Title for the final section of The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954), consisting of twenty-five poems written after The Auroras of Autumn (1950). A three-part poem titled “The Rock” is one of them. The poems include some of Stevens’s most vigorous and moving work.
An Old Man Asleep
Nation 175 (6 Dec. 1952), “Poems,” consisting of the first seven poems of “The Rock”; CP 501, LOA 427.
Another poem that moves like river motion, with increasing repetition and undulating rhythm.
“the river R”: the capital-R typic river, any R river (Rio Grande), “R” as the sound of a sleeper gently snoring, pun on second-person “you are.” The poem closes with “the river R,” so that all these meanings seem to continue on after the poem ends.
The Irish Cliffs of Moher
Ibid.; CP 501–2, LOA 427.
One of Stevens’s parenting poems. Jack Sweeney sent him a postcard from County Clare in Ireland with “the worn cliffs towering up over the Atlantic.” It felt to him “like a gust of freedom,” in the sense of returning Stevens to memories of “the spacious, solitary world in which we used to exist” (L 760–61, 1952). The card was the starting-point for this poem (L 770, 1953). The Cliffs of Moher are listed as one of Ireland’s “attractive … localities” in Joyce’s Ulysses (p. 726). Note the use of the colon in effecting closure.
“somnambulations”: cf. preceding poem, also “Somnambulisma.”
Ibid.; CP 502–3, LOA 428.
A striking poem on the end of the imagination. The poem turns direction with the astute argument that “the absence of the imagination had / Itself to be imagined.” It is thereby both like and unlike many poems on the same subject, e.g., Coleridge’s “Dejection Ode.” The lexical precision and play are remarkable.
TITLE: “plain” in several connotations, as glossed by the rest of the poem; cf. “The eye’s plain version” (OE I), also John Ashbery’s “This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level” (“Paradoxes and Oxymorons,” Shadow Train [1981]).
“Inanimate in an inert savoir”: distinctly un-plain diction, rhyme, and sound effects; “savoir”: (Fr.) “knowledge.”
“blank”: the chosen adjective (l. 5), yet suggesting something absent, a blank on the page; cf. “blank” elsewhere, and see note on “The Auroras of Autumn” II, above.
“great structure”: cf. houses and dwelling-places elsewhere (“A Postcard from the Volcano,” NSF I.VI, etc.).
“turban”: synecdoche for an exotic or colorful figure, as in “The Load of Sugar-Cane.”
“fantastic”: as of a fantasy, not in the modern colloquial sense.
“repetition … repetitiousness”: note difference in meaning between the two words.
“of men and flies”: cf. “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods” (King Lear IV.I.36).
“great pond,” etc.: inviting comparison with Eliot’s pool in Burnt Norton, especially given the rat in l. 17 (Eliot’s earlier rats are memorable).
“inevitable knowledge”: moving on from the kind of knowledge in “Inanimate … savoir.”
One of the Inhabitants of the West
Ibid.; CP 503–4, LOA 428–29.
Another angel poem, another reader poem, another poem meditating on day’s end, here as if on the edge of Western Europe. If it is touched by any sense of “Westward the course of empire” (Berkeley, 1752, and see Bartlett), there is no sense of triumph. The poem breaks in form, import, and tone with the text of evening written or read by its archangel. Medusa is startling; the evening star even more so, as praise gives way to troping the star as a drop of blood, an apocalyptic image. The varying dimeter and trimeter lines use occasional tetrameters for emphasis.
“evening’s one star”: the evening star is Hesperus or Venus, familiar from Sappho through to Tennyson (“Crossing the Bar”) to Eliot.
“its pastoral text”: “Evening star that bringest [home] … the sheep … the goat” (Sappho 149, Lyra Graeca, Loeb Classical Library, quoted by Stevens, L 248, 1926; cf. Milton, Comus 93; Eliot, The Waste Land III.221); on “pastoral,” see note to “The Old Lutheran Bells at Home,” above.
“Horrid figures of Medusa”: Lat. horridus means “causing fear,” “shaggy,” or (of hair) “standing on end,” all appropriate for Medusa’s snake-hair and its effect; “figures”: also rhetorical figures, e.g., tropes of evening; “of ”: of Medusa herself or petrified by her.
“banlieus”: (Fr.) “suburbs, outskirts”; Stevens noted that it has appeared as an English word and hence “the justification for the final s instead of x” (L 764, 1952); not in the OED, but in Webster, which cites Max Beerbohm’s use.
“men of stone”: including men who looked directly at Medusa.
“well-rosed two-light”: a double light made rosy from sunset and/or rosecolored glasses; recalling “fall”; playing on “twilight” (etymologically “between-light,” cf. “Delightful Evening”).
“I am the archangel of evening”: cf. the very different “I am” sentences of the angel in “Angel Surrounded by Paysans.”
