Stevens Textplication #36: Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb

On the Manner of Addressing Clouds is one of many early Stevens poems that present traditional Christian practices and belief in starkly unflattering terms. “Sunday Morning” is perhaps the most famous example of this, where a Baudelairean pursuit of aesthetic contemplation is substituted as philosophical ideal for the meaningless rituals of churchgoing.

The darkest strains of Stevens’ contempt for religion as it was almost universally practiced in his time and place can be found in a series written in the aftermath of the apocalyptically deadly but spiritually meaningless first world war which might be termed “Christian burial poems,” such as Clouds, Cortege for Rosenbloom, “The Worms at Heaven’s Gate,” The Emperor of Ice Cream, “To a High-Toned Old Christian Woman,” and today’s poem, from 1921, “Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb.” These poems all reference the sine qua non of Christian belief – that today’s sacrifice to the word of Christ will redeem us tomorrow with a perpetual afterlife. As evidenced by funeral ceremonies, these poems suggest, there is no evidence whatsoever for this proposition. Death is presented as an ocean of nothingness that offers no reason for the living to follow the conventional religious dictates of faith, worship and service to others.

It could be argued that Stevens’ reputation as a major 20^th century poet derives from these poems, and the resultant critical perspective of him as a post-Nietzschean (aka post-death-of-God) poet, seeking humanistic alternatives in a world where traditional religious faith is no longer possible. Such a crisp, “modern” viewpoint certainly helps squeeze the rotund Romantic Stevens into Pound’s ascetic canon of radical reactionaries who came to deify the poet king by killing him first – just as it fits into the larger cultural “agenda” of “secular humanism” bent on catapulting the god of scientific materialism over the Judeo-Christian god just as surely – if not as honestly or elegantly – as the Greco-Roman pantheon was supplanted.

Thus Stevens is still viewed in many circles as the “atheist poet,” akin to Sylvia Plath as “confessional poet” or Bob Dylan as “protest singer.” The truth, not that such an arrow has much force in the face of such a passionate army, is that Stevens is almost exclusively and obsessively a metaphysical poet, continually capturing in his verse the unseen spirit that pervades all things. Granted, the great conflict in his work is between the ability of “poets” (Stevens’ all-encompassing term for what should not be understood as simply putting rhymes to paper) to see this mystic truth (through the vehicle of “imagination”), and the inability of much of the rest of humanity to be anything but “realists” who are trapped in a meaninglessness existence. But traditional religion, in his point of view, is just one of MANY blocks to humanity having a true, mystical perception of reality.  

That being said, there is something distinct, more personal, in these early poems on Christian belief that deserves a deeper examination. Let’s do so, using as our example “Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb:”

What word have you, interpreters, of men
Who in the tomb of heaven walk by night,
The darkened ghosts of our old comedy?
Do they believe they range the gusty cold,
With lanterns borne aloft to light the way,
Freemen of death, about and still about
To find whatever they seek? Or does
That burial, pillared up each day as porte
And spiritous passage into nothingness,
Foretell each night the one abysmal night
When the host shall no more wander, nor the light
Of the steadfast lanterns creep across the dark?
Make hue among the dark comedians,
Halloo them in the topmost distances
For answer from their icy Élysée.

Similar in form and theme to “Addressing Clouds…,” the speaker starts here by addressing, instead of specific “grammarians,” the more general “interpreters.” The inquisition, however, is the same: what can you tell us of what happens after death? Specifically, the speaker sardonically asks, what contact do these interpreters have with the dead, and inquires yeah or nay whether the “darkened ghosts of our old comedy” (a literary reference to Dante’s Divine Comedy for the interpreters) wander aimlessly about the dark, thinking they are carrying on their earthly goals (again like Dante), or whether they in fact no longer exist.

This unpromising set of choices is presented in an absurdly overwrought manner (“does / That burial, pillared up each day as porte [gateway] / And spiritous passage into nothingness, / Foretell each night the one abysmal night / When the host shall no more wander” is an exceedingly elaborate way of contrasting the “daylight” of a funeral ceremony with the “darkness” inside the tomb, for example). The possibilities are further limited by the suggestion that the still-existing dead only believe “they range the gusty cold,” which makes everything that comes after it seem like a pathetic gag, where the poor dears have no idea just how ridiculous their pretensions to purpose really are. The “freemen of death” (noble sounding but as ineffectual as the Keystone Kops) become the dark comedians of this dark comedy.

And what is more darkly funny, the speaker implies, the ghost that does not know its own absurdity, or the people who act like there’s a ghost when there isn’t one? The comic possibilities, at least, are endless.

This tone continues in the final lines: “Make hue among the dark comedians, / Halloo them in the topmost distances / For answer from their icy Élysée.” Hue and halloo mean essentially the same thing: a loud cry or clamor. Élysée is presumably the French variant of “Elysium,” the paradise of ideal happiness for the blessed after death. Its juxtaposition with “icy” suggests a contrast between an ideal or imagined state of paradise and a real location – the actual sky. These interpreters are in effect asked to noise torture the fugitive dead (as if they are Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega being bombarded by Metallica’s “Enter Sandman”) to get an answer, any answer, from them. It’s as if the more they talk, the more, rather than less, likely they will find the answers they seek.

The sense of comedy (referenced twice in the poem) is clearly that of irony. There are many interpretations why Dante called his magnum opus The Comedy, but one of the most prominent is the sense of irony, as in poetic justice or karma, everyone deliciously getting what is coming to them (including the poet by tumbling to earth after tasting heaven). The ultimate irony expressed here is that the interpreters themselves have nothing to interpret. Their punishment is to create a frightful cry out of nothingness and then try all over again.

The message of the poem is simple enough: all we know of the dead is what the living say. But the manner of presentation of this message (the degree to which heaven actually becomes a tomb) betrays a sharpness and bitterness uncharacteristic of the normally high-minded Stevens.

One fruitful way to delve further into this is to remember that Stevens didn’t seriously begin to write poems until after 1912, when he was 33 years old. That was the year his mother Kate died, and a year after his father Garrett had passed. He had not seen either parent since 1909, when he married Elsie Katchel despite their disapproval. While he described Garrett as “quite a good egg; agreeable, active,” he had a much more problematic relationship with his mother, by all accounts a devout and strict Lutheran who encouraged his artistic side. The sense – hardly commented on, since Stevens said virtually nothing his whole life about his mother – was that he carried with him quite a bit of guilt about not being a pious son, of not deserving all the care and attention she lavished on him, of marrying someone beneath his station, of not being able to get outside of himself to understand her before she died. Instead he was left, at her sudden death, with a terrible void, one that kept him from easily moving on to un-self-conscious adulthood. The one who created him had become nothing, and that left him grieving at the nothingness within and outside himself. All he could look to were the hymn books, scriptures and exegesis of a religious tradition that she lived in but that he could not, and in that he found – as if directly mocking him – a void as complete as that left by his mother. From the bitterness and pain of having stared into such an abyss he began a second lifetime where he continually searched for a spiritual alternative.

Of such struggles are great poets made.