Stevens Textplication #40: A High-Toned Old Christian Woman

Now we come to the part of the program known as The Mother Poem. Typical for its genre, it displays little of the original wound it is there ostensibly to conquer. The depth of emotion behind it must inevitably remain sublimated. However this IS Stevens, so as usual there is something larger and more universal to take away from it.

From 1922, it’s called “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman”, and it also marks the first use of a concept that would later obsess Stevens, most famously in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” that of necessary fictions humans need to create to live full lives. This poem is pretty famous in its own right. Here it is:

              Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.

              Take the moral law and make a nave of it

              And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,

              The conscience is converted into palms,

              Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.

              We agree in principle. That's clear. But take

              The opposing law and make a peristyle,

              And from the peristyle project a masque

              Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,

              Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,

              Is equally converted into palms,

              Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,

              Madame, we are where we began. Allow,

              Therefore, that in the planetary scene

              Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,

              Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,

              Proud of such novelties of the sublime,

              Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,

              May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves

              A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.

              This will make widows wince. But fictive things

              Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.

Imagine, if you can, the curse of being born a poet in a household where the highest value is fealty to the biblical word. The chief requirement for being a poet – a topic Stevens would understandably come to explore time and again – is to take direction from an oracle known as The Muse. She is, as has been demonstrated as far back as Plato, an exclusive mistress who does not take the received wisdom of others kindly, especially that which is designed to organize – a.k.a. control – human society. Instead she urges her acolytes to remain in a state of intoxicated mystery, forever reaching just beyond the surface of things for a truth that dissolves just as it moves beyond the thing. The “poetry,” epithets and hymns of the Christian religious tradition enforce, on the other hand, a rigid set of beliefs in terms of right action, consequences and the will to salvation. On the surface, however, they seem to be poetry, the only true poetry, in fact, a pious believer (like Stevens’ mother) would unwaveringly conclude.

To be denied, thus, one’s calling to live life in the heightened state of poetic awareness is in a real sense a tragedy – at least to the sense of identity, place in the world and in the family. It is a primal wound, in fact, so deep, it cannot be looked at directly, but deflected with a series of “winces,” turned, in other words, into a gay but somewhat painful comedy.

Stevens enlists help for his cause in the form of his college mentor George Santayana, the philosopher of beauty, who argued in Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (the book he published when he was friends with Stevens at Harvard) that religion and poetry are both, equally, fictions, in that they express our longing for the ideal and give our lives direction. Aha, said the young Stevens, sharpening his blade, but the older Stevens, having let for the sake of familial piety the youthful possibility of poetry slip away (except in the courting of a woman his parents disapproved of), knew all too well how impossible it was to use such a subtle philosophical rock to move a high-toned old Christian woman from her hard place. But now, almost a decade after her death, firmly ensconced in his poetry vapor bar, he can carry on the argument in his head, on his own terms.

Suitably soused, he one-ups Santayana by declaring that poetry is, in fact, the superior illusion (“the supreme fiction, madam”). He proceeds, with an argument that grows progressively more convoluted, to tell us why. The alert reader will detect the anger in the passage that follows:

Take the moral law and make a nave of it

And from the nave build haunted heaven.

It is at once an elegant and clear-headed description of how religion may be perceived as a “fiction” as well as a vicious put-down of the belief system of people like his mother. The emotional sense is poetically expressed through the repetition of the word “nave.” Literally, a nave is the central part of a Christian church, where the parishioners worship, but it sounds exactly like “knave,” a dishonest or unscrupulous person. In the context this suggests that the Christian church uses “moral law” (implied to be objective in some sense) to make dishonest fools of people, who proceed to help the church construct a “haunted” afterlife (implied to be a fantasy).

The attack only intensifies from here, if that’s possible:

Thus, / The conscience is converted into palms, 

Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.

Again, on one level it’s a seemingly innocuous philosophical proposition. The believers transform their intuitively known moral law into grace through the use of symbols, in order to identify with the ideal who will bring to Earth the higher law (in the form of the palm branches Jesus’ followers spread for his final return to Jerusalem). They become vessels (cithern is a hollow-bodied stringed instrument somewhere between a lute and a guitar) who live in the desire for God’s word. The passage could equally be read, however, as its messy poetic antithesis: that belief in the Christian dogmas turns the human conscience (and by extension the soul) into a meaningless symbol, to be left with no more consciousness and will than a musical instrument on which the meaningless choir book is played. This sense is heightened, once again, by word sound. The word “cithern” echoes “cistern,” a holding tank for water that is at its linguistic root a prison or dungeon but in Stevens time most commonly referred to toilet tanks.

This bizarre Dr. Philosophy and Mr. Poetry schizophrenia continues as if Mr. Poetry isn’t even there: "We agree in principle. That's clear.” In other words, the philosopher logically may be able to find some common ground (in theory) for his sagacious understanding of the root of religious practice. It’s funny, pathetic, bitter and tragic as the poet tries to assert it. This poet, like so many before and after, has a hard time explaining himself to others.

This “opposing law” of poetry is not exactly, however, what the speaker has in mind with which to “make a peristyle … (a continuous porch of Greco/Roman columns around the perimeter of buildings, often enclosing, as in this case, an courtyard) [that will] project a masque (a lavish dramatic entertainment in the royal courts of Europe, usually based on classical rather than Christian themes) / Beyond the planets.” The “opposing law” clearly references – as a philosopher undoubtedly would – the ancient world, which had its own moral laws and monuments to higher powers. It is opposing only because it was opposed and ultimately defeated by Christianity, not because it represents some contrasting principle of darkness or evil. The reference to planets is also sly, given that the stars and planets were understood and named in the classical world, while the Christian world was often mired in the cosmological confusion created by the Bible. The idea is that the classical ideals could aspire beyond the understood planets, to the great unknown, with the implication that this was something unavailable to the Christian tradition.

