NSF III.VIII; biblical and Miltonic resonance, and cf. also Wordsworth on “aspirations of the soul / To majesty” (Prelude VII.755).
“wafts of wakefulness”: José Rodríguez Feo “creates by mere will a total wakefulness,” as against Eliot and Blackmur, who, said Stevens mischievously, “step into their nightshirts and … say their prayers” (L 624, 1948).
XII
Among the most powerful cantos of the series, and deservedly well known; in the shortened version, canto v. We so commonly say a poem is “about” something that our formulation goes unobserved. Stevens challenges it, then moves on, expanding into a visionary moment, as if a new poem were being born.
“cry”: a key word in the sequence, as also in Stevens’s poetry; already introduced in IV and VIII; see also note on “leaves,” below.
“res”: (Lat.) “subject-matter,” later “thing” or “object,” now chiefly legal; for its wide significance, see Black’s Law Dictionary.
“about”: the poem is not about its subject, but part of it, just as we do not say a cry of pain is about pain, but part of it; similarly love, sex, or a jazz improvisation are not per se about something; they simply are.
“The mobile …”: note the precise diction and grammar of this long sentence, which ends with a clause governed by “as if ”; see Vendler (1969) 275–78 on how the many appositions work.
“the area between is and was”: on the fact that “we never see reality immediately but always the moment after,” see L 722 (1951), where Stevens calls it “a poetic idea.”
“leaves”: Stevens’s favorite topos of the fallen leaves that moves from Homer to Virgil to Milton to Shelley to Whitman and through many more; see note on “Domination of Black,” above. Shelley’s apocalyptic leaves recall and revise Isa. 40:6–8 and its “cry” (“All flesh is grass”), ending with a prophecy of spring. Whitman’s title Leaves of Grass (where we expect “blades of grass”) also recalls and revises Isa., evoking the meaning of “leaves” as “pages” of a book, as well as human bodies or “lives.” Stevens’s leaves remain autumnal. Compare also Eliot’s use of leaves in Little Gidding IIb (1942).
“a casual litter”: “leaves” also as leavings or “litter” (cf. “littering leaves,” “Sunday Morning” v), and see the note on “casual” (ibid., viii), above.
XIII
A return to a more casual tone in this descriptive walking canto, after the climactic canto XII.
“ephebe”: much strengthened since NSF I and now a “strong mind in a weak neighborhood.”
“seeks out / The perquisites”: more work with words from Lat. quaerere, “to seek” (cf. “inexquisite,” “inquire,” “searched out” in v).
“journalism”: as the daily and passing record (Fr. jour, “day”), cf. “newspapers” in XII.
“neither priest nor proctor”: i.e., not belonging to the “chapels” and “schools” of VII.
“under the birds, among the perilous owls”: related to Yale’s carved stone owls, symbols of wisdom, on various buildings?
“difficulty”: cf. “these difficult objects” in i. On the importance of believing that “the visible is the equivalent of the invisible,” see NA 61 LOA 681 (1943); by so doing, we destroy “the false imagination.” The reality of Stevens’s religious ancestors “consisted of both the visible and the invisible” (NA 100, LOA 703, 1948).
XIV
Continuing work with the word “cloud” and the apocalyptic, Stevens invents Professor Eucalyptus, whose way of thinking is the focus of XIV and XV; he reappears in XXII, but is not the poem’s final focus.
“Eucalyptus”: as against apo-calypse (Gk., a “sudden uncovering,” especially the cataclysmic Christian Apocalypse), the eu-calyptus flower is wellcovered and gradually unfolds, thereby offering a figure for natural progressive revelation. (This last was much favored in the eighteenth century; see the end of Newton’s Optics.) Borges also uses the pun in “Death and the Compass.” Compare Stevens’s early implicit pun on “eucalyptus,” “Primordia” vi, “In the South” (OP 26–27, LOA 535–36).
“not grim / Reality”: see Stevens’s remarks on “grim reality” in head-note to this sequence, above.
“heaven … earth … New Haven”: see head-note to this sequence, above.
