In memoriam Richard Macksey, who introduced me to this poet, this poem and this form of literary analysis, explication de texte.
The problematic relationship between what is, broadly speaking, and how it is expressed poetically is a theme probably as old as the first interpretation of a work of art. Plato considers poetry “a dim adumbration in comparison with reality,”[1] an inferior imitation of eternal ideas and forms. Aristotle, on the other hand, holds that art better represents universal truths than ordinary reality, because it gives shape to the formless and structures it into a whole, “present all at once in contemplation.”[2]
The second-hand nature of poetic
representation was taken as a given by these philosophers because it had
already been codified in Greek myth, in the form of the nine muses, each
representing a different genre of poetic expression, and sent to inspire
mortals to produce words, music and dance for the a-muse-ment of the Mount Olympus gods. The reliance on these
“necessary angels”[3]
for artistic inspiration has been a constant of Western literary history ever
since, from the opening prayers to the muse for inspiration in Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad to prominent roles in classic poems like Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Paradise
Lost.
By the time of the Romantic movement, exterior
muses had transmuted into what poets such as Wordsworth and Shelley
internalize as a one-to-one correspondence between man (or, more precisely,
man’s poetic sensibility) and nature. Poets, it was thought, have mystical
gifts to access the realms of the eternal through a sensory relationship with
nature (“an unremitting interchange / With the clear universe of things around,”[4] as Shelley put it). But
such a posture could not be sustained, even among the romantic poets. Shelley expresses in the same poem a kind of terror that what he thought was direct
inspiration from nature derived in part from something foreign in the human: “from
secret springs / The source of human thought its tribute brings / Of
waters—with a sound but half its own.”[5]
Such were the stirrings to re-inquire the
thorny question belief in the muses had long ago, blithely answered: “Where
does art come from?” The distance between the source and production of art grew
wider in the age of which Wallace Stevens was a part, when the scientific materialism
that had become the dominant belief system would no longer tolerate supernatural
beings, however theoretical, and whose ideas of progress involved automated
production (including the mechanized implements of unprecedented mass
slaughter). The art that grew out of this brought – as in the Garden of Eden – a
self-awareness that came with the loss of innocence. The poet can no longer
“presume” to be an open vessel of a larger, greater force; the ambiguities of
language, perception, intention and motivation create a cocoon around the
artist that threaten to swallow up what is said, as it paralyzes the saying of
it.
It is here that Stevens “strides,”
balancing the classical, romantic and modernist worlds – at the furthest
geographic extreme as Professor Macksey points out – to address foundational
questions such as “what creates a poem?” and “why does it affect us?”
The poem in question is “The Idea of Order at Key West,” written by Stevens in 1934 and used for the title of his
second volume of poetry, Ideas of Order.
Its first five stanzas examine a mysterious singer who walks alone on the beach, and whose songs appear to the poet / speaker to be similar enough to the sound and
feeling of the sea that he has difficulty discerning where one begins and the
other ends.
Female singers near bodies of water in a
poem naturally conjure up the image of the muses, especially since poetry in
abstract is the topic of discussion. Stevens, as we will see, leaves this
implication open, but he portrays her in decidedly human terms, for reasons we
will learn as we pause along each line of the poem.[6]
She
sang beyond the genius of the sea …
Genius, a seemingly odd term to describe
the sea, makes more sense if one considers the word’s etymology. Deriving from
the Latin, “attendant spirit present from one's birth, innate ability or
inclination,” from the root of gignere,
“beget,” the original sense gave rise to “a person's characteristic disposition”
(late 16th century), which led to “a person's natural ability,” and finally “exceptional
natural ability” (mid 17th century).[7] The poem plays upon this
historic evolution by using the modern sense to suggest the sea has some
exceptional artistic ability (what the singer
would have) while still hewing to its classical “origin” by exhibiting its
native (non-human) spirit.
In line with the singer as muse, the poet /
speaker carries forward her song of the sea by personifying the sea in the poem
as a “genius.” This doubling of function for singer and poet is also revealed
in the sound of the line, as the thrice struck s consonance evokes the sibilance of the sea, while “she sang”
sounds like waves breaking on the iamb, which in turns sets up a wave-like
rhythm that continues through the poem.
The opening line also establishes that the
sea will not be accurately represented in the singer’s art. By going “beyond”
genius, she evades the sea’s true nature, either by transcending it or by
falling short. The ambiguity of which one it is hangs over the entire poem like
a dissonant chord that is extended but never resolved.