The Greek alternative referenced here is also, of course, the birthplace of poetry muses and man as the measure of all things. “Thus” it offers a richer source of expression than the rigid church:

Thus, our bawdiness, / Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last, / Is equally converted into palms, / Squiggling like saxophones.

The Greek tradition honored the principle of life by elevating the temple prostitute as the most revered of humans. The term “bawd” means prostitute, so it’s not as simple as saying sexual debauchery is equal to religious ritual (although that is clearly what the passage suggests). “Indulged at last” invokes the firm hand of puritanical repression yes, but “Unpurged by epitaph” evokes a focus on life rather than the Christian preoccupation with death, or rather, viewing life only in terms of a final accounting. A less constricted, more sexual human “is equally converted” (bringing back Santayana’s formulation) to palms, a symbol of victory over death that ironically predates Greek as well as Christian cultures but was shared by both.* The meaning, of course, is that immortality is not limited to the Christian religion. But into this straightforward formulation comes again our Mr. Poetry, with the line that I personally would kill for: “palms, squiggling like saxophones.” It’s hard to get lustier than saxophones, or more evocative of the heightened state of being our decadent modern life can create for us. Yet the simile, for all the rich associations it connects, does not mean anything literal. The heaven of poetry is equally as elusive as that of Christianity.

Thus, “palm for palm, / Madame, we are where we began.” Neither the poet nor the unnamed Christian woman have unobstructed access into ultimate truth. And neither Stevens nor his mother can ever find common ground in what are, truly, separate spheres of reality.

“Allow, / Therefore,” – the note of desperate pleading comically made to seem like an uncontestable formulation …

that in the planetary scene / Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed, / Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade, / Proud of such novelties of the sublime, / Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk, / May, merely may, madame, / whip from themselves / A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.

The key word here is “flagellants,” a long-standing Christian cult who furiously whip themselves in public while singing hymns in order to pay penance and honor the suffering of Jesus. They are qualified as “disaffected” (unwilling to support the authorities) because for most of Christian history such practices were considered heretical, to the point that many flagellants were burned at the stake! They are “well-stuffed” because, like play animals and dolls, their insides (in this case blood) come out when the skin is ripped. They exhibit the Christian sin of “pride” in “smacking” [hitting] their “muzzy” [woozy] “bellies on parade” [in public display]. Stevens drippingly dismisses their novelty “of the sublime,” presenting them, perhaps the most extreme yet pious of true believers, as representative of the Christian faith. He even mimics the sound they make as they walk along whipping themselves, as if it was a popular tune. While the bitter poet has scorched the earth with his high-rhetorical bludgeon, the philosopher is still willing to concede that this self-flagellation “may, merely may” create a connection with the higher planes of consciousness, or as the poet more sensually (and quotably) shows (rather than tells), “a jovial hullaballoo among the spheres.”

Then, just as we begin to believe this poetic rant disguised as argument can’t get any weirder, widows make their appearance:

This will make widows wince. But fictive things

Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.  

What is the “this” that “will make widows wince?” The sight of zealots whipping themselves? The reminder in the sight of heavenly hullaballoo that their husbands are no longer with them? The blasphemy of comparing the penitential sacrament to something as unsacred as poetry? Instead of clarifying, the poem distances itself further into the mystery: “fictive things / Wink as they will.” Leaving aside the enigma of just what a “fictive thing” is, “wink” could be read in any of three ways: to close and open one eye to acknowledge something shared between two, to pretend not to notice something bad or illegal, or to shine or flash intermittently, like a star. “Fictive things”, read as things created by the imagination, poetry specifically (since it is “the supreme fiction”), really do all of these kinds of winking: they acknowledge shared secrets and jokes, avoid topics that aren’t “poetic,” and can assume the quality of natural or ethereal objects. As we’ve seen, these qualities are not predictable, and cannot be produced systematically, they more or less naturally appear (“as they will”).

There’s a marvelous sense of freedom expressed here, that the responses of the widows (for whom we are presumably supposed to feel compassion) don’t have to be explained or accounted for, because the spirit of poetry metes out its own, ineffable sense of justice. The muse, rather than being traumatized by the sight of widows/mothers wincing, is actually strengthened by it, because the emotional material that comes out of such pain creates great art. Thus after purging all the anger of being denied, the poet can finally earn out of the experience the palm branch of victory.

*It is also an important symbol to Stevens, as indicated by the title of the very book we are using for this series, The Palm at the End of the Mind.

Momentary Reveries of Summer

The swirl of excess desire
Is inhaled by invisible bees
While the lover inside merely breathes,
Waiting, with the world, for attention,
So to become an extension
Of the stars, moon and sea etc.

All the stiff forms
That taunted my perception
Melt translucent
In empathy eyes.

Still the metallic brick
Keeps us gripped to the cliff,
For what is behind
— Mind interpenetrating mind —
The whole that is already there
Too much to bear...

Something holds onto shape here.
What is bird must only be bird
To turn into anything else.