“tournamonde”: the world as a place where “things revolve” and so an apt word “in the collocation of is and as”; Stevens’s invention, starting with “mappemonde,” then Fr. tournemonde, then “tournamonde.” He added that a number of words in his poems “come to me from French origins” (L 699n. and 699, 1950).
“heaviness”: cf. the way that imagination can come “ ‘ in a leaden time’ ” to a world that has been brought to a standstill by “ ‘the weight of its own heaviness’ ” (NA 63, LOA 682, 1943).
“hand”: Stevens is sensitive to the language of hands, like Milton, whom he faintly echoes here in unusually personal language.
XVI
On paradoxes of youth and age in nature, e.g., ever-fresh, ever-youthful new days, which are nonetheless an ancient phenomenon.
“youthful sleep … eyes closed”: with the trope of a daylight sky making love to the sea, cf. Shelley’s earth-ocean embrace in “the Earth and Ocean seem / To sleep in one another’s arms, and dream … all that we / Read in their smiles, and call reality” (“Epipsychidion” 509–12).
“Oklahoman … Italian”: see note on “Oklahoma” in “Earthy Anecdote,” above.
“bough in the electric light”: recalling and revising Shakespeare’s tropes of aging in sonnet 73, “That time of year thou mayst in me behold”: first, leaves dropping until a bough is bare (“those boughs … Bare ruined choirs”); second, loss of light “after sunset fadeth.”
“eaves”: in 1930, Stevens remarked on how the wind in Florida “cries in the eaves in a most melancholy manner” (L 258); an echo of “leaves,” given the cross-line assonantal rhyme with “leaflessness.” This part of the sequence is the most “leafless” and ascetic part.
XVII
A canto that moves from an initial sense of failure toward the commonplace, rather than comedy or tragedy. This is the commonplace in the best sense, as, e.g., in wisdom literature. The last sentence locates the genre of the whole poem, and establishes its dominant tone.
A somewhat pedestrian canto on trying to see and live in the present, which is defined as a thirty-year span of generation.
“this carpenter”: unidentified, though an anonymous carpenter is likely to evoke Jesus; note the difference if “this” is stressed. The poet is troped as a carpenter in Dickinson (no. 488).
“depend / On a fuchsia in a can”: the construction recalls Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow”; Stevens noted “Carpenter and Fuchsia” as a possible title or subject (Lensing, Southern Review [1979], 878, also 1986, 166).
XIX
On the center or axis or radial aspect of a given time, see also “Description without Place” iii. With the last two stanzas, and the figure of Ecclesiast, the poem moves toward the possibility of an answer to its quest, though in the future. Similarly with the youth in the essay, “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet.”
“radial aspect”: Stevens called Milan “a great radial focus,” if not a great place (L 645, 1949).
“Ecclesiast”: the Preacher or Solomon, author of Ecclesiastes. In NA 78, LOA 690 (1947), Stevens quotes Ecc. 12:6, commenting on how it provides “the pleasure of ‘lentor and solemnity’ in respect to the most commonplace objects.” The reference helps to confirm that he is locating the genre of this poem within wisdom literature.
XX
In cantos XX–XXVII Stevens avoids the familiar shaping of comedy and tragedy, but this does not bring him to a standstill as it does at the end of “The Comedian as the Letter C.” Instead he works with the commonplace. He experiments with different “models” (XVIII) in this occasionally ascetic portion of the series, looking for a “radial aspect of this place” (XIX).
Canto XX treats the will and the possibility of escaping from it, which canto XXI denies. On “the will, as a principle of the mind’s being,” see NA 10, LOA 648 (1942), referring to Richards on Coleridge; Stevens marked in his copy of I. A. Richards’s Coleridge on Imagination the famous quotation on fancy and imagination, where the secondary imagination is “co-existing with the conscious will” (Biographia Literaria, chap. 13; copy at the Huntington Library).
“imaginative transcripts … / Today”: as if the speaker kept a daily journal, noting events of the imagination.