“a drop of blood”: cf. Joel 2:31, where the moon is turned into blood. World War II ended in 1945; its devastations were still widespread in 1952.
Lebensweisheitspielerei
Ibid.; CP 504–5, LOA 429–30.
A poem of human life that is all the more cherished because of its diminishments. Sentence coincides with stanza, except for the first.
TITLE: (Ger.) “Practical Wisdom’s Amusement,” compound apparently invented by Stevens; Lebensweisheit is common, as is Spielerei, but not the combination; contrast “Weisheit” in “Things of August” V.
“poverty / Of autumnal space”: autumn is also troped as diminishment in adjacent poems, as if in anticipation of old age.
“What he is and as he is”: cf. Stevens’s “I am” formulations in NSF, and their revision in “The Sail of Ulysses.”
The Hermitage at the Center
Ibid.; CP 505–6, LOA 430.
An intertwined double poem in stanzas 1–4, with one poem consisting of line 1 of each stanza, the other of lines 2–3 as marked by dashes and indentation; lines 2–3 also gloss line 1. Stanza 5 locates the two fugal voices as an end and a beginning, and speaks with one voice in unison. As with many other poems of this period, this one is marked by memories from Stevens’s early poems and days. It is also marked by the reappearance of birdsong.
TITLE: cf. “hermitage” elsewhere, especially “Things of August” ix.
“leaves on the macadam”: cf. the wide troping of leaves throughout Stevens’s work, also “Tea.”
“attends”: also in the Fr. sense of “wait for;” cf. the sense of waiting in “The Paltry Nude … ,” “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” and “Gray Room” (OP 28, LOA 537–38, 1917).
“tintinnabula”: (Lat., plural), “bells, signal-bells.”
“intelligible twittering,” etc.: with “tintinnabula,” “wit,” etc., providing internal rhyme, much echoic sound, and a memory of Stevens’s favorite Keats poem, “To Autumn.”
The Green Plant
Ibid.; CP 506, LOA 430–31.
“Otu-bre”: see note on “Metamorphosis,” above.
“lion-roses … paper”: presumably red roses, late-blooming, now withered and paper-like (cf. “Extracts …” I).
“glares”: as in the sun, as from an angry person, as if “angering for life” (“Nomad Exquisite”).
Madame la Fleurie
Accent 11 (autumn 1951); CP 507, LOA 431–32.
A haunting terrible-mother poem, where the powerful mother-figure is identified as earth, though hardly a generative Mother Earth (cf. “In the Carolinas”). This Mother Earth is the one who awaits our end. She is seen here as a destructive force, like the wicked mother in some myth or fairy-tale. Stevens makes clear that she need not be seen in this light. The two quatrains and one quintain have exceptionally long lines, chiefly hexameter; Stevens’s great skill in the use of repetition is evident.
TITLE: Fr. “Madame” changes the stress from Eng. “Madam,” as in NSF III.X; “Fleurie”: (Fr.) “flowery, florid,” hence a late metamorphosis of Florida; cf. Flora Lowzen in “Oak Leaves Are Hands.”
“Weight him down,” etc.: note the force of an opening imperative, of repetition (three times, with a spondee in l. 5), of internal rhyme and nearrhyme (“weightings,” “thought,” “waiting”); “weight” as mental and spiritual burden, also evoking burial.
“O side-stars”: as if in attendance on the great mother like “side-cars”; “side” echoing “sideral” (including malign influence) and “sidereal.”
“His crisp knowledge is devoured by her”: like some lettuce eaten by a caterpillar (cf. “devoured” in “Puella Parvula”; see note on “crisp” in “The Comedian as the Letter C” I, above).
“a glass”: on the perils of living as in a glass or mirror, cf. NSF I.IV; for Stevens, both the reality of the earth and the imagination that interacts with it are needed for full human life.
“black fugatos”: cf. the function of “black” in “The Countryman,” “The River of Rivers in Connecticut,” and “The Sick Man.”
“lie there”: contrast with how “he lies” in “The Sick Man.”
“say the jay”: as in MBG XXXIII or “The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man”; double sense of “say” as example and as speaking.
“feed on him”: including literally, in the dissolution of the body after death.
“dead light”: as against opening “weight,” and playing on “dead weight / dead wait”; ghost-rhyme of “weight-light-late.”
To an Old Philosopher in Rome
Hudson Review 5 (autumn 1952), “Eight Poems,” together with the following seven poems (order of the next two reversed); CP 508–11, LOA 432–34.
A moving poem addressed, though not by name, to George Santayana, American philosopher of Spanish origin (b. 1863) and Stevens’s teacher at Harvard; he also wrote poetry. He returned to Europe in 1912 and lived secluded in a convent in Rome, where he died in 1952. Robert Lowell wrote in 1952 that Santayana “sternly remained an ideal but unbelieving Catholic” (Letters, ed. Hamilton [2005], 196). The poem is remarkable for its imaginative apprehension of a peaceful death-bed and a waning life on the threshold of death. Threshold imagery, where “two worlds” meet, runs through the poem, as does a contrast of what is small and shrinking with what is large and long-lasting. Two very long sentences contrast with short one-line sentences.