Two New Moon Intentions

I.
The bags were sticky with the refuse we'd collected
As sand birds scavenged scraps blown to the tar
And the low sun mist turned the tattooed six-year-olds gold
And the sea froth yellow. The few who remained
To stare at the foam
Still hoped for a new way to see.

II.
The day the chemtrails stopped
The Hollywood Bowl howled,
The caves of LA emptied,
Its hillsides posed for portraits,
And the pueblo voiced itself
In street flute and rough timbales.
It pulled the homeless from their smoke,
Families out of balloons,
To extricate the real from summer fountains...
An afternoon of waiting turned
To a merger between equals with the sun.

Reflections on the Homeless Man in the MAGA Hat

I.

The hanging tree
Says “marry me”,
Carved by the knife
Of Lady Liberty
In impeccable bloodlines.

The slaves were not slaves,
The dead did not die,
But these, these …
In vehicles rumbling
With gold exhaust plumes
And jeweled bumpers
Like upholstered elephants of yore
With Emirs fanned by fronds
Of rock ’n’ roll
With their entire sheikdoms behind them
As they disregard the curbside powerless
No matter how much they wave

Their HappyCups^TM in desperation.

There’s no justice in the world
Though there are those who seek it anyway.

II.

She wanted me to play
With boys my own age
She said,
The one who taught me
How the world is insufficient,
But these boys were just neglected,

Swam in the latent violence
The therapist coaxed out
With the foam-covered shafts
They used to pummel me.
He liked the way I was present for them,
Or maybe he wanted to diddle me,
At any rate I was invited to a Red Sox game
As if this was a real family
And we could eat at least hot dogs together
While we seethed in our animosities.

I still feel guilty for saying no.
How could it have been so hard to refuse
Gifts to the homeless
If I had a real home
Or professional intervention
If I was actually sane?
The thought that still taunts me
Is how disappointed he was,
How hard he tried to get me
To change my mind, his voice
Of despair, as if the angels
Sent a guide down here
To re-arrange some chairs.
I’d like to think he knew
What I knew, 

That creeps with badges

Don’t seem like the law
But still he seems as clueless
To any flaw in his constitution
As my family, friends and dog,
Who said it’s only a baseball game,
Can’t you be friends with anyone?
The fact that time has revealed 

My instincts as correct
Makes the pit in my stomach worse,

That I couldn’t be strong enough
To serve him.

That’s the scam, they say,
But what if he really believed it?
Like I believed in my own madness,
My need to be left alone?

An old friend, the best in all things,
Especially human compassion,
Was sent away last week
For a long, long time.
His crime was too heinous to say,
But nobody who knew him
Was really surprised,
For he had that gleam in his eye,
To serve or to die.
It was like a cancer invaded his will
And the truth long repressed
Had to speak in his voice.
He mentioned the priest,
As a confidence, in passing,
As if he hadn’t prepared to share
That since we met,
And he said it helped him understand
The pain others felt.

We give and give and give and give
But it’s only what we offer.
When the other side asks
For what’s needed
We don’t know, we don’t know,
The pathos for others
Bleeds into terror
And nothing short of our soul
Gives more than a voyeur’s silence.

III.
How many children are in these boxcars?
How many sex slaves will it take
To deliver this evening’s propaganda?
How can compassion fight evil?
When the emperor smiles
At the subjects in chains,
How can our hearts freeze
In the face of his misery?

Too powerful to be sacrificed,

Too weak to end the bleeding,

And he, after all, is the one who

Fears judgment from subjects

Whose judgments are all of

Themselves, under his watchful eye.

So tarnished with horror

At the depth of his secrets,

Compassion is all he can see.

Odes by Hölderlin: Encouragement

{Second version}

Echo of the heavens! Holy heart! Why, why

Did you become silent among the living,

Sleeping, free of those broken from God

And cast forever down inside the night?

Does the ethereal light still keep vigil?

And does the old mother, the earth, still bear fruit?

And though the spirit is no longer

Practiced, doesn’t love smile still on justice?

Only you are gone! But the heavenly ones

Incite and the breath of nature exhales, to

Shape the silence, like a barren field,

In the exhilaration of one soul.

O hope! That soon, soon the groves will no longer

Sing life's praises alone, because it is time

For the tongue of mankind to pronounce

And proclaim the beautiful soul again,

So the element forms out of a bonding

With loving mortals, and only then reaches

The breast of the earth, where it unfolds,

Thanks to pious children, the infinite,

And our days are again, as flowers, bestowed

Wherever you, out of heaven’s sun, exchange

Sight in silence, and are glad again

In the gladness that light finds itself in.

And he, who is without speech, anonymous,

Prepares for the future, the spirit, the God,

In the human word, on the sweet day

Ahead, where each, as once, speaks each other.

--------------------------------------------------------------

Ermunterung

Echo des Himmels! heiliges Herz! warum,

Warum verstummst du unter den Lebenden,

Schläfst, freies! von den Götterlosen

Ewig hinab in die Nacht verwiesen?

Wacht denn, wie vormals, nimmer des Aethers Licht?

Und blüht die alte Mutter, die Erde nicht?

Und übt der Geist nicht da und dort, nicht

Lächelnd die Liebe das Recht noch immer?

Nur du nicht mehr! doch mahnen die Himmlischen,

Und stillebildend weht, wie ein kahl Gefild,

Der Othem der Natur dich an, der

Alleserheiternde, seelenvolle.