“residuum”: cf. Stevens’s view that “a residuum will eventually emerge” from a number of scattered phenomena (L 508, 1945).
“when it was blue”: as usual, blue is the color of the imagination, which includes the religious imagination.
XXI
As elsewhere, Stevens can be cryptic when eros is involved. For all its mysteriousness, a strong canto in its affirmations, as befits poetry on the subject of the will. The ending is a surprise, given the bleakness at the end of XX, yet also a typical move for Stevens. It speaks to the power of “another isle” and “the alternate romanza.”
“will of wills— / Romanza”: a pregnant dash, as Stevens moves to an example of will that cannot be evaded, the force of romanza (It. musical term, denoting a romance or song or ballad).
“black shepherd’s isle … his black forms”: see note on Cythère, below. Why “shepherd”? Probably as amorous lover, pastoral variety, given to singing.
“the will of necessity, the will of wills”: as in Ananke, goddess of Necessity (see note on “Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery” xii, above).
Cythère: the Fr. form of Venus’s isle, with “black,” suggests Baudelaire’s “Voyage à Cythère” with its “île triste et noire” (“dreary island, the black one there” [Richard Howard]), which makes everything “noir et sanglant” (“black and bloody”). For Stevens’s early view of Cytherea, see “Carnet de Voyage” VI (OP 7, LOA 523, 1914); for Crispin’s early view, see “From the Journal of Crispin” II (OP 50, LOA 988, 1921), cut in “The Comedian as the Letter C” along with all references to Crispin as lover and to the genre of romance.
“Out of the surfaces”: cf. note on x, above echoing the well-known opening of Psalm 130:1, “Out of the depths have I cried unto thee” (Lat., “ De profundis, clamavi,” a Baudelaire title).
XXII
“a daily sense”: hence the importance of diurnal observations and tropes throughout; cf. “oldest-newest” in XVI.
“lone wanderers”: in context, not so much a solitaire or a Wordsworth (“I wandered lonely as a cloud,” etc.) as an isolated wanderer, especially isolated from the actual world; the planets are also called the “wanderers,” though none is a lone wanderer.
“the evening star”: the planet Venus, linking this canto with the previous one (cf. the early poem, “O, Florida, Venereal Soil”).
XXIII
An evening canto, whose long third sentence repeating “sound” suggests Long Island Sound, sometimes like charm verse. The canto provides a very effective mimesis of going to bed, musing on the day, dozing, and slowly approaching sleep.
XXIV
“The consolations of space”: a revisionary echo of Boethius, “The Consolation of Philosophy.”
“The statue of Jove”: as elsewhere, a statue embodies something long gone that is now unreal (cf. NSF II.III).
“Incomincia”: a latinate neologism, presumably “things that are incoming,” etc.; cf. “a coming on and a coming forth” (XXX), “edgings and inchings” (XXXI), etc.
“the hand was raised”: in context, suggesting the common gesture that signals a beginning, as before a speech, or a conductor’s first movement, or a bell-ringer’s for the “first bells.”
XXV
A simple, beautiful, and memorable canto on Stevens’s inner artistic conscience, personified.
“fixed”: a strong word for Stevens; cf. his observation in 1948 about certain painters who appeared to be deviating from reality, but in fact “were trying to fix it” (L 601, 1948).
“C’est toujours …”: (Fr.) “It is always life that is watching me.”
“unfaithful”: “to every faithful poet the faithful poem is an act of conscience” (OP 253, LOA 834, 1951).
“this hidalgo”: less a muse figure than “a companion of the conscience” (ibid.), and cf. L 692 on how “the conscientious artist must please himself ” (1950). See biography and also SPBS 93 (1948) on the characteristics of the “deep Spanishness” of Santayana and Picasso.
“The commonplace became a rumpling of blazons”: offering many possibilities for word-play linking “commonplace” and “blazons.”
“hatching that stared …”: cf. “looks that caught him” in l. 4, and “The eye of a vagabond in metaphor / That catches our own” (NSF II.X), in a submerged “hatch” - “catch” rhyme; hatching is also a drawing technique.