The
water never formed to mind or voice, …
In literal terms, this line follows from
the first, suggesting the distance between artist and subject arises from the
responsive rather than generative nature of artistic expression. The sea does
not yield words to explain itself to humans. In metaphorical terms, the
Christian creation myth of the earth being created from the logos of God is reversed, suggesting
some absolute separation from God for the water (the life force of nature), as
well as for man whose mind, in traditional scholastic thought, approximates
that of God.
Like
a body wholly body, fluttering …
This first of many word repetitions
highlights how the convention that the mind controls the body is so ingrained
it is difficult to grasp what a body would be like without an inhabiting spirit
(“fluttering”). One can hear the echo of “body of Christ” here, expressed as an
empty vessel, synecdoche of religious practice without any real meaning. The
effect would be the same, one suspects, in poetry, when the object of
deification is absent or non-existent.
Its
empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion …
This image calls forth all kinds of robes
and veils, officious and otherwise. Of the many implications, most striking
perhaps is the idea that there is nothing beyond what is veiled from our
knowledge. Behind the sleeves lies the desolation of no meaning, expressed as
an ocean full of changing, lifelike forms but lacking a controlling
intelligence.
But something animates the sea. Is it
“mimic motion?” If so, what is it mimicking? So we find ourselves back on the
shores of “Plato’s ghost or Aristotle’s skeleton,”[8] where what we can perceive
is only a dim approximation of what exists. How can an artist, in a world with
meaning hidden, offer anything but emptiness?
Made
constant cry, caused constantly a cry …
Yet artists produce anything but
emptiness, just as the void of sea seems to speak in many affecting voices. The
consonance and repetition in this passage poeticizes the heartbreaking beauty
of lone voices who try to speak above an indifferent wilderness, as well as the
annoyance such plangent and meaningless noise can create to the indifferent
hearer.
The crying of the sea recalls the sirens
and sea nymphs (also known as nereids) of ancient Greece, who take, like our
unidentified singer, the shape and character of the water, but whose singing
causes the humans who happen to hear it to become spellbound or insane. The sea
nymph Calypso, for example, bewitches Odysseus to stay with her by singing to
him on the shore as she moves, or “strides” to and fro. Calypso’s name means
"concealing the knowledge."[9] In a similar vein, the
“constant cry” may be heard as a constant veiling, like the continuous “white
noise” of the sea.
That
was not ours although we understood, …
The poet / speaker reminds us here, speaking on behalf of
all humans, that, although the sea lies outside of our
comprehension and control, humans can and do draw all sorts of human emotions
from it, because it helps us – even as it resists – to understand our own
thoughts and feelings. We recognize our own cry in the sound of the occulted
surf. Does the fact that the sea doesn’t intend such a meaning make it any less
true?
Inhuman,
of the veritable ocean. …
Veritable, from verité (truth), stands as a warning to remind us that the true ocean, the true inspiration, beyond the “sea,” as “inhuman”, is also unknown to us. But how then
can we relate to what is inaccessible? The first stanza ends with this
seemingly intractable problem still flailing.
The
sea was not a mask. No more was she. …
The iambs sounding like hissing surf,
we’re told the ocean is not disguised after all. What we see and respond to is
merely independent of whatever existence or essence it has. The singer is
similarly unveiled, with the implication that she may not be any more
comprehensible than the sea. The term “mask” calls to mind Melpomene, the Greek
muse of song and tragedy, who came from the sea and is usually depicted wearing
sleeves and the mask of tragedy (see “ever-hooded, tragic-gestured” and
“theatrical distances” below). She in fact is not the mask she carries. That is
for the human to wear. She is the inspirer of human song rather than the actual
singer. Stevens in a later poem directly references Melpomene:
Sordid Melpomene,
why strut bare boards,
Without scenery or lights, in the theatre’s bricks,
Without scenery or lights, in the theatre’s bricks,
Dressed high in
heliotrope’s inconstant hue,
The muse of
misery? Speak loftier lines.
Cry out, “I am the
purple muse.” Make sure
The audience
beholds you, not your gown.[10]
Mask
or not, this muse is veiled, high above the stage, safely away from the theatre
goers to whom art is misery instead of transcendence. Like the singer, she is
an elusive figure who withholds as much as she reveals.
The
song and the water were not medleyed sound …
Whoever she is and whatever her song of
the sea is based upon, it is “unmedleyed,” that is, not harmonious enough with
the sea’s sound to allow even a blend of the two presences.
