“Gubbinal,” from 1921, has always been one of my favorite of Stevens’ short
poems, but until I sat down to write this I’d always assumed the
title was an actual word. It turns out it’s not. In the spirit of
the refrain, “have it your way,” expertly appropriated by Burger
King as one of the 20th century’s most effective
marketing slogans, let’s look at what we can make this coined word
into.
The title may derive from the British
dialectical term "gubbin" or "gubbins", which, no
surprise, has three distinct meanings. It is a derogatory term
denoting simpleton or country bumpkin. This makes some sense in that
the poem at some level is complaining about the understanding of its
readers. The term could also refer to gadgetry, so the poem would be
"like a gadget." This makes sense too, in that the reader
feels subjected to a Mobius strip of repetition that doesn't seem to
mean anything concrete. "Gubbins" can also refer to fish parings or refuse,
more broadly scraps or bits and pieces. Adding -al to this sense of
gubbin seems to this poet a fine way to incorporate lines and
fragments lying around unused into an invented poetic form, in this
case something resembling the mournful French villanelle,
where the 2nd and 3rd line of the first stanza are alternately
repeated at the end of subsequent stanzas. Or, all arcane
etymological research aside, "gubbinal" could "simply"
be a nonsense word—Stevens was no stranger to making sounds into
words.
The title could very easily mean any or none of these things, as we shall see. It's a testament to the poetic way information
is offered and withheld in it that we truly have to use our own leaps
of imagination to interpret it. This is a quality that intrigues with
many of Stevens' poems, but this one in particular seems to be about
that. Here's the poem:
That strange flower,
the sun,
Is just what you
say.
Have it your way.
The world is ugly,
And the people are
sad.
That tuft of jungle
feathers,
That animal eye,
Is just what you
say.
That savage of fire,
That seed,
Have it your way.
The world is ugly,
And the people are
sad.
What gives the poem
its particular cloying quality is how the narrator offers bold,
unusual and challenging metaphors for the sun (“that strange
flower,” “that tuft of jungle feathers,” “that animal eye”,
“that savage of fire,” “that seed”), and immediately foists
them off for interpretation onto the reader, concluding they are just
what “you” say they are. In between he repeats a seemingly
unconnected thought, “The world is ugly, and the people are sad.”
So this unnamed “you” who must contend with exotic poetic
metaphor must also face a blanket abstraction that the world and its
people (all that we know) are in dismal shape. Add in the pervasive
repetition and the reader gets the feeling of being hypnotized by
ambiguity.
But don’t worry.
You can “have it your way,” like a giant, sickening Whopper. As
if to seal its hermetic obscurity, the poem does not resolve into the
larger statement about belief, reality and/or the imagination that
are hinted at. Such implications are truly left to the reader to
ponder.
On the one hand, the
rich metaphors show the interpretive possibilities for the commonest
objects (in this case the sun, perhaps the most common object of
all). On the other, the metaphors are only as insightful as the eyes
of the beholder. If one can't imagine the sun as an "animal
eye", for example, one is indeed not only outside the meaning of
the poem, but lacking in the mythic intelligence that can use known
things as correspondences to inquire about what is unknown, the
ultimate nature of reality.
A simpleton, or
gubbin, would not see how the eyes of a tiger could be peering from
the sun. Or perhaps only a gubbin would, as the prevailing religion
of scientific materialism has foreclosed the possibility for
respectable thinkers to seriously entertain such fantasies. Without
engaging with the person on the other end of his words, the poet
seems to be throwing up his hands (or is it quill?) at the
possibility of a common understanding. "The world is ugly, and
the people are sad" is all one can say, like "how was your
weekend?" or "times are hard." It might as well relate
to the poet—a mass of humanity that has no comprehension of his
beautiful poem—as to the reader—they are missing out on the opportunity
to rise above the limitations of earthly life to perceive a
meta-reality through the powers of the imagination.
Yet the poet is
grafting his perception directly onto theirs. This is where the
second sense of the word "gubbin", as a poetic gadget or
contrivance, might come into play. "Have it your way" is
the inverse of "you can never see it from my perspective."
And "[it] is just what you say" is of course the opposite
of "I'm telling you the way it is." The poet accedes to the
reader as master of reality, free to make of the poem anything they
want, but the reader still must accept the poet's reality of the sun
as all manner of chimerical figures. It is a dance, in other words,
where the refrain is a general opinion that, because it is unargued
perhaps, is the only agreed-upon thing: "the world is ugly, and
the people are sad." And, of course, the poet is the one playing
the harmonium (the title, not coincidentally, of Stevens' first
volume of poetry).
To truly become a
poet, however, one must leave that stage of approval and agreement
and seek a solitary path. And this is where the third sense of
"gubbin" comes in. Scraps of lines where he has described
the sun in all kinds of uncanny ways will, if enough will and faith
is put into them, harmonize with scraps of overheard conversation
(like "have it your ..." and "the world is ..."),
things from the mundane human realm that have floated up into the
poetic aethers. The poet collects them all to make some kind of music
of them. There is no need for ultimate meaning. The poem speaks for
itself. It is whatever you want it to be. And the you is no longer
outside of the poet, but within.
As we mull through
these trajectories of meanings, a sense of freedom is slowly
unveiled. The freedom of the poet from the outside is no longer
something to be pitied but celebrated. What the poet has—however
elliptical, uncooperative or nonsensical—is of such a high degree
of perception and expression that others need to—and will—seek
it out.