On “the earth / Seen as inamorata,” both afar and nearby. The ending resembles the ending of xv, and similarly is unexpectedly moving.
“the afternoon Sound”: punning on Long Island Sound, the location of New Haven, and the sounds here and elsewhere.
“transcendent”: cf. the end of “Effects of Analogy” (NA 130, LOA 722–23, 1948).
“inamorata”: a beloved (female), here the earth, both in its sublime aspect and its everyday impoverished aspect; cf. reality as the poet’s “inescapable and ever-present difficulty and inamorata” (OP 256, LOA 838, 1951).
“naked or in rags”: cf. the poor items at a farmers’ market that nonetheless have extraordinary emotional power (OP 248, LOA 820, 1948); a resonance of language from the Gospels, used of the needy who require help for body and spirit.
“gritting the ear”: see note on “grates” in “Autumn Refrain,” above; a rehabilitation of the word and the effect.
XXVII
A canto close to a parody of the marriage of the Spirit and the Bride in the Book of Revelation, though the tone does not sound parodic. Perhaps it is deliberately dry after the emotion of XXVI.13–18 and before the accumulating force of the last four cantos.
“ ‘lies at his ease beside the sea’ ”: cf. major man in the form of the McCullough, who “lay lounging by the sea,” where language may speak “with ease” (NSF I.VIII).
XXVIII
The first of four powerful closing cantos. Note the careful construction of the remarkable closing sentence, a key sentence for Stevens’s work.
“the tin plate,” etc.: as in actuality, and also in paintings by Picasso, etc.
“Misericordia”: (Lat.) “pity, compassion, mercy”; in capitalized form, the goddess of pity.
“Bergamo on a postcard, Rome … Salzburg … Paris”: Stevens enjoyed postcards from abroad, which stimulated his sense of place. Paris and a few other sites became places he could visit imaginatively (L 605, 1948); when a friend was at Bergamo, he “looked up the place” (L 645, 1949); a “postcard from Rome set me up” (L 629, 1949); and cf. “a postcard from … Salzburg” (L 613, 1948); for Paris, see, e.g., index to L, “Paris,” especially letters to Anatole and Paule Vidal, and to Barbara Church.
“longed-for lands”: Stevens has already evoked Patmos (where the Apocalypse was written) and Cythère with the other isle, as well as Paris in the present and Long Island through a pun.
“intricate evasions of as”: “evasions” is not necessarily a pejorative word for Stevens; “as”: not only the preceding “as,” but also the “as” of all similitude; note how the grammar (“of life, // As it is, in the intricate evasions …”) complicates things.
“created from nothingness”: as elsewhere, revising the sense of creation ex nihilo, the orthodox Christian doctrine of creation.
XXIX
A bewitching canto, capturing the sense of many of the contraries in this poem, which test an ideal world against this present one in its plainest aspects. In the end, the earthly paradise and this actual earth are one and the same, “except for the adjectives”—a large exception.
“land of the lemon trees”: a compendium of earthly paradises, most immediately Goethe’s, in Mignon’s well-known song, “Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn” (“Knowst thou the land where the lemon trees bloom”), from Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (The Apprencticeship of Wilhelm Meister), associated with Italy.
“citron-sap”: also recalling Milton’s citron trees in Eden, which lie behind Goethe’s.
“mic-mac of mocking birds”: setting up multiple word-play; also reminding us that the North American mockingbird corresponds to the European bird associated with an earthly paradise, the nightingale (as in Milton, Keats, etc.). (It is sometimes called “the American nightingale,” and see Whitman, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” and others.) Note also the sound effects, as of bird song or cry.
“land of the elm trees”: New Haven as Elm Tree City (as it was once known), i.e., this earth.
“Wreathed round … round wreath”: autumn in New Haven through the eyes of an heir to a Spenser-Keats line of succession, in the conventional figure of an autumn wreath (“Mutability Cantos” 7.30.1–9, “To Autumn”); it is presented in a scheme of chiasmus, another example of going “round and round.”