Even
if what she sang was what she heard …
The singer’s mimetic strategy does not
qualify for even the status of imitation. This suggests the singer (or muse, or
poet) is so fundamentally distanced from nature there can never be an accurate
representation.
Since
what she sang was uttered word for word. …
This is the first conclusion reached in
the poem, that it is language, not the distance between perceiver and
perceived, that keeps the sea from speaking through the song. The very act of
using language to reproduce nature de-natures
it, by shaping it into a medium foreign to its being. “Word for word” also
connotes the artificiality of ordering words in temporal or relational
sequence, how that distorts the all-encompassing ubiquity of (non-verbal)
presence.
It
may be that in all her phrases stirred …
Despite the gulfs between singer and song,
human and nature, reality and perception, muses and Gods, language and what is
represented, the end rhyme here suggests something is alive between the two polarities. Almost by
chance, the singer may be conveying something of the sea.
The
grinding water and the gasping wind; …
What stirs – what is conveyed – is how the
sea effaces: the water that crushes and fragments as well as the wind that
aggressively possesses the air. We sense, in other words, the negative
consequences on us as humans, how the sea (and by extension, all that is
“inhuman”) reduces our sense of self, competes with us for breath, in short,
threatens to erase us.
But
it was she and not the sea we heard. …
As 20th century philosopher
Ludwig Wittgenstein noted, “If a lion could talk, we would not understand him.”[11] All we can understand of
the sea is what comes from the singer, who seems, as the second stanza ends, to
have now almost completely taken its place.
For
she was the maker of the song she sang.
The seemingly inapt craft term “maker” is
applied to the seemingly natural act of singing to introduce order as a
contrast to the perceived disorder (or at least incommensurability) of the
actual sea. Melpomene was associated with Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and
the only half-human Olympian immortal. In The
Birth of Tragedy,[12] Nietzsche outlines two
contrasting aesthetics, the Apollonian, which cultivates what Nietzsche calls
“critical distance” to refine perception in order to create distinct forms such
as sculpture; and the Dionysian, which counters the loss of unity in
individuated perception by blurring the distinction between the perceiver and
perceived to enter into the whole through direct, unmediated experience. Order
and chaos, in other words, are the operating principles of “art-making.” The Dionysian embraces all, much like the
singer / muse who speaks for the entire sea. Carving out the distinctions
between what is of the sea and what is of the singer, as the poet / speaker has
done thus far, follows the Apollonian path.
The
ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea …
The sea continues to churn – beautifully
expressed, hardly understood – as human emotions and thoughts are thrown into
its mists. Melpomene is echoed again, as something removed from humans, not
even accessible as inspiration.
Was
merely a place by which she walked to sing, …
The sea is actually incidental to the singer, just a backdrop we have given value to.
It has no intrinsic connection to her song. We gave them that connection
because they are proximate, but, in fact, we understand the singer little more
than the sea.
Whose
spirit is this? We said, because we knew
As singer and sea disappear together in
front of the poet, he recognizes that the animating spirit is nothing external
at all, but within. We, in fact, create what the song is in the way we respond
to it. The singer, too, is incidental.
It
was the spirit that we sought and knew
What animates the song or poem or work of
art is what critic Edmund Wilson calls “the shock of recognition,” a moment of
enlightenment when something already known but hidden within us comes suddenly
to the surface.[13] Philosopher Martin
Heidegger uses a similar concept when describing art (particularly poetry) as
the “presencing of being,” where what is disclosed through art only exists as
it breaks from the earth that veils it.[14]
That
we should ask this often as she sang.
Our engagement with what is already inside
us (“the voice that is great within us”)[15] is heightened as the
singer continues to facilitate its disclosure, which in turn prompts us to go
deeper for more self-knowledge. The challenge posed at the end of stanza three
is why are we so dependent on the singer for what we have already have? Why do we require art for this experience? What does art do to move and change us as
observers?
Stevens proceeds to delve deeper into
these questions.
If
it was only the dark voice of the sea …
One difference between philosophic poetry
like Stevens’ and actual philosophy is the way problems are resolved
emotionally in poetry, by precisely locating the feeling (however ambiguous and
unformed), rather than try to resolve the cognitive dissonance by bringing the idea to a
logical conclusion. This stanza shows a good example of this, as the poet /
speaker sets up an elaborate “if … then” proposition, only to modify the “if”
into the more poetic “if only,” putting the emphasis on the longing for what
doesn’t exist rather than on any necessary condition for fulfillment. The
effect leaves the reader to swim inconclusively in the undertow of the
unresolved desire of the poet for the “if only” of something else. This something
else cannot be named as much as the space for it acknowledged. “If it was only”
– if there was nothing but blank sea with no human relation, or, alternatively,
if the poet could unselfconsciously personify the “dark” Dionysian nature of
the sea with a human voice, then … relations would be clear, the human world
would be simpler, there wouldn’t be the endless looking into the void of nature
and seeing the terror of the human void starting back.