O Hoffnung! bald, bald singen die Haine nicht

Des Lebens Lob allein, denn es ist die Zeit,

Daß aus der Menschen Munde sie, die

Schönere Seele, sich neuverkündet,

Dann liebender im Bunde mit Sterblichen

Das Element sich bildet, und dann erst reich,

Bei frommer Kinder Dank, der Erde

Brust, die unendliche, sich entfaltet

Und unsre Tage wieder, wie Blumen, sind,

Wo sie, des Himmels Sonne, sich ausgeteilt

Im stillen Wechsel sieht und wieder

Froh in den Frohen das Licht sich findet,

Und er, der sprachlos waltet und unbekannt

Zukünftiges bereitet, der Gott, der Geist

Im Menschenwort, am schönen Tage

Kommenden Jahren, wie einst, sich ausspricht.

Image and Idea

The tree leaves use the light to speak.

Is it of memories, or other dreams?

If all we say is what is not

How could anything be?

Maybe that’s the shine upon the green,

That we are impossible

Making ourselves real

On the barest flare of idea,

As if the echo will hold us

Just long enough to believe

In what is underneath,

The paper-thin reverberation

Where all this creation is dim,

And elements themselves are broken

In the service of wisdom –

It’s the light here, that isn’t there

In perfection, that is prized,

What is missing from our fiendish dreams

Of immortality, the way the wheat

Doesn’t need to be told to grow straight,

So gold parades gimcracks and says “this is me”

And wonders why no one believes them.

Beneath the paper-thin veil is only a

Faint beating, enough of a suggestion

That the sky is gold in our reflection,

So we have to bow down,

And though even the shiver we feel

Is our own only, so fiercely kept

Is the secret on either side,

Something – familiar – connects:

The urging of the completed

On the aimless incomplete,

How choices must be made

Without an understanding,

Just the vagaries of faith

And an inkling of home.

Backyard Salon

The dragon moves
Unlike the wind
That makes the basil wands
Teach the bees,
The cherry leaves
Rhapsodize in time,
The canna dance,
The parsley give
The somber sign of yes;

It doesn't seem to move,
Such poets never do,
Still it poses here
And poses there,
The dusty bricks,
The rusted jar,
With eyes that can't stop seeing,
Saying nothing
For in emptiness
There's the longing
For what these plants
Can't understand,
All that's shaken off
On the road to stillness.

If it weren't the thing
That gives them life,
Perhaps they wouldn't turn
Their nervous limbs for
Something true to mourn,
They'd be motionless too,
As if invisible,
As if the eye of all that saw
Doesn't only look at them.

Stevens Texplication #39: The Ordinary Women

100 years is a long time even in poetry. The manners and habits of ordinary life are so different now than in 1922, when “The Ordinary Women” was written, it’s hard for contemporary sensibilities to feel the frisson at the heart of the poem. But then again, in 1931, R.P. Blackmur, one of the most astute poetry critics of the 20^th century, said of it, “I am at a loss, and quite happy there, to know anything literally about this poem.” So maybe the incomprehensibility of poetry is something immortal after all!

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.

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.

When the Strings become Visible

What does it mean
          to walk like
A human being?
          Is there some
Connection that
          must be broken?

To see the lights
          turn inward
The flame no more
          than a display
The reach no greater
          than that of a tree

I convince myself
          I'm watched for clues
To get keys to the puzzle
          from which I've sprung
Some unimpeachable proof
          that I'm not wrong

Instead the separate stories
          seem to blend
As one vast
          victimhood
Of what will not
          be listened to
    
But how could such indifferences
          exist?
There's only me
          and I walk past
The something that
          has happened

Could I try to catch up
          or just keep walking
Knowing no one's
           watching
When my shoes hit
            the horizon

Above the Fountain

It’s a sculpture

               one of thousands

                              most now melted down

He got ripped off

               is all he remembers

                              and the breasts a few mls thicker

A thousand pass in front each day

               few pay some respect

                              avert their gaze

Fewer mutter things, about Venus

               or is it Artemis?

                              or the clean lines of de stijle

(But that is only to impress

               those already bullied

                              by the aforementioned size of breast)

Yet something in it stirs

               some Mona Lisa smile

                              as if the real is there to taunt

For it symbolizes, despite its nakedness, some

               refuse of immortality

                              some glimpse of latent beauty

Something that exists so we don’t have to

             that we’re supposed to feel but not

                              allowed, despite it all, to see

Perturbations in the Grid

These strangers are too much inside me
With compassionate stares
And opening-night eyes, what form
I have is nothing before theirs.

They say it's only a mirror
Moving like a pool,
It's anything I want it to be,
These faces blurred like jewels.

There is no place outside myself;
I'm the alien one
Offering some half-gone crumbs
From half-forgotten homes,

With nothing I can offer in response.
It's what they call an answer, one hand
Clapping, the question asked
To its end,

The back I turned the only kind of yes,
The no of getting lost in oneness
Narrows to a point where we disappear
In what we have to share.

Odes by Hölderlin: Return to the Homeland

Your mild air lifting! Heralds of Italy!

   Replete with your poplar trees, beloved stream!

      Your swaying mountain! All of your one

         Sunlit summit, so have you come again?

You silent place! If in dreams you seemed distant

   After the day grew more hopeless with longing,

      You are my mansion, and companion,

         Trees of the hilltop, you the familiar!

How long it has been, how long! The dormant child

   Is gone, and gone is youth and love and desire;

      But you, my fatherland, are holy -

         Long suffering one! See, you have remained.