“They rolled their r’s there”: again, multiple word-play (a Mediterranean Romance language, an etymological pun on “voluble,” an echo of “cigars” and so an idealized South, perhaps Milton’s reported pronunciation, etc.).
“folded over, turned round”: a play on “elm” / “lemon” and on “folded” (enigmatic) and “turned” (reversed and troped) language. The linguistic play offers a trope for the relation of this actual earth and an earthly paradise.
XXX
The bareness of late autumn provides a figure for the clearing or purging of sight that is given as Stevens’s aim at the start.
“là-bas”: (Fr.) “down there,” often used of an ideal place (see note on NSF II.v). “a coming on”: cf. “Incomincia” (XXIV) and also “sweet the coming on / Of grateful evening mild” (PL IV.646–47).
“squirrels”: cf. Dickinson, no. 131.
“hundreds of eyes, in one mind”: not just one hundred eyes in one man, Argus.
XXXI
At the end of his long sequence, Stevens seems content to leave the building of a new common mythology to a future generation. Similarly in the essay, “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet,” where the focus is on one imaginative leader, not a community as here. Most of the canto is a 15-line sentence whose subject is given in lines 10–12 (“the edgings … statements”).
“legible,” etc.: the opening examples both pun and cross sense-effects as in synaesthesia; e.g., “reds” with “legible” puns on “reads,” “sheets of music / In the strokes of thunder” suggests sheet-lightning, etc.
“Constantine”: the emperor Constantine (288?–337), instrumental in decreeing the acceptance of Christianity within the Roman Empire (313) and convening the first ecumenical council (Council of Nicaea, 325); suggesting a parallel of early Christianity and the mid-twentieth century; playing also on “constant” elsewhere.
“Mr. Blank”: as with “blank” elsewhere, the reader is invited to fill in the blank, and perhaps to consider other memorable uses of “blank” (see note on “The Auroras of Autumn” II, above).
“a woman writing a note”: on realizing “the poetic act” in ordinary things such as “writing a letter to a person at a distance,” see OP 255, LOA 836–37 (1951).
“a solid”: Stevens quotes Joad on the misperception of the world “as a collection of solid, static objects” (NA 25, LOA 658, 1942).
“dust”: in biblical use including humankind (cf. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust” in many Christian burial services). Compare also Stevens’s troping on “dust” and “shade” throughout his writing.
“force”: any force that “traverses a shade,” e.g., a brain wave. Stevens’s hypothetical definition of reality is “a shade that traverses” or “a force that traverses,” a definition that also accords with modern physics. On a wave as a force rather than solid water, see NA 35, LOA 665 (1942).
Things of August
Poetry 75 (Dec. 1949); CP 489–96, LOA 417–22.
Stevens moves from bare autumn back to late summer, in these sharply realized August sounds, sights, weather, etc., with intimations and memories therefrom. The tone is generally more relaxed than in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” and sometimes exhilarated. There is much humor in the tenpart series, though the end is touched with melancholy. While the series is uneven, some parts deserve to be better known, particularly cantos I, II, V, and X. Some portions read like commentaries on the long sequence just preceding. Note the variation in person throughout.
I
“Locusts”: cicadas (American usage); see note on “Certain Phenomena of Sound,” above. Not biblical locusts (family Acrididae), who do not sing, and include destructive pests, as in the plague of locusts (Ex. 10:5–6, 12–15, and see “Puella Parvula”); but they do give biblical resonance to “day” and “night” in line 1, echoing the pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night (Ex. 13:21–22); the echo is appropriate as these sounds also are guides to another place, perhaps a home.
“By a pure fountain, that was a ghost”: playing against the well-known French-Canadian (originally French) folksong, “A la claire fontaine” (“By a clear or pure fountain”), with a refrain, “Il y a longtemps que je t’aime / Jamais je ne t’oublierai” (“Long have I loved you / Never will I forget you”).
“honky-tonk”: ragtime or jazz, usually on the piano and of a kind played in a honky-tonk, i.e., cheap nightclub, etc.; the word in the sense of “music” was first recorded in 1933, according to the OED.