That
rose, or even colored by many waves; …
It’s not the “dark voice of the sea” that
rises, but something so disturbing it’s like the poet / speaker doesn’t really
want to know what it is. He would settle for the scientific explanation of
prisms formed (“even colored”) by the play of sun and wave, if there was the assurance that that indeed is what creates the particular fancies and sense
impressions humans have.
If
it was only the outer voice of sky …
An outer voice implies an inner voice, the one that actually, in fact, speaks. The voice of sky, as has been alluded, comes from within our own minds, with all the attendant grief that nothing transcends the limits of what we aspire against, that there is no meaning external to that which we willfully create.
And
cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled, …
Trapped within this human veil is the
voice not only of clarity (“sky”) but of confusion (“cloud”). Our ability to ponder questions, hold conflicting ideas, not have answers is just as threatened by the lack of external relation as our ability to know the truth. “Of the
sunken coral water-walled” heightens the twin senses of the glamour and
unavailability of the external world. The red color of most coral matches the
allure of the Red Sea the Israelites escaped across through a wall of water,
but the coral is “sunken,” indicating the divinely ordained escape is not
available (or more likely, the belief in such a possibility is dead / buried)
to the observing speaker.
Coral has the unique distinction of being
both a plant and a rock, that is, endowed with both life and permanent shape.
The Florida Keys, in fact, are shaped by the only living coral reef system in
the U.S.[16] According to Ovid’s Metamorphosis, coral was created by
Perseus – with help from the sea nymphs – out of the blood of Medusa’s severed
head. Ovid, fascinated as Stevens was with the thresholds between realms,
remarked of it “what is alive, under the water, above water is turned to stone”[17] Thus, it is not
surprising that the poet who used stone as a symbol for what is no longer
accessible to the imagination (“The lion in the lute / before the lion locked
in stone”)[18]
would situate the coral as “sunken.” Alive it is subsumed by the sea,
unavailable to human use, in contrast to its petrified state where it is equally intractable. “If only,” the poet / speaker suggests, this dead thing that does
not yield was all there was, and we didn’t know of the shimmer of living things
we cannot reach.
However
clear, it would have been deep air, …
“If only” there was irrefutably nothing
there instead of the cloying hint of something, then, the propositional premise concludes, the sea’s sound “would
have been deep air.” The dichotomous frisson
of “deep air” brings forward the realization that it is the human who gives the
air depth, not an inherent quality. The satisfaction of the “then” in this
proposition is that the human could, as the “if only” conditions were met, freely attribute depth, create it in
fact, instead of having to represent the illusion
of what is already there.
The
heaving speech of air, a summer sound …
Air personified as having “heaving speech”
projects a comical picture of an overblown, melodramatic presentation on stage.
The assonance of the doubled ee sounds
like the wind blowing, and the sense of the air rising and falling, even
sighing, are perceptually fitting, yet it cannot be said the wind is speaking
nor that its expression “lifts up” (to use the German heben derivation of the word “heave”). One can begin to sense how
much of a vacuum imagination fills when it populates the air with the
pontifications of a “too, too human God.”[19] But isn’t that, one is
prompted to ask, what the air is actually for?
It’s similar with summer, which has so
many varied sounds, so many connotations drawn from human experience, that it
can be an ideal tabula rasa to sound
out a human story, one distinct from the summer itself, that will depart from the
season just as words disappear after their meaning is communicated.
Repeated
in a summer without end …
Summer thus within the human grasp becomes
endless. And the story can be told again and again, refined over time as human
experience responds to its own history. That this idea would be expressed with
the positive and pleasurable image of “summer without end” adds poetic grandeur
to the potentiality Stevens here aspires to, of a world where human expression
is the sine qua non of all that is.
And
sound alone. But it was more than that, …
“Sound alone,” in this vein, connotes
“expression alone.” There is no external referent. It’s a far cry from the
mimesis of ancient Greece. Why would this be necessary? What is so disturbing
and threatening about the external world to the poet? The short answer comes in
the next statement: “more.” There is more to what is human than the natural
world can provide, and it is only in imagination that we can access it. To be free,
true, autonomous, the human must, in some way, be – or at least be acknowledged
as – more.
