“The Worms at Heaven’s Gate”* is true rarity among Wallace Stevens’ oeuvre: a poem that's played completely straight, that is, it doesn’t leap beyond its literal meaning. It’s a clearly detailed description of worms devouring a corpse, organ by organ, from the perspective of the worms:
Out of the tomb, we bring Badroulbadour,
Within our bellies, we her chariot.
Here is an eye. And here are, one by one,
The lashes of that eye and its white lid.
Here is the cheek on which that lid declines,
And, finger after finger, here, the hand,
The genius of that cheek. Here are the lips,
The bundle of the body and the feet.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Out of the tomb we bring Badroulbadour.
For all the poem’s specificity, Stevens leaves its implications open-ended (Are these worms at heaven's gate angels of god or evidence that god doesn't exist? Do the worms use the body to produce silk or flies?). Why would Stevens write a poem about worms eating a corpse? Two word choices in the line repeated at the beginning and end of the poem offer clues.
The first phrase is “out of the tomb,” which suggests Christian or other (perhaps literary) immortality. It’s the opposite of the way people usually describe the natural process of bodily decay after death. But it makes sense in the context of linking consumption with immortality (similar to the “Cannibalism Manifesto” of Stevens’ contemporary, the Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade). The only immortality we can confer is what we can gather of the dead woman’s effects/spirit/work to make a part of ourselves.
The second repeated note is the name of the dead woman, Badroulbadour. Meaning literally “the full moon of full moon’s” in Arabic, she was the princess with whom poor Aladdin in the Arabian Nights stories fell in love and managed with the help of his jinn (genie) to win. The feminine, the exotic, the magic, the literary, the Islamic – all of that is gently alluded to, but the incantatory word sounds too much to me like the word Troubadour, which at the time this was written (1916) was a very popular topic among the poetic avant-garde, thanks largely to Pound’s scholarly studies on the subject. Thus there’s a hint not just of the imagination, but of poetry, a version of it that involved performing in front of an audience. An audience of worms, ready to devour, like at a poetry reading in a coffeehouse? Maybe. Consider the French word for worms, vers, which also means “verse”. And consider the bookworm, epicure of the printed page.** What kind of immortality is this – to have the permanence of books destroyed? It’s hard to know – worms eat everything, and the nature of their transformations are invisible. Stevens didn’t know about the internet – infected with its own kind of worms.***
* Wikipedia suggests that the title “worms at heaven’s gate” comes from the line “hymns at heaven’s gate” in Shakes-peare’s Sonnet 29 (also where TS Eliot copped the line “desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope” for the opening of “Ash Wednesday”) . Sonnet 29, like the sequence in general, concerns, as Hank Whittemore thoroughly documents, the “deal with the devil” the Earl of Oxford (Edward De Vere) made with the British Crown to save his illegitimate son Henry Wriothesley (to whom the sonnets are dedicated) from execution in exchange for hiding (probably forever) De Vere’s authorship of “Shakes-peare’s” works. The “hymns at heaven’s gate” are those that come from Wriothesley, by dint of remaining alive, to the dead, forgotten and disgraced De Vere, a consolation for the loss of his artistic works and legacy that he bemoans earlier in the sonnet. Wriothesley being saved is enough immortality for De Vere, who “scorn(s) to change my state with kings.” The implications for Stevens’ poem are intriguing.
** The lines “Here is an eye. And here are, one by one, / The lashes of that eye and its white lid” do seem to suggest that the eye is the one reading the page, and seeing the lashes of commas on the page, until the white space contains it (see Jacqueline Vaught Brogan).
*** For a more modern, internet-generated view of the significance of worms at heaven’s gate, go to the Church of Euthanasia website.