II
The world as an egg is a common trope. Stevens’s troping also makes use of a breakfast egg, cracked and then poached or fried (“spread white,” etc.). The exultant ending celebrates this example of a “poetic act” in an ordinary occasion.
“myrrh and camphor”: both intensely aromatic; linked in sound with the word “summer,” hence a “variation”; “myrrh” breaks with the familiar December myrrh of the Three Wise Men and moves toward the second syllable of “summer” (as well as Keats’s “summer mirth” in “To Autumn”).
“And Adirondack glittering”: the Adirondacks become one in a collective metaphor, and a radical change of perspective, a mountain within an egg; note the scheme “And Adiron- ,” which is another type of “variation” and initiates a series of sound-schemes here.
“cat hawks it … hawk cats it”: as if the Adirondack brought its animal life with it; another variation, where words “spread sail” and play with grammar; as if the hawk is a flying cat, etc.; suggesting how hawks and cats resemble each other, notably in eyesight, claws, and pouncing on prey; similarly with the writer, and so recalling Stevens’s use of both creatures as figures for the poet or poetry; through chiasmus, pulling the inner eye up and then down, and around in a circle, like the governing trope of egg as world. All this and more, in the sheer fun of nine words.
III
Compare the contrast (with a difference) in MBG xxiii.
“High … low”: already exemplified in the poem’s high and low diction.
“Mediterranean”: as elsewhere, the etymological meaning is in play, (Lat.) “middle of the land.”
IV
An intriguing canto, not yet well read. Stevens analyses a fragrance that brings back memories, like the odor of Proust’s madeleines. As in Proust, the memories evolve into filial ones, but less happily. It is uncertain how far the parentoffspring relation is personal and/or generally individual and/or metaphoric, as, e.g., with God the Father. Stevens leaves open the question of how the desired lilacs at the end might help. (See also the father figure in viii.) This is the only canto using “One” as person.
“The sad smell of the lilacs”: a spring-time fragrance remembered in August. “Sad” recalls both Stevens’s own associations with the fragrance (see note on “Last Look at the Lilacs,” above) and Whitman’s in his elegy for Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”
“Not as … Persephone … a widow Dooley”: Persephone returns from the underground in the spring, thanks to “parental love.” The reader must infer Mrs. Dooley’s character; if she is the widow of the sardonic political commentator, Mr. Dooley, he may have influenced her. (See Finley Peter Dunne’s once-popular series on Mr. Dooley.)
“rich earth … brown wheat”: with these lines, cf. the passage on “autumn umber” (NSF I.I).
“the fatal … An arrogant dagger … In the parent’s hand”: cf. “Esthétique du Mal” XIII on father and son.
V
By contrast, Stevens’s favorite wisdom figure and mentor, the rabbi, fills this canto with happy satisfaction. The tone gives Stevens’s own flavor of wit and humor, easy intelligence, accommodation of high and conversational diction, and sense of pleasure. Compare with the tone of ii.
“Weisheit”: (Ger.) “wisdom,” part of Stevens’s exuberant w series; wisdom with German connotations, as with a learned rabbi.
“wears the words … to look upon / Within”: an expansion of the word “insight,” whose metaphoric base is now dead, and which ends the canto; see also next note, below.
“crown,” “garment”: for the metaphor of wearing wisdom as a garment and crown, see, e.g., the apocryphal book of Ecclesiasticus, 6:31.
VI
As if extending the word “fatal” in iv, and contemplating its influence in a life.
“frere”: (Fr., frère) “brother,” accent omitted; alliteratively linked to “fields” as “mechanic” is to “mountains.”
VII
A rather flat canto. Nonetheless it catches the mixed response of returning to nearby familiar life after contemplating the world at large. Compare the tower in “Credences of Summer” iii.
VIII
“We resembled one another,” etc.: starting a new stanza, as in LOA.
IX
A single 20-line sentence, marked by a large proportion of monosyllabic words.
“A new text of the world”: cf. “an Ordinary Evening in New Haven” I.
