Source of book: I own this
If you want a weird trivia fact, the two most artistic insurance agents of the 20th Century have to be composer Charles Ives, and poet Wallace Stevens. Not the kind of day job one associates with an artistic sensibility, but it does seem a particularly American sort of phenomenon.
I previously read Harmonium, so you might want to check out that post from a number of years ago.
As I noted previously, Stevens leans modern in that there are rarely rhymes in his poems, although there is often meter. He also has a particular fondness for the three-line stanza.
I also do want to reiterate that Stevens was of his era - the 1930s in this case - and with that comes certain ways of writing that would not happen today. I noted in the previous collection that there are lazy (although not mean-spirited) racial stereotypes, the kind of casually racist ways of thinking and expressing that you run across a lot from that era. (See also: antisemitism, sexism, classism)
In this case, the main offense is the use of the n-word as a descriptor rather than a slur. As in the other collection, there is nothing mean-spirited or hateful about the use here. It is just a use that wasn’t considered offensive (at least by white people) at the time, but is definitely considered offensive now. Reader be warned, but don’t think this is a Charlie Kirk or Stephen Miller situation at all. Stevens intends no harm and throws no shade.
I’ll start this post with one of those three-line-stanza poems, one that I find beautiful and perceptive.
Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz
The truth is that there comes a time
When we can mourn no more over music
That is so much motionless sound.
There comes a time when the waltz
Is no longer a mode of desire, a mode
Of revealing desire and is empty of shadows.
Too many waltzes have ended. And then
There’s that mountain-minded Hoon,
For whom desire was never that of the waltz,
Who found all form and order in solitude,
For whom the shapes were never the figures of men.
Now, for him, his forms have vanished.
There is order in neither sea nor sun.
The shapes have lost their glistening.
There are these sudden mobs of men,
These sudden clouds of faces and arms,
An immense suppression, freed,
These voices crying without knowing for what,
Except to be happy, without knowing how,
Imposing forms they cannot describe,
Requiring order beyond their speech.
Too many waltzes have ended. Yet the shapes
For which the voices cry, these, too, may be
Modes of desire, modes of revealing desire.
Too many waltzes – The epic of disbelief
Blares oftener and soon, will soon be constant.
Some harmonious sceptic soon in a skeptical music
Will unite these figures of men and their shapes
Will glisten again with motion, the music
Will be motion and full of shadows.
There is far more to this than merely an older man lamenting the replacement of the old dances (and the old art forms) with the new. I see in it a lament that the ways of expression of emotion do not resonate across time, leaving young and old estranged alike from meaning and connection. The root desires and meanings continue to exist, but the expression has become incoherent, incomprehensible.
Next up is one of so many poems Stevens wrote about winter and snow - ironic given his Florida residence. It also mentions a common bird there and here - the loud and swaggering Grackle.
Snow and Stars
The grackles sing avant the sprint
Most spiss - oh! Yes, most spissantly.
They sing right puissantly.
This robe of snow and winter stars,
The devil take it, wear it, too.
It might become his hole of blue.
Let him remove it to his regions,
White and star-furred for his legious,
And make much bing, high bing.
It would be ransom for the willow
And fill the hill and fill it full
Of ding, ding, dong.
And yes, grackles would be happy enough in hell - as it is, they seem to prefer WalMart parking lots, so…
Stevens has this kind of snarky, sly, tongue-in-cheek style about a lot of his poems. They are serious enough, but not quite serious. I rather like it. Here is another that is a bit unexpected.
Botanist on Alp (No. 1)
Panoramas are not what they used to be.
Claude has been dead a long time
And apostrophes are forbidden on the funicular.
Marx has ruined Nature,
For the moment.
For myself, I live by leaves,
So that corridors of clouds,
Corridors of cloudy thoughts,
Seem pretty much one:
I don’t know what.
But in Claude how near one was
(In a world that is resting on pillars,
That was seen through arches)
To the central composition,
The essential theme.
What composition is there in all this:
Stockholm slender in a slender light,
And Adriatic riva rising,
Statues and stars,
Without a theme?
The pillars are prostrate, the arches are haggard,
The hotel is boarded and bare.
Yet the panorama of despair
Cannot be the speciality
Of this ecstatic air.
As one who has felt this way in the mountains, I found this one particularly poignant.
This next one is the rare romantic poem, and is another gem. Also: three-line stanzas.
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.
The longest poem in the collection is Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery. It consists of 50 short verses - are they epitaphs? - ranging from three to six lines each. I think some of the finest poems in this book are found here. And, as I mentioned, ignore the title - they are equally beautiful with or without it. Here are my favorites:
II
Sigh for me, night-wind, in the noisy leaves of the oak.
I am tired. Sleep for me, heaven over the hill.
Shout for me, loudly and loudly, joyful sun, when you rise.
V
If ever the search for a tranquil believe should end,
The future might stop emerging out of the past,
Out of what is full of us; yet the search
And the future emerging out of us seem to be one.
XXII
The comedy of hollow sounds derives
From truth and not from satire on our lives.
Clog, therefore, purple Jack and crimson Jill.
XXXII
Poetry is a finikin thing of air
That lives uncertainly and not for long
Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.
XLIII
It is curious that the density of life
On a given plane is ascertainable
By dividing the number of legs one sees by two.
At least the number of people may thus be fixed.
I could have quoted so many more. It really is a great poem cycle, and worth reading.
I’ll end this post with one of a few Stevens poems that are almost, but not quite, a sonnet. There is no rhyme, but the meter and line number match, as does the basic division of ideas as found in a Petrarchan sonnet. Also, more grackles and the made-up words that approximate their sounds.
Autumn Refrain
The skreak and skritter of evening gone
And grackles gone and sorrows of the sun,
The sorrows of the sun, too, gone . . . the moon and moon,
The yellow moon of words about the nightingale
In measureless measures, not a bird for me
But the name of the bird and the name of a nameless air
I have never - shall never hear. And yet beneath
The stillness of everything gone, and being still,
Being and sitting still, something resides,
Some skreaking and skrittering residuum,
And grates these evasions of the nightingale
Though I have never - shall never hear that bird.
And the stillness is in the key, all of it is,
The stillness is all in the key of that desolate sound.
As always, there are so many more I could have quoted. If you haven’t discovered Wallace Stevens, I highly recommend him. And definitely read out loud.
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