Blackmur's praise alludes to the poem’s sonorous and unexpected
language rich with archaisms, as well as the ease and panache with which Stevens
pulls off another of his self-devised poetic forms. Here the stanzas consist of
two iambic hexameter lines, the second one having an internal rhyme, followed by
a three-beat line and an equally odd five-beat line. The overall effect (carried
over in the diction as well) is a lush romantic set up that’s abruptly clipped
into Asian-like cadences that echo anxiously in the air. Here’s the poem:
Then from their poverty they rose,
From dry catarrhs, and to guitars
They flitted
Through the palace walls.
They flung monotony behind,
Turned from their want, and, nonchalant,
They crowded
The nocturnal halls.
The lacquered loges huddled there
Mumbled zay-zay and a-zay, a-zay.
The moonlight
Fubbed the girandoles.
And the cold dresses that they wore,
In the vapid haze of the window-bays,
Were tranquil
As they leaned and looked
From the window-sills at the alphabets,
At beta b and gamma g,
To study
The canting curlicues
Of heaven and of the heavenly script.
And there they read of marriage-bed.
Ti-lill-o!
And they read right long.
The gaunt guitarists on the strings
Rumbled a-day and a-day, a-day.
The moonlight
Rose on the beachy floors.
How explicit the coiffures became,
The diamond point, the sapphire point,
The sequins
Of the civil fans!
Insinuations of desire,
Puissant speech, alike in each,
Cried quittance
To the wickless halls.
Then from their poverty they rose,
From dry guitars, and to catarrhs
They flitted
Through the palace walls.
From dry catarrhs, and to guitars
They flitted
Through the palace walls.
They flung monotony behind,
Turned from their want, and, nonchalant,
They crowded
The nocturnal halls.
The lacquered loges huddled there
Mumbled zay-zay and a-zay, a-zay.
The moonlight
Fubbed the girandoles.
And the cold dresses that they wore,
In the vapid haze of the window-bays,
Were tranquil
As they leaned and looked
From the window-sills at the alphabets,
At beta b and gamma g,
To study
The canting curlicues
Of heaven and of the heavenly script.
And there they read of marriage-bed.
Ti-lill-o!
And they read right long.
The gaunt guitarists on the strings
Rumbled a-day and a-day, a-day.
The moonlight
Rose on the beachy floors.
How explicit the coiffures became,
The diamond point, the sapphire point,
The sequins
Of the civil fans!
Insinuations of desire,
Puissant speech, alike in each,
Cried quittance
To the wickless halls.
Then from their poverty they rose,
From dry guitars, and to catarrhs
They flitted
Through the palace walls.
Stevens is always obsessed with how imagination makes
reality seem meaningless, as reality makes imagination seem illusory. What
better way to explore the ever-shifting interplay between these two poles than by
examining an evening at a movie theatre? This gives the poet a chance to reflect
on how celluloid illusions shape and transform us, just as it allows a
spotlight on the not-so-pretty mechanics of how those illusions are created.
The poem begins with the word “then,” which suggests the
poem takes place in the middle of the incoherent stream of modern life, where
the pace created by mobility and convenience causes events to arise and shift
rapidly, without resolution, the only constant being the time as “this happened
then that happened.” The women who rose from poverty weren’t permanently emancipating
themselves from economic bondage, they were just temporarily escaping into the
opulence of a movie theatre.
The opening (and awe-inspiring) rhyme of catarrhs with
guitars (bearing in mind catarrhs means “copious discharge of mucus”) serves as a typical Stevensian trope about art and the receiver (for which he often
employed guitars, then nowhere near the dominant instrument of American musical
culture it would one day become, to signify, as if he had a vision of Leo
Fender somewhere inside his head). Thus, the women brought their weeping /emotion
(and coughing/wheezing) into the movie theatre, where they were met (in those
days) by guitar players accompanying the (silent) picture.
“They flitted” (moved swiftly and lightly, almost
secretively) “through the palace walls,” suggesting the glee of transport and
escape into a fantasy paradise, the super-extravagant movie “palace” of the day.
“They flung monotony behind” to crowd these “nocturnal halls,” where they
huddled in “lacquered loges” and “mumbled zay-zay and a-zay, a-zay.” The
passages are both journalistically sound as physical description and poetically
redolent of the feelings evoked from what must have been a new and thoroughly exciting
affair. The rich brown of the loges (the first section of a balcony in a
theatre) is richly depicted, while the sound of excited talking is perfectly
rendered as “zay-zay and a-zay, a-zay,” with its echoes of “say” and “I say.”