“hermitage”: cf. “Hermitage at the Centre.”
A canto moving back toward more realistic mimesis, as in canto I.
“The mornings grow silent”: early-morning birdsong, so loud in spring, wanes during the nesting and fledgling season, until it falls virtually silent in August.
“the never-failing wonder”: Stevens’s syntax is built so as to offer two possible meanings of “wonder,” birdsong or the cycle of song and silence.
“tricorn”: a three-cornered hat, literally “three horns,” playing on the epithet of the moon as “triform” because it is “either round, or waxing with horns towards the east, or waning with horns towards the west” (Brewer).
“Impolitor”: an invented noun from Lat. adj. impolitus, -a, -um, “rough, plain, unadorned,” perhaps by analogy with Imperator (Emperor). Instead of a “rex Imperator,” a king Emperor, Stevens offers a king Rough; in context, rough plain king Winter or king Death.
“what she was”: a contrast in dazzling brilliance, love, and generosity with the rex Impolitor who will follow. Perhaps August at month’s end. Perhaps an August muse like the one of fictive music. Perhaps both.
“exhausted and a little old”: as of August, as of any woman, in contrast to the “never-tiring wonder” in l. 1; the contrast resembles that in Keats’s “To Autumn.”
Angel Surrounded by Paysans
Poetry London 17 (Jan. 1950); CP 496–97, LOA 423.
A central and moving poem. Stevens chose a phrase from it, “the necessary angel,” as title for his collection of essays in 1951, a phrase that needs to be read in its full context. (See the couplet where it appears, as in the epigraph to The Necessary Angel; see also note on “angel of reality,” below). The poem grew from a still-life painting by Tal Coat, purchased by Stevens in September 1949. He titled it Angel Surrounded by Peasants, calling the “Venetian glass bowl on the left” an angel and “the terrine, bottles and the glasses that surround it” peasants. He added that the title tamed the painting (L 650, 1949). See also L 652–54, 655–56, 661.
“paysans”: (Fr.) “peasants, countrymen”; cf. Dickinson; “How far the Village lies - / Whose peasants are the Angels” (no. 7).
“There is / A welcome at the door … ?”: cf. Rev. 3:20, “ ‘Behold, I stand at the door, and knock,’ ” etc., and the once-famous Holman Hunt painting by that title. As is appropriate, it is impossible to tell who is inside the door and who is outside—or rather if there is an inside and outside at all in the allegorical sense of Hunt’s painting.
“I am the angel of reality”: note Stevens’s important statement that the necessary angel “will appear to be the angel of the imagination” for nine readers out of ten and for nine days out of ten. But, he adds, “it is the tenth day that counts” (L 753, 1952).
“no wear of ore”: that is, an earthly figure with no golden crown or similar adornment, not a heavenly creature (L 661, 1949).
“tepid”: on Stevens’s awareness of lexis here (“paysans” and “tepid”), see his amusing p.s. to Nicholas Moore, Poetry London (L 650, 1949).
“Rise liquidly … watery words”: as in a new creation, echoing Milton’s creation story (see note to “Looking across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly,” below).
“half of a figure of a sort”: part of a cunningly shaped question; “figure” in multiple senses, including (1) a personified angel; (2) a ghost (“apparition”); (3) a figure of speech, alliteration (see next note, below); and more.
“apparition apparelled”: cf. “glorious Apparition,” used of the archangel Michael (PL XI.211), and cf. “Apparelled in celestial light” (Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” I.4).
“lightest look”: as in “sheerest, hardly perceptible,” “ghost-like”; as in a look that is light; as in a look full of light like Wordsworth’s celestial light.
“a turn / Of my shoulder”: also a turn of enjambment over the line, and a turn of the page, the last page of The Auroras of Autumn. The figure, which has metamorphosed into something like a ray of light or a fugitive ghost-like glimpse of some thought, now reappears as a body, with shoulders. Like the body of the poem, it turns sideways when the page is turned, becoming wafer-thin and vanishing, except where it lives on in memory.