More
even than her voice, and ours, among …
The human thus separated out and elevated
against the incomprehensible hum of nature, the singer’s voice and ours are
one. But there is something “more,” it turns out, beyond “even” the
transcendent human.
The
meaningless plungings of water and the wind, …
This beyond human more cannot be found in
“meaningless” nature, but humans have to endure, to be “among,” the nullity of
water and wind in order to voice what they have to say.
Theatrical
distances, …
They also have to endure “theatrical
distances,” an apt term for what Jean-Paul Sartre later described as mauvaise foi (“bad faith”), in which
people, to conform with what they believe to be the social contract, adopt
inauthentic personas to actively hide their true self, and play roles behind a
series of masks in hopes what is repressed will be revealed.[20] Thus is created a
seemingly insurmountable distance of inauthenticity and deception between
humans. This “theatrical distance” creates between humans no less of a distance than that between humans and the physical world.
bronze
shadows heaped / On high horizons, …
There is also the confusion of how the
human and the non-human have been intermingled. Bronze is a human invention,
designed in part to approximate the look of the sun. What sets at twilight to
the human eye, the physical sun, or its representation in bronze? The sun
(being inaccessible) reduces to bronze, which reduces (through human sublimation)
to the slag heap of elements of which it is composed. All we can say of the
wide dispersion of color at sunset is that it’s “on high horizons,” an abstract
concept removed, as words always are, from what is directly experienced.
mountainous
atmospheres / Of sky and sea. …
The long fourth stanza ends with the last
of a string of paradoxical descriptions, “mountainous atmospheres / Of sky and
sea.” At one level, as with many of the physical descriptions in this stanza,
it’s easy to recognize: clouds over the sea appear like mountains on the
horizon. On another level, it’s a contradiction of terms; how can air filled
with water vapor be equivalent to massive stone outcroppings? They can’t, it’s
just that sun and sea, mountain and cloud, earth and sky have become
indistinguishable. After all the infringements on the human ability to express
where and who we are through song, we are left with perhaps the most poignant
one, how everything blurs to oneness despite all our efforts at Apollonian discernment.
What is left, then, of the individual, specifically the individual voice? Is
there anything real in what the
single self feels?
It
was her voice that made / The sky acutest at its vanishing. …
With these challenges to the autonomous
existence of the human voice established, the broken fifth stanza re-introduces
the singer, to identify, in a list of her qualities, what’s important about the
human capacity to express through poetry and art. Her singing voice makes “the sky
acutest at its vanishing,” that is, the artist provides meaning – or at least
consolation – when humans are kept from ultimate knowledge. The stories we tell
of heaven, for example, only make sense at “vanishing,” when there is no longer
an actual heaven to impinge on them. It is precisely when heaven veils itself,
in fact, when the absence is “acutest,” that the singer can provide emotional
sustenance.
She
measured to the hour its solitude. …
Further, the singer brings a sense of human
time – the zeitgeist or spirit of the
age in which she lives – to the ever-present separation between the mortal
(human) and the eternal (heavenly). Each epoch of human solitude has its own
relationship with the touchstones of meaning it has been left with to explain
what is hidden, and each translates them through its own experience. The singer
stands apart from this historical play to measure “to the hour” (to and of the
times) in order to contextualize it among some deeper continuum of emotional
response. We care little, for example, about the players and political
battlegrounds of Renaissance Florence, yet we can readily place ourselves and
others in the deepest rung of Dante’s Inferno.
She
was the single artificer of the world …
Here is made the key distinction between
the artist as “creator” and as “artificer.” The creator acts as God, omniscient
and all-powerful inside the artistic creation, whereas the artificer merely
generates the myths that explain what is perceived. Stevens’ point is that such
a distinction doesn’t matter. The original creation is so remote (dim and removed) that the secondary rendering of the artist supersedes it. The clear implication –
and it runs throughout Stevens’ work – is that the work of imagination has
replaced faith in the modern world as the access point to ontological queries.
Thus art, though it purports to represent
the natural world, has supplanted it. Why, then, if the artist is
so important, was the poet in stanza four mourning the encroachments upon the
artist from the outside? The answer, as the following stanzas make clear, is
that the creator may disappear as readily as the external world that has been
overcome. Thus the existential crisis at the center of the poem deepens as the
search for the source of art (what prior ages said simply was the muse) becomes
more and more problematic.