And therefore they suffer alongside of you,

   Your friends, their costly teacher! Your servants too,

      Who wander and stray, when far away

         And reminded in dreams they’re unfaithful.

And when in the feverish breast of the young

   The capricious wishes are mollified and

      Stilled before destiny, thus they are

         Made dearer to you because purified.

Goodbye then, days of youth, your path of the rose

   That loves, and all of your wayfarer pathways,

      Farewell! And capture my life again,

         O heaven of the homeland, in blessing!

----------------------------------------------------------------

Rückkehr in die Heimat

Ihr milden Lüfte! Boten Italiens!

   Und du mit deinen Pappeln, geliebter Strom!

      Ihr wogenden Gebirg! o all ihr

         Sonnigen Gipfel, so seid ihrs wieder?

Du stiller Ort! in Träumen erschienst du fern

   Nach hoffnungslosem Tage dem Sehnenden,

      Und du mein Haus, und ihr Gespielen,

         Bäume des Hügels, ihr wohlbekannten!

Wie lang ists, o wie lange! des Kindes Ruh

   Ist hin, und hin ist Jugend und Lieb und Lust;

      Doch du, mein Vaterland! du heilig –

         Duldendes! siehe, du bist geblieben.

Und darum, daß sie dulden mit dir, mit dir

   Sich freun, erziehst du, teures! die Deinen auch

      Und mahnst in Träumen, wenn sie ferne

         Schweifen und irren, die Ungetreuen.

Und wenn im heißen Busen dem Jünglinge

   Die eigenmächtgen Wünsche besänftiget

      Und stille vor dem Schicksal sind, dann

         Gibt der Geläuterte dir sich lieber.

Lebt wohl dann, Jugendtage, du Rosenpfad

   Der Lieb, und all ihr Pfade des Wanderers,

      Lebt wohl! und nimm und segne du mein

         Leben, o Himmel der Heimat, wieder!

The Wind of Distant Sirens

The crack of palms in crisp gusts
The kind of day where you move
Without question

And all the directions
Merge into one
Triumphal chaos

As if all the micro
Discernments adjustments
And judgments were wrong

No longer a thought for what is
And what is not
In the powder blue sky

Even the slightest hesitation
Against the inexplicable
Seems to defy the will of God

At the Eurythmy Recital

On the ground of wonder,
Where we train our souls to art,
The music talks in circles,
It cannot offer anything
Except what we want to hear:
The town square with all its lamps,
But not what's inside the windows,

The conjuring bow
Like a second sun
Focused on heroics, noble
Dreams, faces that glow,
What disappears in the flicker
Of its feather whiskers
In vaporous shadow

One wants so much more:
To fill in the echoes
But all we can fill in is the sound
With imagined notes from
Remembered instruments,
Maybe to see the music's dissonance,
As if it was invisible.

Stevens Textplication #38: Bantams in Pine-Woods

“But I am, in any case, / A most inappropriate man / In a most unpropitious place,” reported Stevens in “Sailing After Lunch,” a rare glimpse inside the personal life of the great poet. The same feeling is evoked in “Bantams in Pine-Woods” from 1922. It’s not exactly a confessional poem, but the amount of self-disclosure in these ten mad-cap lines opens up a fresh view of Stevens that is often lost when a writer is safely feted and dead. Put your seat belts on, here’s the poem:

Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan

Of tan with henna hackles, halt!

Damned universal cock, as if the sun

Was blackamoor to bear your blazing tail.

Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal.

Your world is you. I am my world.

You ten-foot poet among inchlings. Fat!

Begone! An inchling bristles in these pines,

Bristles, and points their Appalachian tangs,

And fears not portly Azcan nor his hoos.

This is a difficult poem to explicate, because it makes, despite the large proportion of nonsense words, such complete sense explanations seem counter-productive. But I only have to go as far as the Wikipedia entry on this poem to be reminded that the gulf between poet and reader in Stevens is always vast. In fact, the reading of the poem from Stevens’ most esteemed readers is so much opposed by the actual poem, it’s instructive to paste the entire interpretation (as of 6/1/18 at least) here:

This poem can be read as a declaration of independence for American poetry. The new world's "inchling" poets are defiant towards the traditional literary canon, and particularly defiant against the unnamed, arrogant, self-appointed gatekeeper of literary tradition; they are confident instead in their own free powers of innovation in the New World. The poem can be compared to "The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage" on Helen Vendler's interpretation of it as an expression of confidence in new American art. On this reading Chieftain Iffucan represents the canon, making a claim to universality and a privileged access to inspiration that is challenged by the Appalachian inchlings. The richness of tradition is conceded ("Fat!...."), but it is relativized ("Your world is you"). Nevertheless, a single poet is addressed but not identified in the poem; the possibility that that poet is T. S. Eliot, who emigrated from the New World to the Old World, problematizes whether the "canon" is or is not un-American.

Somehow, I don’t think the critics are just being polite about the ridiculous way the poet presents himself here. The first stanza conjures the spectacle of a grossly obese man wearing a caftan and parading like a ceremonial cock’s comb his red dyed hair (henna was traditionally used to dye hair red, for example by the Pre-Raphaelites). It’s impossible not to point out in this context that Stevens himself had red hair and – shall we say – ample girth. The cheesy play on words of “if you can” and “as can” only heightens the silliness, as if a Boumi hat has been placed on the Chieftain’s head.