“Rome, and that more merciful Rome / Beyond”: Rome and heaven or the New Jerusalem as a perfected Rome; thus Augustine, De civitate dei (On the City of God ), Dante, Purgatorio 32.102, etc.
“The newsboys’ muttering”: as elsewhere, newspapers provide a figure for life’s daily passing concerns (“The Emperor of Ice Cream,” OE XII).
“fire … symbol”: fire is traditionally the symbol of the “celestial” (Dante, Eliot, etc.); Stevens’s “celestial possible” allows room for both the tradition and a more tentative imagined celestial.
“Be orator”: the second imperative that is addressed to the dying man, and the start of a 20-line sentence that imagines, as if it is in the very room, what the dying man may be feeling, as it responds to his life, both past and present.
“with an accurate tongue / And without eloquence”: how Stevens’s ideal “orator” speaks; cf. “accurate” in NSF I.IX, and Stevens’s suspicion of eloquence in, e.g., “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” X.
“the blood of an empire”: the sense of a present Rome, where Rome’s long history is also embodied, runs throughout; similarly, a person’s own history is embodied in the present, here in a dying body.
“Of bird-nest arches and of rain-stained-vaults”: accurate description, also recalling Shakespeare’s famous sonnet 73.
Vacancy in the Park
Ibid.; CP 511, LOA 434–35.
Another fine March poem, eliciting a late-winter feeling of absence, chiefly from a set of footprints in the snow. Among the “Eight Poems,” Stevens mentioned liking “Vacancy in the Park” (to Babette Deutsch, 31 Oct. 1952, New York Public Library, Berg Collection).
“four winds”: from all four directions, as traditionally shown on old maps, in the turbulence of March.
“mattresses of vines”: grape or other vines, dense and now leafless, provide a winter mattress for dead leaves or sheltering birds, awaiting spring and resuscitation.
The Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain
Ibid.; CP 512, LOA 435.
Stevens moves into the subject of mimesis suggested by his title, illustrating its immense force, first by statement, then by leaving it behind and entering the world it has made. The first two stanzas, each a sentence, are set in two worlds simultaneously; the last five stanzas, all one sentence, move fully on to the poem-mountain.
TITLE: a stimulating, even provocative, title, in itself slyly humorous, though its poem is not.
“his own direction”: cf. the use of “direction” in “Credences of Summer” IV.
“right,” “exact,” “inexactnessess”: Stevens’s constant emphasis on accuracy becomes more pressing as he grows older, especially in writing where he seeks a sense of completion and of home, as here.
“pines,” “rock”: cf. earlier pines (e.g., end of MBG) and “rock” elsewhere (e.g. in “The Rock”).
Two Illustrations That the World Is What You Make of It
Ibid.; CP 513–15, LOA 435–37.
A winter-summer pair, working from the contracted world of winter and the plenitude of summer. The pair offer two different readings of the common idiom in the title, including “make” as a form of sculpting. Part I ends with a 12-line sentence.
I The Constant Disquisition of the Wind
EPIGRAPH: “disquisition”: another quaero, quaesitum word (Lat., “to seek”) from the family Stevens liked (cf. “Nomad Exquisite,” etc.); not his inquiring wind this time, but a pronouncing wind whose breath nonetheless is not human.
“animal”: the wind may be anima (Lat.) but is not animal, not human; cf. MBG XVII.
“a Sunday’s violent idleness”: ending on a surprising oxymoron, with memorable internal rhyme.
II The World Is Larger in Summer
“half a shoulder and half a head”: recalling Shelley’s “Ozymandias.”
“bellishings”: Stevens’s blue, color of the imagination, expands into exuberant b sounds, including this obsolete Eng. word without the usual em- prefix and so closer to Lat. bellus (“beautiful”) and Eng. “bells.”
“mastery”: as elsewhere, the inheritance from real mastery is necessarily limited, once the master has died; cf. generally “A Postcard from the Volcano,” and in particular, the loss of the “master and commiserable man,” Santayana, in “To an Old Philosopher in Rome.”
Prologues to What Is Possible
Ibid.; CP 515–17, LOA 437–39.
