Month: June 2003

Although there were only a few lines and phrases that I liked in Stevens’ The Man with the Blue Guitar,
there are so many poems that I liked in Parts of a World, that I’m not quite sure where to start. So, I’ll just start with:

ON THE ROAD HOME

It was when I said,
“There is no such thing as the truth,”
That the grapes seemed fatter.
The fox ran out of his hole.

You….You said,
“There are many truths,
But they are not parts of a truth.”
Then the tree, at night, began to change,

Smoking through green and smoking blue.
We were two figures in a wood.
We said we stood alone.

It was when I said,
“Words are not forms of a single word.
In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts.
The world must be measured by eye.”

It was when you said,
“The idols have seen lots of poverty,
Snakes and gold and lice,
But not the truth;”

It was at that time, that the silence was largest,
And longest, the night was roundest.
The fragrance of the autumn warmest,
Closest, and strongest.

At first glance, the narrator’s line “There is no such thing as the truth” seems rather shocking, and it’s hard to see how it could make grapes fatter, much less make the fox run out of his hole. However, when the listener makes the distinction that there are many truths but they are not parts of a truth, we begin to see how such constructs determine how we see the world. In a very real sense, certain words separate us from the world, make us stand alone.

Only when we realize words are just words, there is no magical Word that will allow us to see the Truth, only when we realize that no prophet, no idol, has ever captured the Truth only then do we realize that we must “measure” our world by eye.

When we escape all “truths,” all “concepts,” the world will seem “largest,” “longest,” “roundest,” “warmest,” “closest,” and “strongest.”

“Landscape With Boat” develops this concept even further:

LANDSCAPE WITH BOAT

“An anti-master floribund ascetic.

He brushed away the thunder, then the clouds,
Then the colossal illusion of heaven. Yet still
The sky was blue. He wanted imperceptible air.
He wanted to see. He wanted the eye to see
And not be touched by blue. He wanted to know,
A naked man who regarded himself in the glass
Of air, who looked for the world beneath the blue,
Without blue, without any turqouise hint or phase,
Any azure under-side or after-color. Nabob
Of bones, he rejected, he denied, to arrive
At the neutral center, the omnious element,
The single colored, colorless, primitive.

It was not as if the truth lay where he thought,
Like a phantom, in an uncreated night.
It was easier to think it lay there. If
It was nowhere else, it was there and because
It was nowhere else, its place had to be supposed,
Itself had to be supposed, a thing supposed
In a place supposed, a thing he reached
In a place that he reached, by rejecting what he saw
And denying what he heard. He would arrive.
He had only not to live, to walk in the dark,
To be projected by one void into
Another.

It was his nature to suppose
To receive what others had supposed, without
Accepting. He received what he denied.
But as truth to be accepted, he supposed
A truth beyond all truths.

He never supposed
That he might be truth, himself, or part of it,
That the things that he rejected might be part
And the irregular turquoise part, the perceptible blue
Grown dense, part, the eye so touched, so played
Upon by clouds, the ear so magnified
By thunder, parts, and all these things together,
Parts, and more things, parts. He never supposed divine
Things might not look divine, nor that if nothing
Was divine then all things were, the world itself,
And that if nothing was the the truth, then all
Things were the truth, the world itself was the truth.

Had he been better able to suppose:
He might sit on a sofa on a balcony
Above the Mediterranean, emerald
Becoming emeralds. He might watch the palms
Flap green ears in the heat. He might observe
A yellow wine and follow a steamer’s track
And say, “The thing I hum appears to be
The rhythm of this celestrial pantomime”

Although I’m not sure that I agree with, or completely understand, the underlying philosophy of this poem, it does make one who subscribes to transcendentalism or romanticism step back and re-examine their beliefs. In essence, Stevens, much like a painter, seems to be arguing that it’s a mistake to reject the concrete reality of nature for some abstract reality. In one sense, he seems to reject Emerson’s platonic ideal of transcendentalism, though it might be argued that he seems to be confirming Whitman’s celebration of every aspect life.

Stevens rejects the “floribund ascetic,” as someone who ignores the very reality of nature, the thunder, the clouds, the blue of the sky for something much more abstract, for the “neutral center, the omnious element,/ The single colored, colorless, primitive. ” In other words, the ascetic rejects the physical world and seeks a Platonic truth that underlies this natural world. He seeks a “truth beyond all truth.”

Stevens suggests as an alternative that the man himself, not some abstraction of himself, “might be truth, himself, or part of it.” Perhaps, “divine things might not look divine.” Even, blasphemy of blasphemy, that the “world itself was the truth.” Truly seeing this world as it is, seeing “the palms/ Flap green ears in the sun,” may be the only was to truly perceive the holiness of the world.

Although not necessarily typical or representative of the poems in “Ideas of Order,” “Meditation Celestial and Terrestrial” and “Re-statement of Romance” are my favorite poems in this section of Collected Poetry and Prose. They are both fine examples of Stevens “elegant style,” but unlike some of his poems they focus less on “art” then on other “truths.”