The self-deprecation expands in the second stanza, as the sun is compared to a “blackamoor” – a stereotyped depiction of African and Asia servants/slaves by Europeans – to serve this rooster tail of spectacle that is derived from the delusions of the male ego (“damned universal cock”).

The strutting referred to here is obviously of the poetic variety, as our would-be chief, like a crowing cock, displays the ornate images and incessant rhymes that would feed his desire for authority and/or recognition.

But the third stanza wrecks this pretense faster than an ignored diet plan: “Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat!” The seemingly incongruous comeback to this, “I am the personal. / Your world is you. I am my world” suggests that the main character is responding to an attack. What does a poet do when he is accused, as Stevens often was, of being too lush, too stylish, too obscure, too detached from reality? He points out coldly, as here, that all of this makes perfect sense to him, in his world. That it doesn’t register in another world is not, in fact, his concern.

The poem then darkens – and deepens – by making an abrupt shift from self-examination toward outward hostility to him. The ten-foot poet (our Chieftain) is now addressed by someone or something else, an inchling (clear enough in context but, as far as I can tell, a made up word). The twist here is that the inchling, or bantam if you prefer (smaller roosters in contrast to the giant cock), has the power over the giant instead of vice-versa. He is the one who bids him “begone” and dismisses him by not fearing/hearing his owl-like hoos.

Instead, he “bristles” (reacts angrily and defensively as if to a grave offense, with hair stood on end) and the associated they “point their Appalachian tangs,” the latter word not only connoting the sound of a strong accent but also a literal knife that vows to cut up his work to ribbons. Indeed, if everyone inhabits different worlds, as suggested in the earlier stanza, the lack of commerce between the giant and the inchling gives the power to the inchling.

It is that sense of just how much power ignorance wields that lifts this up from what would be a standard – albeit strangely worded – retort to one’s critics. We are taught – generally – that there are “great” writers who “rise to the top” by subjecting their “genius” to the “tempering” of multiple, critical readings. This poem shows an altogether contradictory experience, where illiterate and venomous mediocrities routinely destroy poetic geniuses and their work, as if that is the natural order of things.

Comically, such an end is fitting for our Azcan, who finds he has far less power and influence that he had egoistically led himself to believe. More seriously, it should also prompt a sense of cognitive dissonance in the reader, who would likely hold on to the belief despite the evidence that his/her reading list has been pre-screened by reputable readers. Ah, but that’s the beauty of separate worlds! They have such rich, open possibilities.

Chronologies with Stevens are often speculative, but this poem appears to have been composed around the same time as “The Comedian as Letter C,” an epic foray into romantic illusion that was itself a rewrite of an equally epic “From the Journals of Crispin.” This earlier piece had been composed for and submitted to some literary contest hand-picked by Stevens’ friends. Unfortunately, the poem did not win, or even place. This apparently hit Stevens hard, as he threw the entire manuscript in the trash when it was returned. Some enterprising neighbor rescued it, held onto it for decades without Stevens’ knowledge, and finally released it to the scholarly circuit, where it eventually appeared in Opus Posthumous.

That background suggests a possible real-life inspiration for “Bantams in Pine-Woods.” Poets dependent on publication to be read (or not read, as the case often is) feel perhaps more keenly than other artists the hegemony that critics and literary gatekeepers have over their work. It’s some comfort that someone as great as Stevens experienced it and kept his humor intact.

Social Media

Their minds are like flowers, calling for bees

But there are only more flowers

And a wind that blows keenly but too far away

So they pose for each other,

What they try to be, and avoid becoming,

Seeking a color that matches, shapes that contrast

In the hope that their own might be

Recognized at last for what it is:

The only thing unique among the petals.

Young Man with Cigarette

The passing traffic seethes so many misses
— What is not agreed to, understood, done —

The air seems to carry the regret
As if the smoke will never clear.

The pictures show us armies moving
Like birds across the sky ...

Some harmony we lack,
As a request for no ice in a coca-cola

Brings everyone out of their boxes to glare
And waste all their time shouting.

Hall of Recor s

It's the only government building
Without somebody's name in front,
Where what we really are
Can theoretically be seen ...
So much that we've assumed
To become those ledger numbers;
People traipse around the park
Just barely on the ground.

There always is a listener
Who's never there.
People talk into space
A little louder than is necessary
As if they'll be understood at last,
Like they're landing in a place
Where the language is the same as theirs,
How the years of shapeless tongues
Never even really happened.

Vacancy Outside of Rosamond

L'art pour l'art ... no one has touched these wastes,
No one has drawn here human shapes.

Inscrutable energies hold for an earth
That seems to exist for life to burst forth.

Its expressions are without context,
Like a voice of pure poetry.

What feelings arise are of absence,
Not any torments of its being.

Rhapsodic winds blow through joshua trees,
The sage shows the sun's constellations.

On the Hills of Tehachapi

That rock, by that tree
Overlooking the whole of the San Joaquin,
I could stay there forever
To ponder whatever is pondered
And solve nothing that needs to be solved,
With the laurels of the purple grass
Honoring each gust of mind.

But I am wanted somewhere else
For reasons I don't understand
And service that I can't conceive I'm giving,
The very reason I must go back now
To smile at all the brand new wounds
I'll lick again in private.