In
which she sang. And when she sang, the sea, …
Again, the singer didn’t create a world,
but inhabited one (“in which she sang”), and incorporated it into her song.
Whatever
self it had, became the self …
The poet / speaker here remarks on the
transference of the “self” of the sea into that of the singer. It is not the
one-to-one correspondence the romantic poets would have one believe, but some common
shadow between perceiver and perceived – perhaps alien to both – that becomes
the realized song.
That
was her song, for she was the maker. Then we, …
There is only the song, in fact, left of
the two polarities. It is not the singer that is expressed, even though she
created the expression.
As
we beheld her striding there alone, …
“We,” as hearers of the song, can see her
figure in the distance, may even see her lips move, but have no access point to
her being (she’s “alone”), except her song – or, more precisely, our response to her song.
Knew
that there never was a world for her …
Despite our separation from her, we know
(presumably from her song) that she is not a part of this world. We even know
that “there never was a world for her.” Certain singers (and artists) are remote from human understanding, because their inspiration is so
surprising, their mien so otherworldly, their concerns so remote from our
common human experience. In the realm of poets, names such as William Blake,
Friedrich Hölderlin, Emily Dickinson and Pierre Reverdy come to mind, figures
ostracized from their societies yet held up as avatars by later versions of the
same societies.
Except
the one she sang and, singing, made.
As the poem has deliberatively snaked
through the Florida Keys of its argument, we find ourselves at its farthest
extremity: the abyss of inspiration. There is only the unaccountable song. The
world, the singer and even the listener have been cast adrift from any
anchoring shore.
Ramon
Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
At this point the poem pulls back
decisively from the void, turning the spotlight around to a recognizable Key
West from where all that came prior was beheld. A mysterious figure named Ramon
Fernandez takes the place of the mysterious singer, both as the object of
address and as the alter impulse of Apollonian rationality to the singer’s
Dionysian disembodiment.
There does not, of course, have to be an
actual Ramon Fernandez to recognize the quality of duende the sound of the name brings to the speaker in his emotional
distress as he searches for whatever human correlation is available. Nor is a
real-life person necessary to recognize this figure as a type of limited rationalist who, in fact, cannot answer the
unanswerable questions the poet / speaker poses, because they exist beyond the
human mind, however keenly they are felt.
This did not stop various correspondents
from asking Stevens if he was referring to French-born Mexican literary critic
Ramon Fernandez (1894-1944), a friend of Marcel Proust who co-founded the Nouvelle Revue Française and published
contemporaneously with Stevens in many of the same little magazines. In 1953,
Stevens replied, “Ramon Fernandez was not intended to be anyone at all. I chose
two everyday Spanish names”[21] and, then, in 1954, “The
real Fernandez used to write Feuilletons in one of the Paris weeklies and it is
true that I used to read these. But I did not consciously have him in mind.”[22]
Stevens’ evasion is probably out of
kindness to future readers. For “the real Fernandez” could never take the place
of the absent Fernandez of the poem. Still, Fernandez’s musings on self and
world, faith and skepticism and the source of the imaginative impulse offer
similar scents to those Stevens cultivates here, a bouquet that reminds more
modern readers of a time when such rarefied ontological discussions were
commonplace:
“Let us for once
have the courage to put nullity in its true place, reality in its true place,
to make fullness within us and void around us. Let us examine our skepticism until
we discover the root of our faith. What! As soon as I touch the depth of myself
I feel myself urged to hope, to will, to believe in a world different from that
which surrounds me, in a being different from myself.[23]
The
seriousness with which the speaker approaches Ramon is indicated by “Tell me,
if you know,” which repeats the same question asked by God in the Book of Job,
“Have you surveyed the extent of the earth? Tell Me, if you know all this”[24]
Why,
when the singing ended and we turned / Toward the town …
It turns out it hadn’t been the single
perception of the poet / speaker generalizing to all of humanity (“we”) his own
reactions, but an actual audience (at least including Ramon Fernandez). They
had been listening to the singer on the beach, and then dispersed “toward the
town” when the show was over. The introduction of an audience clearly reorients
the poem from art as it is created to
the collective response to it. We’ve
all had the almost magical impression of life being intensified after a good
song, movie or book, where what is real seems to blend with what is imagined in
a seamless way. When the speaker returns, with “why, when the singing ended,
…,” to the questions of the relation of humanity to what is beyond it, it’s
within this frame of how the song they’d heard enlarged their consciousness to
perceive things with a more imaginative cast, as if more than a song had been
transferred from the singer.
tell
why the glassy lights, / The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there, …
The same lights are characterized in two
different ways on either side of the line break. They are first described as
“glassy,” which suggests with Dionysian multi-valence a blurred and diffused
warmth whereby the lights around the town appear to be the same as the stars.