A powerful two-part poem. Note the force of the word “possible” in Stevens (NSF III.VII, “To an Old Philosopher in Rome,” etc.). The possible here includes what is just beyond ourselves, yet perhaps attainable; also the possible that governs the world of imagination (not so much “This is,” as “This is like” or “Let this be”). Part I evokes an immense range of the possible, while Part II evokes Stevens’s own possibilities as a writer. The lone figure in a boat bears comparison with Ulysses, who appears in several late poems. The magic boat suggests the genre of romance, a quest that will fulfill itself by shattering the boat on arrival. With the shattering attainment of the syllable that lures, cf. “The Motive for Metaphor.” Both poems suggest the force and the price of making art; the second also extends this into the wider domain of human experience. In some of Stevens’s best late poems, the force of life is troped as a journey on a powerful river or sea. (Compare earlier, less weighted, water journeys in his work.) Stevens’s very long lines include many trisyllabic feet, and a strong rowing rhythm in part I.
I
“an ease of mind that was like …”: the starting-point, governing the full 18-line sequence of part I.
“a boat carried forward by waves”: suggesting briefly Rimbaud’s “bâteau ivre,” then quickly moving away with another simile that makes the waves into rowers. Stevens’s enjambment changes the context with each line, moving the poem further into the world of “an ease of mind.”
“destination”: governed by a third trope (“as if ”), then developing so that we forget the waves (and Rimbaud) and see the strong rowers.
“The boat was built of stones”: not an old stone-boat, but a magic one. On an early conjunction of sea, stone and syllable, cf. “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,” stanza I.
“He belonged … and was part”: governing the final 9-line sentence, with its series of dependent phrases and clauses. The man is gradually perceiving as one with his vessel, as he travels on the sea of a mind at ease, intense, focused, and searching. Compare Stevens’s uses of “part of ” in Parts of a World and elsewhere.
“speculum of fire”: a brilliant trope, with all three meanings of “speculum” in play (a mirror, part of a bird’s wing, the medical instrument whereby internal parts of the body may be seen); the trope suggests ways of voyaging to unknown places in order to attain new insight.
“glass-like sides”: with “brilliance” and “speculum of fire,” gradually suggesting an approach to some otherworldly state, as in the similar imagery of Yeats’s “Byzantium.”
“like a man lured on by a syllable without any meaning”: the fourth simile, once again shifting the focus, here to the lure and the arrival; the grammar also acts as a trope that embodies the action, as the man enters into the simile-world; “lured” makes the syllable sound like a Siren; later poems develop the similes here in different directions, e.g., the Sibyl (cf. a “syllable”/ “Sibyl” scheme in “The Voyage of Ulysses”) and “without any meaning” (cf. “without human meaning” in “Of Mere Being”).
“shatter,” etc.: cf. the end of “The Motive for Metaphor”; entering another state means shattering normal existence. Compare the trope of “splitting” the atom. To enter into the atom or inner meaning of a syllable would be like splitting it.
“central,” “moment”: weighted words for Stevens, especially in contexts of finality; cf. “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour.”
II
“The metaphor stirred his fear”: which of the metaphors? All as part of one, surely. A startling reaction to metaphor; cf. the unexpected fear at the end of “Domination of Black,” which is however more explicable. The powerful near-visionary experience here is too strange, shattering the sense of limitless metaphoric possibilities; the boundaries of the man’s imagination have been made apparent, though not closed entirely.
“speculated”: contrast with “the speculum of fire” in I.
“What self ”: the self, in defense, works within “the enclosures of hypotheses” in a new quest.
“that had not yet been loosed, / Snarling in him for discovery”: among Stevens’s selves is a fierce animal, the dog or lion of poetry that has now become internal (“Poetry Is a Destructive Force,” the end of “Montrachet-le-Jardin”); cf. “Be quiet in the heart, O wild bitch” (“Puella Parvula”), as well as the early firecat in “Earthy Anecdote.”
“as if ”: another simile governing the final 10 lines, where the smallest change can be momentous, as in metaphor, now no longer fearful.
“dithering … smallest … puissant flick”: cf. the ending of OE, with the little more that matters greatly; re “ordinary,” “commonplace,” see also OE.
“earliest single light in the evening sky, in spring”: the planet Venus, also known as the evening star; cf. “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour.”
“Creates … out of nothingness”: as elsewhere, revising the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo.
“a look or touch”: contrast with the end of part I, “Removed … from any man or woman.”
“magnitudes”: also used of stars.
Looking across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly
Ibid.; CP 517–19, LOA 439–40.
On the relation of humans to the natural world around them and the universe beyond them. Despite Stevens’s engaging invention of Mr. Homburg of Concord, the poem remains opaque and not very satisfying. Stevens fails to make sufficiently clear his disagreement with Mr. Homburg. His much-favored grammatical construction, apposition, here tangles the line of thought rather than spinning it out suggestively. Stevens disliked the sense of the transcendental in traditional Christian doctrine, but the radically revised Transcendentalist viewpoint does not fare much better here, at least in Mr. Homburg’s thought.
“Mr. Homburg,” from Concord, is presumably one of the Transcendentalists of Concord, though he has left home. He may be a post-1894 variety, as the Homburg hat appeared only then, to follow the OED. Perhaps a suitably Germanic heir to Emerson and like-minded thinkers. The hat suggests the character.