The crowd quieted when “the moonlight fubbed the girandoles.”
This is an exquisite yet evocative way of saying “moonlight did some sleight of
hand trickery on the candelabras in the theatre.” It makes perfect sense if the
moonlight is the strange sudden beam of light coming from above, also known as
a movie projector light. The flickering of movies is well known for its effect
on objects it touches, and Stevens makes full use of this throughout.
Said movie light – like the moon – made the dresses cold,
just as it stilled (made “tranquil”) the spectators, and created a “vapid haze”
in the “window-bays,” a wonderful description of the ornate boxes found in old
movie houses, where they could look through the “window” to another reality.
After playing with multiple meanings in the word window,
Stevens goes practically pun-crazy in stanza five. From their window-sills they
could see “the alphabets,” which refers not only to the intertitles in silent
movies that capture for viewers much of the dialogue, but the stars, which are
categorized by the letters of the Greek alphabet. The alpha stars are major,
the beta secondary and the gamma even less bright. In the days of the Greeks,
the people looked to the stars for answers. In the days of moving pictures,
they look, of course, on Hollywood stars, where there are similar levels – the
term “A-lister” derives from this use. It appears these ladies were watching
what was referred to as a B movie. But they did see in the “canting curlicues”
of all the movies of that time (the slanting designs around the words on the
title cards ((as well as the sanctimonious rhetoric and circular plots of early
movies))), that this film was about heaven and it was written in a heavenly
script (note again the double meaning). Put another way, the movie and its
cathedral were like preacher and church had earlier been, with powerful words
and miraculous effects and impossible transportations to unfamiliar places.
“And there they read [on the cards] of marriage-bed. /
Ti-lill-o!” Just as the churches know how to use our daily concerns to gain our
sympathetic alignment, the movie here presents what is presumably an adulterous
situation for the ladies to be titillated by. “And they read right long,” gaining
moral strength in others’ moral downfall, with a Southern accent to boot (“right
long”), which comports to Stevens’ sense (expressed in a letter to his wife) that
the churches of the South were still real, in contrast to the “moribund” North.
Again, we see precise description combined with rich
suggestion, with a lot covered in a few lines. Stanza seven steps back from the
relationship between the viewers and the viewed to the assistants who were
helping with the reel illusion, the “gaunt guitarists on the strings” whose
background music “rumbled [appropriately] a-day and a-day, a day” as if in
response to their earlier commotion. “The moonlight / Rose on the beachy floors”
cues the projection team with its apt metaphor for the graininess of film.
This movie light illuminated (made “explicit”) – as movies
in theatres do – the hair-do’s (“coiffures”) of the viewers, rendering them as
diamonds, sapphires and sequins … all the glitters in the Hollywood firmament.
They become one with the movie, as movie-goers have been ever since. Even their
“civil fans” gain the imprimatur of the glitterati.
Stanza nine takes the comedy imbedded in the overripe
descriptions into overt irony. “Insinuations of desire” reminds the reader that
this story-telling is fake and manipulative, “puissant (extremely powerful)
speech … Cried quittance” (a release or discharge from a debt or obligation) so
the women who paid their two bits to get in would feel suitably entertained,
and the halls were revealed to be “wickless” (yet another archaic word Stevens employs
in this poem about the newest modern invention), which could be a nod to the
physical fact that the light doesn’t come, as in churches and stages, from a
candle, or it could be an observation that these people are not part of any
real community, they are only together in being drawn in like moths by the
magic movie light.
“Then,” just as rapidly as they came, they depart the
theatre. The catarrh/guitar rhyme is reversed. They rose again from their poverty (which they didn’t really lose
after all, or perhaps they gained a new kind), from the “dry” (sterile or no
longer played) guitar accompanists and back to whatever afflictions they came
with, leaving a la Cinderella the same “palace walls” they had gloriously
entered before, as if suddenly banished from court.
It’s clear Stevens uses ironic detachment to depict how shocking
movies must have been to sensibilities raised on books and candlelight
storytelling. This sense of shock, unfortunately for us, is so familiar with
each new displacing technology that this poem seems like a relic of that
strange time when poetry and the other arts were awkwardly trying to adapt to a
mechanized world where there was no longer any pretense of the old Gods. The
clinging to the old dictionaries here – like holding on the bible as the demon
attacks – seems somehow absurd, like a 1906 newspaper story appearing in today’s
New York Times.
Still, the poem refuses to give up on Poetry itself, which is
no less threatened by the rise of the picture house than any other art form. In
giving up all the tricks he had to Poesy, Stevens shows us a commitment that
can help us shine through the dark ages here and to come.