That’s the imaginative impression. The second description, “the lights in the
fishing boats at anchor there,” is precise and factual, placing the lights in
time and space but with no implications beyond their physical appearance.
That’s the Apollonian refinement of form, the “reality” in opposition to
imagination.
As
the night descended, tilting in the air, …
Nightfall for Stevens is the gateway to
imagination:
Light the first
light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest
and, for small reason, think
The world imagined
is the ultimate good[25]
The masts of the ships bob on the surface
of the water, but they also appear to tilt – like Don Quixote’s heroic knight – at the impassive sky. The impression
is of an opening to a deeper reality beyond the one we see. But the reality is
one-sided, the effect of consciousness alone, with no participation from the
heavenly other. It is only a theory, something to long for.
Mastered
the night and portioned out the sea,
The question asked over these last three
lines is: why did the human lights, when it got dark, seem to organize
(“portion out”) external appearance, to the point where the night itself is
overcome (“mastered”)? As is common throughout the poem, there is an exterior
(exoteric) and interior (esoteric) connotation. At the level of appearance,
this is essentially the same question any traveler might ask when they see the
straight lines and geometrical patterns from the artificial lights of an
oncoming town, and how they overwhelm the natural darkness all around them. At
a metaphysical level, it’s an acknowledgement that the darkness of the creator
God on all matters of ultimate reality has been overcome or at least
compensated for by the human ability to independently generate truth.
Fixing
emblazoned zones and fiery poles, …
But it’s not just the electric lightbulb
as analytic reproduction of the electric sun. The human imagination is itself a
flame. The dark areas (“zones”) that are framed (“fixed”) by light are
“emblazoned,” which connotes an almost ostentatiously conspicuous display. The
masts of the boats are “fiery” as their lights move to the rhythm of the waves.
Humanity has made its mark both as creator of light and perceiver of the life
within its creation. Thus, a kind of humanism walks hand in hand with
materialism, just as the assonance of “zones” with “poles” colors highly
abstract concepts with a poetic cast.
Arranging,
deepening, enchanting night. …
This human mastery is in turn applied to organize the larger night, the
proverbial silence of the Gods that our imagination, to Stevens, replaces. The
questions are not answered, though, they merely deepen, and the night is lit not with the philosopher’s torch of
Apollonian clarity, but by the poetic enchantments
of the soft-lit moon.
The hearers have, in effect, taken on the
role of the singer in replacing – however incompletely – the external world.
Stevens’ long-idealized notion of art replacing Gods in which we can no longer
believe seems within reach in the afterglow of the singer’s song. But this too
is provisional, a stage in the progression of thought. We soon are stuck at the
idea of order.
Oh!
Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon, …
Despite the human having grown, like
Stevens’ rabbit “humped higher and higher … a self that touches all edges” so
that the predatory “cat is a bug in the grass,”[26] there is still a
metaphysical something else that makes
humans do what we do. “Blessed” by God, it is the “rage for order.” The
passionate Dionysus and the rational Apollo merge, as in, according to Nietzsche,
the ancient Greek tragedy overseen by Melpomene, which he considered to be the
highest expression of art. Here too, the poet / speaker, like a Greek tragic
hero, finds his downfall at his moment of triumph. For there would be no need
for order without the rage, and no possibility of order with it. The butterfly
of the poem to be captured remains elusive precisely because the reason for the
chase is never known, and the pursuer ends up in circles grasping at something
he knows can never be reached.
The futility of art-making may have something to do with why Ramon, the stand-in for the audience, is cast with ghostly pallor
The futility of art-making may have something to do with why Ramon, the stand-in for the audience, is cast with ghostly pallor
The
maker’s rage to order words of the sea, …
The idea of the sea being ordered into words nicely illustrates the absurdity behind the creation of art. It is not, however, the doomed attempt to convey the unknowable externality that makes the poem tragic, but that the intention to dive into the unknown is equally unknown, and out of the control of the human agent.
Words
of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred, …
Stymied, the artist seeks an explanation
of the “fragrant portals,” the access point to what drives him or her, but they
too are “dimly-starred,” part of the universal darkness.
