“Inscription for a Monument,” first published in the March 1916 issue of Others magazine, is one of the few uncollected poems in Stevens’ selected poems. It’s a ten-line free-verse fantasy:
To the imagined lives
Evoked by music,
Creatures of horns, flutes, drums,
Violins, bassoons, cymbals--
Nude porters that glistened in Burma
Defiling from sight;
Island philosophers spent
By long thought beside fountains;
Big-bellied ogres curled up in the sunlight,
Stuttering dreams. . . . . .
The title calls to mind the “inscription for a monument at [insert church here]” elegy poems to other poets that were common in British poetry (for example, Wordsworth to Robert Southey, Henry Kirk White to Cowper, everyone to Shakes-peare). Such poems were invariably ponderous and pious, as they took stock of the poet’s achievement and/or tragic unfulfillment of potential, and sought to articulate the impact the poet had on the later poet (without of course all the modern-day Freudian disrespect towards fathers).
Stevens isn’t playing by that set of rules. Even the seeming fanfare of the first four lines is exceedingly strange: the inscription is to someone known by imagination, not in real life, “evoked by music,” not from reflecting on the person, who is a “creature” of musical instruments, created as much by the martial music of celebration as by actual flesh and blood achievements. Stevens is noting, of course, that the only way one knows anything of a literary (or other famous) personage is by the imaginative effect of reading, but we also see here what I call the irony of statues, a theme Stevens returned to time and time again, where an actual person is lost in his artistic rendering.
By the fifth line, the poem leaves behind any pretense of Western poetical (or monumental) tradition to venture deep into modernist primitivism: “nude porters that glistened in Burma.” The image is vivid, the associations rich (think of the subjugated help of the British empire freed of the all-important imperial uniform). What statues are there of the servants? Monuments depict naked Angels at the gates of heaven (porters are gatekeepers not bag carriers in the British tradition), but few people beyond Margaret Mead and opium addicts would consider Burma to be paradise. It gets even stranger with the oddly-phrased next line: “defiling from sight.” It’s an interesting double entendre, the nude porters marching single file across the mountain passes (the secondary meaning of defile from the French defiler - marching away in columns) and also taking their shameful nudity away from prudish eyes (the sense of defile from the Old English defoulen - to trample on, abuse, pollute). This becomes truly subversive when one remembers that during the golden age of monuments in which Stevens lived, statues were almost always of military heroes or religious figures; what seems to be a forced military evacuation of natives fits all too neatly into the basic Christian notion of sinners defiled in God’s sight. It’s not a fit subject for statues, but the imagination, in truly pondering the governing philosophy of Western civilization to ask how that guy got on the pedestal, might think of such things.
The second imagined statue is of “Island philosophers spent / By long thought beside fountains.” Again, there is the odd phrasing, implying these philosophers don’t have much to show for all their thinking (and thus are not appropriate personages for a statue). What island is this? Is it Japan – as the phrasing suggests? Is it the tropics, a place not usually associated with either philosophers or statues, but where such mental lassitude might be explicable? Or is it one of the more philosophical islands, such as England or Greece? The ambiguity highlights the degree to which the mind can hijack the physical image; the statue of a thinker could lead wherever the person contemplating would care to go.
The third and final statue image is of “Big-bellied ogres curled up in the sunlight, / Stuttering dreams.” The sense is of a tyrant who has every need and wish fulfilled, but still insists on dreaming of more, even when ridiculously sated already. But it’s another ambiguous image – are the ogres the savages or the civilizers? Obviously if it’s a monument it would be the civilizer, but is that any kind of moral superiority to celebrate? Stevens as usual veers away from the strictly political here, but there is clearly a subterranean questioning of how the judgments of honor were arrived at, as one today would speak of asking how the sausage is made.
The poem abruptly ends with an ellipse, like a lazy thought that has petered out in mid-stream. The sense left behind, beyond the shocking dislocation of one’s normal sense of monuments and inscriptions, is how the mind can reshape what one sees into something else entirely, something wholly unexpected that is, at the same time, perhaps more true to reality, for being imagined. These imagined shades of monuments may have more truth and vibrancy than do the strictly realistic depictions common across the world.