“Or we put mantles on our words because / The same wind, rising and rising”: echoing Milton’s creation story, “… at the voice of God, as with a mantle, didst invest / The rising world of water dark and deep” (PL III.9–11).
Song of Fixed Accord
Ibid.; CP 519–20, LOA 441.
A charming evocation of the sight and sound of mourning doves, enfolding touches of the old iconographies of the dove into Stevens’s rich “ordinariness.” Appropriately, Stevens uses imitative sound, and much internal, assonantal, and near-rhyme. The dimeter stress in the first stanza is altered for the female dove’s stanzas, and also later.
TITLE: “accord” as both “being in tune” and “tuning”; “of ”: a song about fixed accord, a song with no variations in the tuning.
“Rou-cou”: “coo,” adapted from the similar Fr. echoic verb, roucouler (“to coo”).
“sooth lord of sorrow”: the mourning dove, in archaic guise, expanding through “sooth love” to the dove as bird of love (e.g., Venus’s birds).
“hail-bow, hail-bow”: the repeated bobbing motion of this bird, adapted to its personified self.
“fixed heaven”: fixed in a general sense, and as in the old Ptolemaic cosmology with fixed stars.
“Day’s invisible beginner”: a fruitfully ambiguous phrase: invisible to those lying in bed and hearing dawn birdsong, in which case this is the male bird; invisible like the sun’s warmth (cf. the sun as Ulysses in the following poem); whether the Holy Spirit as impregnating dove was visible or not is a moot point; the visible beginner of day is the sun.
The World as Meditation
Ibid.; CP 520–21, LOA 441–42.
An exquisite poem of hope and patient waiting for something greatly desired. The faithful Penelope here personifies any such faithfulness, and a Ulysses-sun figure personifies what is so desired. (Compare the use of the word “faithful” for the calling of an artist.) Stevens draws on the intensely moving reunion of Penelope and Ulysses in Homer’s Odyssey. A favorite stanza, the unrhymed tercet, here has very long lines with varying stress. The syntax shows a high proportion of short sentences for Stevens, twenty in a 24-line poem.
TITLE: the unobtrusive title raises questions: what world? (More than one would qualify here.) In what ways can any world be “as meditation”?
EPIGRAPH: “J’ai passé … ENESCO”: (Fr.) “I have spent too much time working with my violin, traveling. But the essential exercise of the composer—meditation—nothing has ever suspended that in me…. I live a permanent dream, which stops neither by night nor by day.” Georges Enesco (or Enescu: 1881–1955) was a Romanian violin virtuoso and composer.
“interminable adventurer”: the phrase works for both Ulysses and the sun.
“trees are mended”: in a seafaring context, we expect to hear that the nets are mended, as in “Continual Conversation with a Silent Man.”
“savage”: see note on “savage” in OE IV.
“Companion,” “friend and dear friend”: cf. NSF II.IV, “companion,” etc. Compare also the opening terms, which work for the “opposite natures” here, though the emphasis and tone differ.
“inhuman meditation”: the world, like Penelope, meditates, awaiting the sun and the change of seasons; “inhuman”: cf. “Of Mere Being.”
“fetchings”: fine ambiguous play on “far-fetched,” on “fetching” as “charming,” and on a “fetch” as someone’s ghost or double.
“His arms would be her necklace”: the implicit trope of “Auroras of Autumn” III.12 is here explicit.
“belt”: cf. the garments of Nanzia Nunzio (NSF II.VIII); generally, evoking the magic belt or girdle of Venus.
“barbarous”: corresponding, and responding, to the “savage presence” of the Ulysses-sun.
“as she combed her hair”: in Stevens, sometimes a memorable act, e.g., “a woman / Combing. The poem of the act of the mind” (“Of Modern Poetry”).
“with its patient syllables”: patience is a predominant virtue of Penelope’s. She and the Ulysses-sun figure appear to come together, yet remain distinct, rather as Stevens’s late landscapes hold reality and imagination in one.
Long and Sluggish Lines
Origin 2 (spring 1952); CP 522, LOA 442–43.
Another February poem, with a strong second half, at first masquerading as simply an older man’s sense of déja-vu. The first stanza is especially fine. A sense of coming rejuvenation begins with the challenge in stanza 5. Compare “A Discovery of Thought.”
TITLE: The lines are shorter on average than those in “The World as Meditation,” in case we suppose long lines must be sluggish. Compare also the lines of smoke, etc., as if in “earth-lines, long and lax, lethargic” (“Stars at Tallapoosa”).
“Wood-smoke”: cf. Stevens’s favorite du Bellay sonnet, “Ulysse …” (see note on “A Dish of Peaches in Russia,” above), also “Death of a Soldier.” “—essent—issant pre-personae”: “-essent” is a common suffix, to which we can add any appropriate prespring start; “issant” is Stevens’s own coinage, as is “spissantly” in “Snow and Stars,” unless of course it is Fr. as in florissant.