And
of ourselves and of our origins, …
In dumb rage, the would-be creator finally
tries to make sense of himself – the null set that has been avoided thus far,
but this as well can’t be grasped without knowing one’s origins, how humans fit
in and where they come from.
We are left with the constant,
inexplicable cry like that of the sea.
In
ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
But the cry, in the end, is far from
meaningless, for everything that is human – every longing for unity that has
been withheld – comes into the song, to provide meaning in and of itself. The
artist outlines of the world, the “demarcations,” are, reflecting Plato,[27] “ghostlier” than the external
reality. But there is some relation, if only in the striving that seems to come
from some common source. There is a kind of order (for example, there are 15 r
sounds in just the last stanza alone).The sounds made by singer and poet are
keener: the act of mourning (one sense of “keen”) creates a clarity (another
sense of “keen”) that almost catapults the expression to the status of truth
about ourselves, our origins, and the fragrant openings to home we aspire to
cross.
Thus the poem ends, not exactly hopeful,
but with a fuller sense of what art is, and why we need it.
[1]
Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols.
5 & 6. Translated by Paul Shorey, Harvard University Press, 1969. Republic X 595-602, quoted at 597b.
[2]
Aristotle. The Poetics of Aristotle.
Edited with critical notes and a translation by S. H. Butcher, MacMillan And
Co., 1902, VII.
[3]
The title of Wallace Stevens’ 1950 book of “essays on reality and the
imagination.”
[4]
Shelley, Percy. “Mont Blanc (Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni).” Shelley's Poetry and Prose. Edited by
Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers, W.B. Norton, 1977, p. 90, l. 40-41.
[5] Ibid., p. 90, l. 4-6.
[6]
All italicized passages from Stevens, Wallace. “The Idea of Order at Key West.”
The Collected Poems. Alfred A. Knopf,
1954, pp. 128-129.
[7]
“Genius.” The Oxford English Dictionary.
2nd ed. 1980
[8]
Stevens, Wallace. “Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit.” The Collected Poems, p. 327.
[9] Etymologicum Magnum (ed. Gaisford, col.
1549)
[10]
Stevens, Wallace. “In a Bad Time.” The Collected
Poems, p. 426.
[11]
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical
Investigations. MacMillan Publishing Co., 1953, p. 223.
[12]
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of
Tragedy of Hellenism and Pessimism. Translation by William S. Haussmann,
The Macmillan Company, 1910.
[13]
Wilson, Edmund. The Shock of Recognition:
The Development of Literature in the United States Recorded by the Men Who Made
It. Modern Library, 2nd Edition, 1961.
[14]
Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Poetry, Language, Thought.
Translated by Albert Hofstadter, Harper and Row Perennial Library, 1975.
[15]
Stevens, Wallace. “Evening without Angels.” The
Collected Poems, p. 136.
[16]
Agassiz, Louis. “Report on the Florida reefs.” Memoirs of the Museum of Comparative Zoology VII:1. Harvard
College, Cambridge, 1880.
[17]
Ovid. The Metamorphoses. A
translation into English prose by A.S. Kline, Poetry in Translation, 2000, 4.750-52.
[18]
Stevens, Wallace. “The Man with the Blue Guitar.” The Complete Poems, pp. 175.
[19]
Stevens, Wallace. “Esthetique du Mal.” The
Collected Poems, p. 315.
[20]
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Nausea. Translation
by Lloyd Alexander, New Directions Publishing, 1964.
[21]
Letter to Bernard Heringman, September 1, 1953. Letters of Wallace Stevens. Selected and edited by Holly Stevens, University of California Press, 1966, p.
798.
[22]
Letter to Renato Poggioli, March 4, 1954. Letters
of Wallace Stevens, p. 823.
[23]
Fernandez, Ramon. “La Garantie des
Sentiments et les Intermittences du Coeur” [The Guarantee of Feelings and
the Fitfulness of the Heart], Nouvelle
Revue Française, April 1924, p. 101.
[24] The Holy Bible: Authorized King James
Version, Holman Publishing, 1978, 38:18.
[25]
Stevens, Wallace. “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour.” The Collected Poems, p. 524.
[26]
Stevens, Wallace. “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts.” The Collected Poems, p. 209.
[27] “The
creator of the phantom, the imitator, we say, knows nothing of the reality but
only the appearance.” From Plato. Plato
in Twelve Volumes, ob. cit. Republic
X, 601c.
