Two Figures is the third in Stevens’ trilogy of poetic
inspiration poems written as he prepared Harmonium
for publication in 1923 (after To the One of Fictive Music and Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks). The poem’s suppleness and open-endedness attest
to his growth as a poet, sounding more like later, greater Stevens than any of
the poems we’ve covered in this series. The artistic problems at the root of
this instruction from one mysterious figure to another become, in fact, indistinguishable
from the problems of love we all share – specifically the difficulties and
possibilities of communication. Holding both meanings in mind when reading the poem deepens
its impact:
I had as lief be embraced by the
porter of the hotel
As to get no more from the
moonlight
Than your moist hand.
Be the voice of the night and
Florida in my ear.
Use dusky words and dusky
images.
Darken your speech.
Speak, even, as if I did not
hear you speaking,
But spoke for you perfectly in
my thoughts,
Conceiving words,
As the night conceives the
sea-sound in silence,
And out of the droning sibilants
makes
A serenade.
Say, puerile, that the buzzards
crouch on the ridge-pole
And sleep with one eye watching
the stars fall
Beyond Key West.
Say that the palms are clear in
the total blue.
Are clear and are obscure; that
it is night;
That the moon shines.
The poem starts with an quizzical bang: “I had as lief
be embraced by the porter of the hotel / As to get no more from the moonlight /
Than your moist hand.” The archaic literary term “as lief” is not in there just
to be obscure, but to serve up the first of many double meanings the poem
juggles in order to deepen its connotative impact. The speaker here (presumably a
female, as the porter presumably is male) would not only readily (the primary
meaning of lief) get intimate with the porter rather than be denied all but the “moist
hand” of her unresponsive lover, but would view the porter as her true love (the
secondary meaning of lief as dear/beloved). The normal human relations are
disrupted in this short sentence not only in that a paid servant in a temporary
lodging can be seen as essentially equal to one’s permanent beloved, but that what
causes the lack of human contact (only a sweaty hand rather than any genuine
love) is beyond-human, simply the moon, that ancient cause of love’s suffering,
poetic or otherwise.
Hand also has a neat double meaning here, in that porters
“lend a hand” to get your bags into the room. The equivalence of the porter’s
and figure’s hands suggests that the poet (who also works/toils by hand) did
not get as much of a hand in his transformative efforts by the effects of the moonlight.
To mitigate the distance between the figures, the speaker
urges the other one to embrace and even channel the extra-human influence: “Be
the voice of the night and Florida in my ear.” As a lover would tell her
beloved to speak softly and naturally, so the poet tells her muse to bring the
music of nature, what is now silent, to her recording ear. But not just any
music. The speaker, turning more directive, throws in another double-sided
literary term: “Use dusky words and dusky images.” Dusky primarily means “dim,”
as at dusk, so the plea here is for poetry that can’t quite be perceived, that
can’t perhaps be explained (as we are trying to do here). Alternatively, dusky
means “dark-skinned” (often as a pejorative term), suggesting an exotic kind of
beauty, as Florida would appear to have to a Northerner, or of a kind of aesthetic
beauty (then untraditional) that shows the darkness as a deeper kind of insight
into human nature. “Darken your speech,” the speaker concludes, a linguistic if
not a practical possibility. The sense is of sunset, where the things that
occupy our minds have vanished and the unsayable persists in a state where
anything can happen, because that is the nature of the walk through the great
mystery the night represents.
“Speak, even,” the speaker continues, “as if I did not
hear you speaking, / But spoke for you perfectly in my thoughts, / Conceiving
words.” This is both an embodiment of perfect human love and an impossibility.
The key term is “as if,” for the speaker does indeed hear, yet finds the other’s
attempts to make themselves heard to be somehow excessive, because they want so
much to be understood. The speaker (who is, after all, doing all the speaking
in the poem) is asking to be permitted to speak for the other, but without
promising that it will be an accurate presentation. Indeed, it seems accuracy
is less than desirable. What’s desired is some undefined spark of creation that
generates words. This is a direct appeal, in other words, for inspiration. The
speaker is asking above all to be trusted in the transmission, as if there is
still some fragment of human agency that she could hold onto in the onslaught
of creation represented by the other.
The speaker compares herself in this process to the night,
which “conceives the sea-sound in silence, / And out of the droning sibilants makes / A serenade.”
People don’t generally consider the night as creating the sound of the ocean,
of course, but it is easy to think why it could be so, since the lack of sight
(the duskiness) magnifies the effect of the ocean’s sounds. More to the point,
the poet, in carrying the sounds heard, actually creates them (at least as
humans perceive it). Note the double meaning here of the repeated “conceive,”
create and perceive. The poet does both, with the implication that it is
darkness and emptiness that allows her to accurately capture and render the
sounds that comprise the poetic experience.
The next (and next-to-last) stanza is even more assertive
in its directives: “Say, puerile, that the buzzards crouch on the ridge-pole / And
sleep with one eye watching the stars fall / Beyond Key West.” Puerile, seemingly
used as a noun but actually a modifier describing the figure addressed, means “childishly
silly and trivial.” The speaker wants a particular, child-like kind of
experience from her muse. The killer detail of a carrion-eating bird (symbol of
death) sleeping on a pole with one eye open on the stars may be a banal, “random”
event when experienced, but it can take on in a poetic representation much
deeper levels of suggestiveness.
The final stanza, in contrast, asks for a more general
truth – and in so doing becomes stumped. “Say that the palms are clear in the
total blue,” the speaker asks in apparent confusion, “Are clear and are obscure
…” as the reader senses the mind once again kick in to try to define what is
being seen, “that it is night …”, even the most basic statement becoming
problematic, “That the moon shines.” And we are left where we started, the
moonlight, and the ineffable feeling that cannot ever be quite described – what
we call poetry.
Taken as a whole, we see the apparently deep
communication and connection between the two figures as completely problematic
in fact. One doesn’t speak, while the other asserts an exacting set of
conditions to speak for the other – or at all. There is intimacy neither in the
beginning nor at the end, despite the stated wish that there would be. The
situation in fact gets worse, as the lack of any response from the other figure
causes whatever spark was there before to be whispered away in the mysteries of
moonlit night.
On the other hand, the already present imposition of the
other on the speaking figure – the wrong speech, the strong light, the moist
hand – allows a more balanced form of interaction – between the lovers, between
the poet and the muse – to occur. The one, in stabbing out at only silence and
shadows can fill out the picture herself in a kind of communion with the other.
What is asked for is, ironically, what is being given. The distance between them
becomes then not a cause for despair, but a necessary condition for solitary
being to commune with solitary being, things of earth to commune with heaven.
We’ll never know how much a work of art is the sweat of
the artist, and how much a gift from the skies, but asking the unanswerable question
can be, as here, poignant, sad and sweet. Stevens will become in time a master
of wringing all the poetry out of such occasions.