“infanta”: (Sp.) “infant, princess,” playing on “infant,” “infantine,” as elsewhere in Stevens (see Concordance, also note on “Infanta Marina,” above); on “infantine” as looking to the future, see L 367 (1940).
“Babyishness of forsythia”: one of the first shrubs to bloom in spring, with swollen flower-buds in February; commonly forced for indoor latewinter bloom; yellow, like the “yellow patch.”
“spook … of the nude magnolia”: like forsythia, magnolia blooms very early in the spring; in February, its candle-like buds may look like ghosts of its forthcoming flowers.
“pre-history,” “not yet born”: life in February as, first, the time before recorded history, then as life still in the womb or “this wakefulness inside a sleep.”
A Quiet Normal Life
Voices 147 (Jan.–Apr. 1952); CP 523, LOA 443–44.
Another poem of place and one of Stevens’s quiet-evening-at-home poems, with unexpected reverberations. The title suggests an exercise: write down examples of a quiet normal life, then read this poem. Do the examples need revising or enlarging? Until the end, the poem does not disclose whether the quiet normal life is tedious and deprived or not. The end raises the question of how many such lives include a similar flame of life. The poem is another example of Stevens’s work with the words “normal,” “ordinary,” and “common.”
“not,” “naught”: homophonic rhyme, unusual in Stevens, emphasized by internal rhyme with “thought.”
“peaked,” “cut”: the two end-words may each be read in a destructive or a constructive sense, e.g., “cut” as in wound or as in diamond-cutting.
“gallant notions”: “gallant” takes a full range of meaning, in a contrast of natural phenomena and a domestic setting. The contrast is heightened by the near-repetition of l. 6 in l. 11. Compare the very different ending of “Domination of Black,” another poem where natural outside phenomena surround a room containing a fire.
“candle … artifice”: see also the following poem for a candle of great force, a trope for the strength of the imagination. Compare the earlier and weaker “Valley Candle.”
Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour
Hudson Review 4 (spring 1951), “Two Poems,” with “The Course of a Particular”; CP 524, LOA 444; final poem in Stevens’s selection of “representative” work for the 1953 Faber and Faber Selected Poems (L 732n.).
One of Stevens’s beautifully realized and affecting late poems, something of a Credo for him. (James Merrill said that “Sometimes I feel about this poem the way others feel about the Twenty-Third Psalm” [see Katha Pollitt, “Poetry on Location,” Nation 246 (16 Apr. 1988)].) Its strength lies partly in its sure measured judgment about how much, and how, to claim for the imagination. Compare the dedicatory poem to NSF.
TITLE: a soliloquy, in dramatic terms, is spoken to oneself alone (unlike a dramatic monologue, which implies an auditor). Why then does the speaker use the first person plural and open with an imperative, as if to another person? Because the paramour is interior, a muse figure, a crucially enabling part of one’s own self. Stevens defined earlier “paramours” as “all the things in our nature that are celestial” (L 367, 1940). Given her importance, a “final” word requires close attention. Does Stevens anticipate that she will vanish? Not necessarily.
“Light the first light”: a simple domestic act that faintly echoes God’s primal act of creation, “Fiat lux,” “Let there be light” (Gen. 1:3).
“ultimate good”: as in summum bonum.
“in that thought,” etc.: the prepositions are important throughout, for a sense of the right placing of this poem’s affirmations.
“since we are poor”: on poetry as “a purging of the world’s poverty” and something that helps “the irremediable poverty of life,” see “Adagia” (OP 193, LOA 906).
“God and the imagination are one”: the noun clause is one of two “Propositia” in “Adagia” (OP 202, LOA 914) where it stands as an independent sentence; note the effect of adding “we say.”
“How high that highest candle lights the dark”: echoing Portia’s “How far that little candle throws its beams!” (Merchant of Venice V.i.90).
The Rock
Trinity Review 8 (May 1954), with “Not Ideas about the Thing …”; CP 525–28, LOA 445–47.
A three-part poem, explicitly from someone in his seventies. The rock as the ground of being is here “the gray particular of man’s life,” “the stern particular,” but then “the habitation of the whole” (III). Contrast the frequent symbolism of a rock as comforting stability or the biblical tradition of God as a rock (cf. Eliot’s 1934 Choruses from “The Rock”). The central metaphor of leaves covering, then curing the rock, is developed in a way that is a shade doctrinal. The poem intimates that the desire to cover the rock is not only human, but also a wider desire within nature (cf. Frost, “West-Running Brook”). Compare also the introduction to The Necessary Angel on poetry as illuminating “a surface, the movement of a self in the rock” (NA viii, LOA 639, 1951).
On the sometimes unreal effect of old memories, when examined by somebody over seventy.
