Humor is always challenging in a great writer. From the lewd asides of Shake-speare to the devilish irony of Kafka, humor in “Literature” baffles readers predisposed to look for serious intent, not playful chaos. The most serious ideas are best served funny, of course, but the play on one’s own seriousness in a great writer prompts the thoughtful reader to re-assess what is really going on – a doubtful proposition when the worlds of these writers are themselves chimeras that dissolve and reappear at the pleasure of something that is not exactly the cognitive facilities.
Something like that is going on in “Six Significant Landscapes” from 1916, where one can almost see Stevens’ Cheshire grin at the word “significant.” The poem is longer than I intended to cover in this series, but it serves as a good example of Stevens’ sly wit – in this case, a subtle satire on the purple tropes of the vapor-eating poetasters with which he as a poetry reader was so familiar.
The poem takes a form Stevens often used: distinct numbered stanzas bound very loosely around a theme that may (“13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”, “The Man with the Blue Guitar”) or may not be (“Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”) coherent. I’ll review each section in sequence, and tie the whole together in some closing thoughts. Imagine as you read the poem the occasional drum roll:
I
An old man sits
In the shadow of a pine tree
In China.
He sees larkspur,
Blue and white,
At the edge of the shadow,
Move in the wind.
His beard moves in the wind.
The pine tree moves in the wind.
Thus water flows
Over weeds.
II
The night is of the colour
Of a woman's arm:
Night, the female,
Obscure,
Fragrant and supple,
Conceals herself.
A pool shines,
Like a bracelet
Shaken in a dance.
III
I measure myself
Against a tall tree.
I find that I am much taller,
For I reach right up to the sun,
With my eye;
And I reach to the shore of the sea
With my ear.
Nevertheless, I dislike
The way ants crawl
In and out of my shadow.
IV
When my dream was near the moon,
The white folds of its gown
Filled with yellow light.
The soles of its feet
Grew red.
Its hair filled
With certain blue crystallizations
From stars,
Not far off.
V Not all the knives of the lamp-posts,
Nor the chisels of the long streets,
Nor the mallets of the domes
And high towers,
Can carve
What one star can carve,
Shining through the grape-leaves.
VI
Rationalists, wearing square hats,
Think, in square rooms,
Looking at the floor,
Looking at the ceiling.
They confine themselves
To right-angled triangles.
If they tried rhomboids,
Cones, waving lines, ellipses --
As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon --
Rationalists would wear sombreros.
Stanza one develops like a prototypical Chinese dynasty poem, say from Li Qingzhao, where wisdom is pulled begrudgingly but naturally out of the stylized landscape. Everything from the rarefied larkspur to the old sage’s beard to the symbolic pine tree starts moving together with the wind, implying a unification of all things, spirit and flesh, time and place, into one. It turns out, though, in the final two lines, that all of that was merely prelude. The wind action was only a way to describe (another Chinese poetic obsession) what water flowing over weeds looked like. The humor – subtle though it is - is in the contrast between the lofty metaphor and the humble image being metaphorized.
Stanza two takes on one of the more pervasive clichés from the Western tradition – that of women compared to night. The speaker does the usual “O unaccountable woman of fragrance” routine (complete with Anglicized “colour”), but the focus of the metaphor is on the likeness of the night to the woman’s arm (to which a logical person might proclaim “duh”). Then night itself is a woman, “concealed” and only seen in a reflecting pool, which is compared to a bracelet that shakes while a woman is dancing. One could read this as tragic or funny or both, for the fact is that the male speaker doesn’t even see the woman, only the bracelet designed to frame her beauty. The sublime female beauty is lost on the mad metaphorizing poet, which kinda defeats the whole purpose of the exercise.
Stanza three takes yet another trope, measuring oneself against a tree, man against nature, but instead of the usual struggle with the immensity of the tree vis a vis the puny human, the speaker here concludes he’s “much taller” than the tree, because he can see to the stars and to the shores. Such a wide scope of definition has its disadvantages, though, for he also endures the indignity of seeing ants crawl across his (presumably hypermagnified) shadow. His petty annoyance at such a small thing is comic when one considers his earlier pretensions of vast size – like a God annoyed by a gnat.
Stanza four is played with an even straighter face. The cliché is the man (or in this case woman) in the moon, with overwrought personifications applied such as a nightgown, “red soles” of feet, and hair jeweled with the blue of stars. The kicker comes when the speaker says “not far off,” applying to both the stars in proximity to the moon, and himself in relation to this imagined moon. Both propositions are absurd. The romantic feeling of unity results in the arrogance of metaphor.
Stanza five takes another game turn at a hoary theme: the idea that man cannot create art as beautiful as nature’s objects. Stevens handles this deftly, comparing various man-made objects seen in night’s artificial light (lamp-posts, streets, domes, towers) to sculptors’ tools (knives, chisels, mallets), concluding in a grand metaphor that the stars are a better sculptor. Again there’s the hubris, that the human scale is equal to the natural scale, even as the poet makes a point of saying it’s not equal. In this fanciful comparison he’s also created a precise visual image of what shadows distorted by light look like, an easily visualized and satisfying image like the dancing nighttime pond in stanza two.
The sixth “significant” landscape is probably the most famous, in that we’re treated to the delicious image of a philosopher wearing a sombrero, the result of his having been invited to, as they say today, “think outside of the box.” Yes, there are not-so-veiled statements about the fluidity and completeness of irrational poetic thinking versus the rigid rationality that rules our society, but we are also left with a hilarious version of an image Stevens often called upon: the inaptness of Northern thinking in the “alien, point-blank, green and actual” (“Arrival at the Waldorf”) South.
Although this poem has Stevens’ customary preoccupation with the primacy of the imagination over reality, collectively it builds into the Harmonium collection a sense of irony and lightness, much like a painter would throw in an odd ochre as a highlight. Aware of the absurdity of its metaphors, the poem mocks the flights of poets, even as it creates the juiciest of poetic images. In the end it’s a particularly poetic kind of humor, not laughing at man’s foibles or at the absurdity of life but at his own intoxication with the wine of poetry as he’s drinking it. It’s a pure laughter, like the way man in her proximity to God laughs at herself.
