The philosopher Martin Heidegger, paraphrasing the poet Frederich Holderlin, wrote* "not only have the gods and the god fled, but the divine radiance has become extinguished in the world’s history. Man can no longer discern the default of God as a default." In this "destitute time," poets are the ones uniquely situated to enter "the extreme oblivion of being" and extract from this abyss the holy traces of what was lost: "Poets are the mortals who, singing earnestly of the wine-god, sense the trace of the fugitive gods, stay on the god’s tracks, and so trace for their kindred mortals the way toward the turning."
This Romantic function of the poet is also pursued by Wallace Stevens in his short poem from 1917, "Indian River":
The trade-wind jingles the rings in the nets around the racks
by the docks on Indian River.
It is the same jingle of the water among the roots under the
banks of the palmettoes,
It is the same jingle of the red-bird breasting the orange-trees
out of the cedars
Yet there is no spring in Florida, neither in boskage perdu, nor
on the nunnery beaches.
Dense with Floridian flora and fauna like a travel postcard, the poem is divided into four long lines. The first three deal with natural, or at least un-human, phenomena, and are united by the word "jingle" (rhymes with jungle), thrice repeated as in the Christmas song "Jingle Bells." The seasonal irony is resolved in the fourth line, where the jingling stops and there is "no spring." This last line also shifts the focus to human things, specifically humans in interaction with nature, more specifically soldiers placed in danger ("perdu") amid boskage (a grove or thicket of trees and shrubs), and nuns in training on beaches. There is "no spring" for either of these archetypal humans: no life after death for soliders, no spiritual rebirth for nuns, at least while they interact oddly and uneasily with the things of this earth.
And therein lies the sharp pain of man’s fallen state, in contrast to the jingle, which is the unseen dynamism, the life force of the cosmos, that animates and unites the winds, the deep waters, the birds, the orange trees. The soldiers and nuns, when truly seen (brought out of their concealments of ambush and habit, respectively), are revealed as out of place, disconnected to the God they worship, so wrapped in the uniforms of human creation they do not even recognize "the default of God." They are blank figures and forms, nuns and soldiers, despite the immense silence of ocean and forest that surrounds them.
All we have is the name, Indian River, which holds within it a trace, of the peoples who were once there, who were at one with the fugitive gods, the sentience of nature.
* Martin Heidegger, from "What are Poets For?", in Poetry, Language, Thought, pp. 91-94, Perennial Edition, translation by Albert Hofstadter