“rigid … no longer remain”: on how memories change over time, cf. “A Postcard from the Volcano” with “The Auroras of Autumn” III.
“absurd”: Stevens, on his birthday in 1939, wrote that a poet should be thirty rather than sixty. It seemed “incredible” to him that he was sixty (L 343).
“an illusion so desired”: note the move from an unmodified “illusion” in l. 1. For Stevens, illusion is not necessarily negative; he offered “the idea of God” as an example of “benign illusion” (L 402, 1942).
II The Poem as Icon
“cured … by a cure”: cf. “Adagia” on poetry as “a cure of the mind” (OP 201, LOA 913).
“a cure of the ground”: ground in multiple senses, chiefly the ground of being, philosophical ground, agricultural ground, etc.
“the pearled chaplet of spring, / The magnum wreath of summer, time’s autumn snood”: as if in a painting of the iconography of the seasons, shown in head-dresses; note also the likeness to flower buds or dew. A snood gathers in the hair as if gathering in harvest (see also note on “snood” “Late Hymn from the Myrrh-Mountain,” above).
III Forms of the Rock in a Night-Hymn
“the gate / To the enclosure, day, the things illumined by day …”: another example of Stevens’s liminal imagery for intensely apprehended, significant moments of existence (“the fragrant portals” at the end of “The Idea of Order at Key West,” “in-bar” and “ex-bar” in “Esthétique du Mal” V, etc.).
“midnight-minting fragrances”: playing on “newly minted” at the portentous midnight hour, when a new day begins, and on the aromatic family of herbs.
St. Armorer’s Church from the Outside
Poetry 81 (Oct. 1952); CP 529–30, LOA 448–49.
Within the topos of a ruined building, a church, Stevens devises new life, a chapel “of breath.” (On responses to a ruined ecclesiastical structure, cf. especially Wordsworth’s “Lines … [on] Tintern Abbey.”) The Episcopalian Church of the Good Shepherd in Hartford was built in memory of Col. Samuel Colt and three children who died in infancy. Much of the architecture, carving, and stained glass represents peace (the church was consecrated in 1869) and also Christian pastoral care, including the text, “Feed my lambs” (quoted by Stevens in his “Adagia”). The architect liked to include details relating to his patron’s life, so that one entrance, “the armorer’s porch,” includes stone carvings of gun barrels, pistol handles, and so on, together with crosses and other religious symbols (see goodshepherdhartford.org). After floods in the 1930s, the church’s foundation began to rot and the 150-foot steeple began to lean noticeably. The building presented a standing allegory for Hartford inhabitants. The multiple ironies need no further comment.
“an immense success”: a tell-tale phrase, like the adverbs in the next line; this church once liked such trite and inappropriate self-congratulation.
“fixed one for good”: punning on the usual idiom, applying it to the graveyard and heavenly destiny.
“geranium-colored”: the geranium is also associated with “our more vestigial states of mind” in NSF II.III.19.
“Terre Ensevelie”: (Fr.) “Earth Entombed.”
“Matisse at Vence”: the chapel of the Dominicaines at Vence, where the wall paintings, stained glass, and more were designed by Matisse; it is full of light. Matisse (1869–1954) completed it in 1950.
“The vif”: (Fr.) “the quick” (as in flesh), a living person.
“sacred syllable rising from sacked speech”: the alliteration slows the pace, and focuses attention on the unusual trope of sacking speech; sacking a city like Troy or Rome meant a radical change of civilization (cf. the preceding line).
“The first car out of a tunnel”: a fine shift to a modern trope of emergence from the dark.
“achieved, / Not merely desired, for sale”: playing against biblical “first fruits” and fruits of the spirit, i.e., St. Armorer’s fruits.
“market things / That press”: see “John Crowe Ransom, Tennessean,” OP 248, LOA 820 (1948) for Stevens’s intensely emotional response to a farmers’ market with poor produce.
Note on Moonlight
Shenandoah 3 (autumn 1952); CP 531–32, LOA 449–50.
“It is as if being was to be observed”: recalling Bishop Berkeley’s philosophical dictum, “Esse est percipi ” (“To be is to be observed”).
“the arbors that are as if of Saturn-star”: i.e., of the planet Saturn, the farthest of the seven known planets in ancient cosmology; Saturn is also an old Roman god, sometimes of seed-time, and so appropriate for arbors (see OCD). Compare also the play on Saturn in NSF II.I. There is pronounced near and partial rhyme throughout ll. 16–18.
“in a corner of the looking-glass”: on light effects caught this way, cf. “Esthétique du Mal” I.5–6.
The Planet on the Table
Accent 13 (summer 1953); CP 532–33, LOA 450.
If the work of a good poet embodies a world, then it can be a planet, like a globe that sits on the table. Adopting a persona of the young Stevens, this poem on his body of work is at once valedictory and celebratory. Its judgments, like those in “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” are measured, sure, and memorable.