Antelope Valley Grass

A few abandoned homes like bad ideas
Along the high lonesome plains,
Deserts have a way of making everything impossible
The merest hopes and dreams
Fly away as crazy as napkins

The grasses tough enough to fill this whistling space
Bob with a furious shiver
That looks like fear, but it is really pain
They're enduring to survive

But when you're in with them
As the sun dots their crowns
There's so much joy,
As if the expanse of the world flows through them
And nothing needs to be explained

The grasses in the golden light know everything

Stevens Textplication #37: The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws

Continuing with his oblique critiques of authorities spiritual and otherwise, Stevens deploys a noticeably lighter touch in “The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws.” This 1921 poem is notable for the way it looks back, towards earlier English-language traditions of rhyme and allegory that are rare in Stevens’ canon, as well as ahead to distant masterworks like “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” that speak of communities of spirit represented in one comprehensive figure. Here’s the poem:

                          Above the forest of the parakeets,

A parakeet of parakeets prevails,

A pip of life amid a mort of tails.

(The rudiments of tropics are around,

Aloe of ivory, pear of rusty rind.)

His lids are white because his eyes are blind.

He is not paradise of parakeets,

Of his gold ether, golden alguazil,

Except because he broods there and is still.

Panache upon panache, his tails deploy

Upward and outward, in green-vented forms,

His tip a drop of water full of storms.

But though the turbulent tinges undulate

As his pure intellect applies its laws,

He moves not on his coppery, keen claws.

He munches a dry shell while he exerts

His will, yet never ceases, perfect cock,

To flare, in the sun-pallor of his rock.

The extended metaphor of one parakeet above other parakeets is a great example of how Stevens uses sly whimsy to insinuate new perspectives on very serious topics. The serious topic at hand is how certain people have power over other people’s thoughts (and actions).

Deadpan humor abounds, starting with the matter-of-fact comparison of parakeets’ nonsensical chatter with humanity’s collective thoughts. Stevens exaggerates the comparison by employing highly sophisticated diction to evoke the seemingly commonplace behaviors of the parakeets (including a comic stage direction aside about the over-the-top tropical décor “rudiments” that could be found to visualize such a scene). The poem’s odd but effective rhymes (alguazil – a ministerial official – with still, cock with rock) further tune its satiric pitch.

Make no mistake, however, the actual ideas that peek through this pet store window are deadly serious. The major parakeet, for one, is the only one who is alive. He is the "pip (a single blossom of a clustered head of flowers) of life," while the tails of his followers (an apt metaphor) are described as a “mort”, which means primarily “dead” but can also be used, as here, to denote “a great quantity.”

Parakeet number one is further described in the second stanza as “blind,” indicating that the purity and vision expressed in his white eyes (or “lids”, suggesting in addition maybe a hat of authority) is simply to disguise that he lacks vision.

He is “not [the] paradise” the other parakeets seek, in fact he doesn’t even move. He simply “flares” in reflection of the sun, connoting here that his presence moves ever outward to assert more power over other parakeets.

In the fourth stanza, “panache” is used in its secondary meaning of “abundance of feathers” to indicate “his tails” (the birds under his control) flick their wings crazily as if to slough off large quantities of rain. Yet he the master is no more than one “drop of [rain] water.” The power of implication is a … powerful thing.

The word “tinges,” used in the sense of colors or fragments of colors, provides a nice visual for the beauty created as these birds are excited, just as the head parakeet’s “pure intellect applies its laws” suggests a harmonious order to the proceedings, an alignment with divine order. This is reinforced by the head bird managing to conjure this effect while remaining completely still. But any release from the ominousness created by the rest of the poem is clipped by three words: “coppery, keen claws.” As Robert Bly wrote, “the teeth mother naked at last.”

Our messianic parakeet, as if to reinforce through banality his evil nature, finally (in an abrupt break from the stillness that had been depicted) “munches a dry shell while he / Exerts his will.” This suggests he has nothing to offer his flock but desiccated husks of ideas – ones that he, not they, consume. (“Dry shells” could also be read as a pointed reference to T.S. Eliot and his Wasteland, but it’s impossible to say whether that would be meant as homage or derision).

The overall effect calls to mind religious demagogues, then as now a danger to society because they propose an alternative society dedicated not to the common good but to themselves. Certain words and phrases enhance this implication: “parakeet of parakeets” like the biblical “king of kings,” blindness as spiritual insight, suggestions one is nothing more than a drop of a water in the vast ocean, “paradise”, and the “rock” this parakeet messiah stands upon.

Nevertheless, the metaphor is flexible (nonsensical?) enough to apply to any power dynamic one would care to name where human authority is vested in the thoughts of one person. This could even include, Plato forbid, poets.

I await a rich offering of interpretations that draw from the seemingly endless possibilities but, as I do not have the kind of influence to make any tails wag at my command, I don’t expect any takers. In that can be found a blessing many have fought for, and died to achieve: the independence of human thought.  

Late to the Meeting

They are not exactly unreal
But they feel like children
Typing daintily on their pads
Holding hands across their mouths
Asking questions to be heard

Seeking in all they do
To recapture the illusion
Of their mother's compassion
Or to avoid being late for
Their father's dis-appointment

They trade their things of value:
Hair curls, smart quotes,
Visions of effects
For looks of respect,
Familial laughter

They shovel down the lunch
They don't deserve
And worry out the time
They cannot solve

In hopes the ghosts who hold
What makes life important
Favor them with a song
To record for tomorrow's
Posterity of stories to be told
More fuel to unquenchable fires

That burn just like the eyes
Of the man I saw on the way
Living in the sand canals
Below the high rise
Huddled in blankets
As he sat alone
Staring at me
As if I actually had been born

New Phone Blues

How the yarn of the brain weaves its webs
To make conversations ... connected.