“Meditation Celestial and Terrestrial” captures the dramatic effect the seasons can have on our attitudes:

MEDITATION CELESTIAL AND TERRESTRIAL

The wild warblers are warbling in the jungle
Of life and spring of the lustruous inundations,
Flood on flood, of our returning sun.

Day after day, throughout the winter,
We hardened ourselves to live by bluest reason
In a world of wind and frost,

And by will, unshaken and florid
In mornings of angular ice,
That passed beyond us trhough the narrow sky.

But what are radiant reason and radiant will
To warblings early in the hilarious trees
Of summer, the drunken mother?

Personally, I find it hard to resist phrases like “wild warblers are warbling,” “lustruous inundations,” and “radiant reasoning.” More than that, though, the poem suggests the real reason that most of us are unable to live lives of “radiant reason.” It is those moments of passion, those moments when we are under the influence of “the drunken mother,” that we completely forget all the cold, hard logic that are the result of the tougher moments in life. You know, those “rational” moments when you declare, rightly so, that “I’ll never fall in love again” or “I’ll buy my next car more wisely,” only to have your plans blown away by the next “love of your life” or by the reddest red Corvette you’ve ever driven.

“Re-statement of Romance” attempts to remove the “ideals” of sentimentalism from a relationship and focus, instead, on the feelings of the two people involved in the relationship:

RE-STATEMENT OF ROMANCE

The night knows nothing of the chants of night.
It is what it is as I am what I am:
And in perceiving this I best perceive myself

And you. Only we two may interchange
Each in the other what each has to give.
Only we two are one, not you and night,

Nor night and I, but you and I, alone,
So much alone, so deeply by ourselves,
So far beyond the casual solitudes,

That night is only the background of our selves,
Supremely true each to its separate self,
In the pale light that each upon the other throws.

It may just be my unsentimental viewpoint, but this seems to me like a great “love poem.” Relationships based on sentimental ideas of “romance” are doomed to failure because any relationship must be based on what the people are, based on what the people are able to give to each other, not idealized notions of what love is. Only when lovers can be “true each to its separate self” can a relationship truly succeed, and to think otherwise is to invite personal disaster.

While this poem may not deal with Stevens’ attempts to place “art” at the heart of mankind, it does deal with another of his major themes, the desire to debunk the “romantic” myths that surround us and to come to a “truer” understanding of human nature.

Although Harmonium, Wallace Stevens’ first book of poetry contains the much more famous and enigmatic “Anecdote of the Jar,” my favorite poem in this section of Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose is “The Paltry Nude Starts On A Spring Voyage,” an elegant poem which uses
Botticelli’s Birth of Venus as a contrast to the very different nude portrayed in his poem.

THE PALTRY NUDE STARTS ON A SPRING VOYAGE

But not on a shell, she starts,
Archaic, for the sea.
But on the first-found weed
She scuds the glitters,
Noiselessly, like one more wave.

She too is discontent
And would have purple stuff upon her arms,
Tired of the salty harbors,
Eager for the brine and bellowing
Of the high interiors of the sea.

Wind speeds her,
Blowing upon her hands
And watery back.
She touches the clouds, where she goes
In the circle of her traverse of the sea.

Yet this is meagre play
In the scurry and water-shine,
As her heels foam—
Not as when the goldener nude
Of a later day

Will go, like the center of sea-green pomp,
In an intenser calm,
Scullion of fate,
Across the spick torrent, ceaselessly,
Upon her irretrievable way.

The ironically humorous phrase in the title, “paltry nude” sets the tone for the rest of this poem. Modern nudes certainly can’t hold up to the sumptious, voluptous nudes of the golden days of the past, can they? I guess that must say something about our modern view of ourselves.

Even the opening line reminds me of “oyster on the half shell” rather than Botticelli’s idealized Venus. That’s not to say, though, that Steven’s lines don’t convey their own beauty, particularly in phrases like “She scuds the glitters,/ Noiselessly, like one more wave.” This is a “real” nude, described (almost) realistically. At least the sea itself is described realistically, though it would, indeed, be a paltry nude that could withstand the rigors of “the brine and bellowing/ Of the high interiors of the sea.”

The real “point,” if one wishes to push a point, which Stevens doesn’t seem in much of a hurry to do, is made in the last two stanzas where this modern nude is compared to Botticelli’s elegant Venus. Of course, Stevens is right when he, in accord with modern tastes, points out that Venus seems to be the “center of sea-green pomp,” and “pomp” probably had as even more negative connotation in the 30’s when this poem was published than it would have today.

Of course, the politically incorrect “Across the spick torrent” raises even more questions about what Stevens is trying to say, though it certainly sounds like a disparaging comment.

Not uncharacteristically, the poem leaves us uncertain of Stevens’ attitude toward his subject, though certainly questioning our own views of art and beauty more than before we read the poem.