“Ariel”: Shakespeare’s engaging spirit of air in The Tempest, and Stevens’s early name for one of his writing selves (L 123, 1909, also L 124).
“ripe shrub writhed”: unusually emphatic, with three adjacent strong stresses in a short line (cf. Keats’s “And no birds sing,” the last line of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”). With the trope and assonance, cf. Browning’s “How the vines writhe,” where nature similarly mirrors a state of mind (“James Lee” III); see also l. 1 of “The Ultimate Poem Is Abstract.”
“His self and the sun were one”: a constant perspective in Stevens, from “Sunday Morning” in 1915 onward.
“if only half-perceived”: echoing and revising “all the mighty world of eye, and ear—both what they half create, / And what perceive” (Wordsworth, “Lines … [on] Tintern Abbey,” 105–7); the internal rhyme with “affluence” mitigates the fractional sense of “half.”
The River of Rivers in Connecticut
Inventario 5 (summer 1953); CP 533, LOA 451.
One of Stevens’s last and greatest river poems. A powerful assertion of the astonishing force of life, all the more evident and necessary as death approaches. The awareness of death is constant for the first four tercets, but rebuffed by the movement of this “great river.” The Connecticut River, which flows through Hartford, is realized as both actual and metaphoric at once, taking on the mythic force of the “fateful” Stygia and conquering it. The iambic pentameter line includes a number of spondees (striking in l. 7) and opening stressed syllables for emphasis. Four negatives define this river and defy death in ll. 7–10. Note also the grammatical moods, and the use of repetition, culminating in the explicit “once more” and “again and again.”
“Stygia”: the area of the Styx, the river that circles Hades nine times, black and gloomy. The great oath of the gods was taken in the name of the Styx, “eldest daughter of Oceanus” (Hesiod, Theogony 776; Homer, Iliad XIV.271). “mere”: see note on “Of Mere Being,” below.
“No shadow walks”: as at noon, and much more “no shadow” as a shade or ghost of the dead.
“fateful, / Like the last one”: the force of life is just as “fateful” as the force of death.
“no ferryman”: no Charon, who ferries the dead across the last river, for a fee. “bend against”: as a rower, and also as a mythical figure who reflects the force of the last river, death; etymologically, “reflect” is “bend back or aside” (cf. “reflecting,” l. 16).
“Farmington”: on the Farmington River, a tributary of the Connecticut River, upstream from Hartford; “Haddam”: on the Connecticut River, downstream from Hartford; the place-names stress that this is not an otherworldly river, but the actual one, seen by an imaginative man.
“third commonness, with light and air”: cf. the epigraph to “Evening without Angels.”
“curriculum”: a running (Lat. cursus), like a river.
“The river that flows nowhere, like the sea”: and like the bloodstream; recalling the Styx; recalling also Oceanus, the circumambient ocean-river that encircles the earth and is a source of life in Homer, Hesiod, etc. (OCD, “Oceanus,” both entries). (See also “flows round the earth” in “Metaphor as Degeneration.”) Stevens drew a diagram of Achilles’ shield in the back of his college copy of The Laocoon, and other Prose Writings of Lessing, trans. and ed. W. B. Rönnfeldt (London: Walter Scott, n.d.); he penciled in the name “Oceanus,” which surrounds the interior scenes of the shield (copy at the Huntington Library).
Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself
Trinity Review 8 (May 1954), with “The Rock”; CP 534, LOA 451–52.
On a common, happy, late-winter dawn experience: the first cry of a newly arrived bird, which heralds the start of the eventual loud chorus of spring birdsong at daybreak. The six mostly unrhymed tercets have unusually short lines; “outside” appears as an end-word three times, an emphatic positioning; note also the use of sibilants and hard c sounds. The technique works to provide a strongly affirmative, clear poem.
TITLE: cf. “Part of the res itself and not about it” (OE XII); prepositions are important throughout the poem.
“seemed like a sound in his mind”: a common phenomenon when waking from sleep.
“panache”: see OED or Webster on the two meanings; note etymology (Lat. penna, “feather”), and also the connection with knightly splendor, as in Stevens’s various Dons, who are often associated with the sun.
“papier-mâché”: in a recording, Stevens uses Fr. pronunciation, as the accents suggest.
“A chorister whose c preceded the choir”: recalling and surpassing the sound effects of “The Comedian as the Letter C”; pun on “pre-c-eded,” as if the act of preceding included the letter c, to which the choir of birds will be tuning, as a modern orchestra tunes to A above middle C.
“part of the colossal sun”: in nature, dependent like all life on earth upon the sun; as if singing a hymn of and with the earlier-rising sun; as if rewriting Milton’s morning hymn (PL V.153–208).
“like / A new knowledge of reality”: a simple simile that captures this common, joyful experience, and a powerful closing sentence to Stevens’s Collected Poems.