Only the misheard is ever remembered:
The jejune school of haiku, the hair of the doge star,
The recovery lawyers and their exploding on moguls cigars.

The self-logical journey will stub its toe at some point,
The clouds will drop so close
Flat earth is no longer a theory,

And there will be nothing to say
As the river is pinked by chemicals
But "give me my cross or give me death."

Chasing Down an Echo

Those roses play that chord.
Somewhere these two
twinned by circumstance
will meet more officially,
the dry raconteurs
who have been telling stories
to each other the whole time
but have only now,
serendipitously, met
at some tropical country club
where the chairs look out at sunsets
that seem to last forever.

Odes by Hölderlin: The Goodbye

{second version}

Weren’t we going to part? Dreamed it good? Deemed it smart?

   Then why the actors’ shock at the murderous deed?

      We know each other little,

         For within us – oh! – is a God.

Who betrayed? It was Him, who gives us everything,

   Life and meaning brought to being, inspirer,

      Guardian over our love,

         This, this I cannot hold inside.

But others fail to conceive of the earth’s meaning,

   Others exercise His office with different laws,

      And that's what the spirit wants:

         Day after day the use of us.

Well! I knew it before. Ever since the grafted

   Came to form, the fear that separates gods and man

      Must be atoned for with blood,

         The lover’s heart must be broken.

Let me be silent! Never let me from now on

   See this fatality, for even though I go

      In peace, it’s still lonely there,

         And the farewell at least is ours!

I reach for the bowl myself, so that I can save

   Enough holy poison from the Lethe to drink

      With you, to share everything,

         Hate and love, all is forgotten!

I want to go. Maybe in a faraway time

   I’ll see you, Diotima, here, with wishes bled

      To death and peaceful like the

         Deceased, to go round as strangers

Go round, conversation leading us back and forth,

   Pensive, hesitant, until the forgetful re-

      Member their place of farewell,

         And a heart thaws inside of us,

Astonished I would look at you, voice and sweet song,

   As from earlier days, would hear and play the strings,

      And the lily would waft up

         Golden over the brook and gone.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Der Abschied

Trennen wollten wir uns? wähnten es gut und klug?

   Da wirs taten, warum schröckte, wie Mord, die Tat?

      Ach! wir kennen uns wenig,

         Denn es waltet ein Gott in uns.

Den verraten? ach ihn, welcher uns alles erst,

   Sinn und Leben erschuf, ihn, den beseelenden

      Schutzgott unserer Liebe,

         Dies, dies Eine vermag ich nicht.

Aber anderen Fehl denket der Weltsinn sich,

  Andern ehernen Dienst übt er und anders Recht,

      Und es fodert die Seele

         Tag für Tag der Gebrauch uns ab.

Wohl! ich wußt' es zuvor. Seit die gewurzelte

   Ungestalte, die Furcht Götter und Menschen trennt,

      Muß, mit Blut sie zu sühnen,

         Muß der Liebenden Herz vergehn.

 Laß mich schweigen! o laß nimmer von nun an mich

   Dieses Tödliche sehn, daß ich im Frieden doch

      Hin ins Einsame ziehe,

         Und noch unser der Abschied sei!

 Reich die Schale mir selbst, daß ich des rettenden

   Heilgen Giftes genug, daß ich des Lethetranks

      Mit dir trinke, daß alles,

         Haß und Liebe, vergessen sei!

 Hingehn will ich. Vielleicht seh' ich in langer Zeit

   Diotima! dich hier. Aber verblutet ist

      Dann das Wünschen und friedlich

         Gleich den Seligen, fremde gehn

Wir umher, ein Gespräch führet uns ab und auf,

   Sinnend, zögernd, doch itzt mahnt die Vergessenen

      Hier die Stelle des Abschieds,

         Es erwarmet ein Herz in uns,

Staunend seh' ich dich an, Stimmen und süßen Sang,

   Wie aus voriger Zeit, hör' ich und Saitenspiel,

      Und die Lilie duftet

         Golden über dem Bach uns auf.

After the T’ang Masters

The only difference between a mad house and our house

Is that here the lunatics are in charge.

My voice just increases the inconsolable screaming,

Dismal whistling, petitions for happiness withheld.

I'd escape, if I could, to this quiet alcove,

Reflecting on definitions of love:

How it is always kind, and never remembers,

And perseveres through faith alone.

But the daisies so white placed here in the glass

Make all of that seem so shallow.

The Have Knots

The desert wind
          changes everything.
You sing
          in dead limbs.

In desolation
          what is living
Seems more alive
          for silence to speak.

Still too much
         dust to overcome,
Too many blossoms
         calling for bees.

New frogs
        in landing squads
Run from algae nets
        across the parched ground

Chasing the scent
       of roses.
What it is
       can't be chased,

The thought occurs
       to elude its capture.
The insects swirl
       eccentric centers.

The thought of abundance
       is earned by trust
And taken away
       by doubt.

There is no other equation,
       though it seems
What can be taken
       fails to yield.

The same spring breeze
       that tells us
We can't have tells us
       we are loved.

Hummingbirds like cataracts
       fly near cactus yellow,
On either side, a hunger
       unrequited,

And that, not
       where it ends
Is what the light, the final
       friend, desires.

The glow becomes
       almost visible
Like what rises in our blood
       and moves our hands.

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.