Friday, August 31, 2018

Stevens Textplication #47: The Virgin Carrying a Lantern

And so we come to the last poem in this series, the last one Stevens wrote for his first book of poems, Harmonium. It would be another eight years before Stevens wrote again with any consistency, and he returned like a soldier from a war a very different poet: emotionally raw, deeply skeptical, focused on the singular quandary of where reality (the other) ends and imagination (the self) begins. That gives his later poems a lucidity and depth that is only hinted at in the strange and mannered poems we’ve covered here, which, for all their renown and panache, require some type of interpretative apparatus to fully feel. Thus, for both poet and explicator, “The Virgin Carrying a Lantern,” this last of Stevens’ apprentice poems, carries the air of “a farewell duty” to wrest light from obscurity. Here, from 1923, is the poem:

There are no bears among the roses,
Only a negress who supposes
Things false and wrong

About the lantern of the beauty
Who walks, there, as a farewell duty,
Walks long and long.

The pity that her pious egress
Should fill the vigil of a negress
With heat so strong!

Stevens employs an uncharacteristically strict verse form here: a rhyming scheme of aab ccb ddb, unusual 4-stress, 9 beat iambic couplets, with a final four beat line in each stanza that is also rigorously followed. This construction makes the poem lighter on its feet than the others in Harmonium, just as the supportive framework it provides for interpretation doesn’t bear perhaps its customary hard lean.  

But Stevens still does a lot within these constraints. The storyline is straightforward enough: A virginal, soon-to-be bride takes one last stroll alone at night with a lantern, but cannot properly consummate this final, exiting duty of her maidenhood because she still longs – despite her lamp – to see what is out there in the dark. The sexual overtones are palpable, from the dangerous bears that hide in the feminine roses to the conflation of heat and darkness as sexual desire in the virgin’s mind.

As suggestive as this depiction is, the wording of the poem is ambiguous enough to support an even more suggestive reading. Specifically, the negress and virgin could be read as two distinct people. In that alternative, the African-American servant watching the bride-to-be as a vigil is the storyline, and her desire for the virgin is what generates the heat. Imagine how perverse that variant of the virginal female trope would have seemed in the 1920s!

Closer reading, however, does not support this second interpretation. Only in the first reading would be possible Stevens’ clever play on the term “negress” as either (or both) a beautiful virgin of color and a figure who only appears to be black because she is behind the lantern in the dark. Similarly, it’s tortured to read “a negress who supposes / Things false and wrong / About the lantern of the beauty” as referring to the negress making a negative judgment about the lantern the virgin is carrying. Is illumination “false and wrong”? But the virgin could easily suppose “things false and wrong” about / around the lantern she's seeing from, because everything is dim, provoking fear and uncertainty.

One of the more interesting theories about this poem came from L.B. Keneally of North Texas State University in the spring 1978 edition of the Wallace Stevens Journal. He believed the poem based on the Biblical account of Jephthah and his daughter in Judges 11:29-40:

Jephthah had vowed to Yahweh that if victory in battle were given to him, he would offer up as sacrifice the first thing that greeted him when he returned home. His only child, a daughter, ran to greet him. Despite the fact that the Hebrews as a group had outlawed human sacrifice, the daughter agreed to allow her father to fulfill his oath. She placed one condition on her consent however, that she be "free for two months" to "go and wander in the mountains, and with my companions bewail my virginity." She walks, as did Stevens' woman, "as a farewell duty."

If Jephthah's daughter and Stevens' virgin are the same, then the" duty" referred to in the modern poem becomes a little clearer. The virgin ["Walks long and long" -- wanders for two months – before she] must bid farewell to life. [p. 49]

That interpretation would also clarify the heat referred to at the end as “the burnt offering” referenced in the Bible verse. It would also support the use of “egress” [meaning exit] and “vigil” [with its connotations of religious observance], and even the use of the term “negress” to denote an appropriately dark-skinned biblical character.

Scanning the poem as a gloss on that bible story, the bears and beasts are not a threat to the rose virgin, for she must confront the dark plans (“false and wrong”) of her fellow humans (and ultimately God). What she sees with her lantern is only a reflection of the grief she otherwise experiences, not the actual external world. The darkness outside is a darkness within. That’s because her true witnessing of life is a leaving. That’s the pity. Death is the mother of beauty indeed.