Wallace Stevens: "The Poems of Our Climate"

Wallace Stevens is a very unique and perplexing poet, or so he seems to me.   Some of his poems are straightforward while others force me to struggle to gain even a glimmer of his point.  Some grab me immediately while others move me not at all.  And this one?



The Poems of Our Climate
                     
                               I 
Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations.  The light
In the room more like a snowy air,
Reflecting snow.  A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations--one desires
So much more than that.  The day itself
is simplified: a bowl of white,
Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
With nothing more than the carnations there.

                             II 
Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one's torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than world of white and snowy scents.

                                III   
There would still remain the never-ending mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

-- Wallace Stevens --
from Wallace Stevens: The Collected Poems


I see a strong element of  Eastern religious, aesthetic or cultural traditions.  The water, the bowl, the flowers create an  image that reminds me of many Japanese paintings: very simple,  only a few items, uncluttered, with light being important.

While my knowledge of Buddhism is minimal and incomplete, I think its main theme is that if one removes all desires, to want nothing, even the need to remove all desires, one  would free oneself from the world's pains.  That seems to be the point of the first stanza.

Yet, in the second stanza  

Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than world of white and snowy scents.

It is the ego, the I, that delights in variety and desires.  It would reject that peace of the simple and uncluttered life for what?  The third stanza seems to answer that question:

The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.


Is this a poem that reflects the difficulty and the obstacles to enlightenment or is it an outright rejection of that way of life?

 

A Passage and a Poem: David Abram and Wallace Stevens

I've mentioned this before, but I'll bring it up again because this is the basis for this particular post.  I would be reading something, and a passage would immediately bring another book or passage or poem to mind.  Sometimes the link would be obvious, while in others it would be remote or even invisible.  This is the passage I was reading when the poem popped up, distracting me to the point I had to stop reading and muse on it for awhile.  

Each thing organizes the space around it, rebuffing or sidling up against other things;  each thing calls, gestures, beckons to other beings or battles them for our attentions; things expose themselves  to the sun or retreat among the shadows, shouting with their loud colors or whispering with their seeds; rocks snag lichen spores from the air and shelter spiders under their flanks; clouds converse with the fathomless blue and metamorphose into one another; they spill rain upon the land, which gathers in rivulets and  carves out canyons; skyscrapers slice the winds and argue with one another over the tops of townhouses; backhoes and songbirds are coaxed into duets by the percussive rhythm of the subway beneath the street.  Things "catch our eye" and sometimes refuse to let go; they"grab our focus" and "capture our attention," and finally release us from their grasp only to dissolve back into the overabundant world.  Whether ecstatic or morose, exuberant or exhausted, everything swerves and trembles; anguish, equanimity, and pleasure are not first internal moods but passions granted to us by the capricious terrain.
-- David Abram --
from Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

 

This is the poem that immediately came to mind when I began the passage above.
 
 Anecdote of the Jar

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
-- Wallace Stevens --



Well, anybody see the link here?  Did you think of something else when you read the passage?  If so, let me know.  I would be interested in learning what memory that passage brought to mind.

One other question:  what does the following sentence fragment suggest to you?
--anguish, equanimity, and pleasure are not first internal moods but passions granted to us by the capricious terrain.


 Who is David Abram?

"David Abram is an American philosopher, cultural ecologist, and performance artist, best known for his work bridging the philosophical tradition of phenomenology with environmental and ecological issues. Wikipedia  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Abram

What is his book, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, about?
"'This is a book about becoming a two-legged animal, entirely a part of the animate world whose life swells within and unfolds all around us. It seeks a new way of speaking, one that enacts our interbeing with the earth rather than blinding us to it. A language that stirs a new humility in relation to other earthborn beings, whether spiders or obsidian outcrops or spruce limbs bent low by the clumped snow. A style of speech that opens our senses to the sensuous in all its multiform strangeness,' writes David Abram, a cultural ecologist and environmental philosopher."


For a little more about the book, go here:   http://tinyurl.com/z3vyymp

Wallace Stevens: The Night-Wind of August

The Night-Wind of August

The night-wind of August
Is like an old mother to me.
It comforts me.
I rest in it,
As one would rest,
If one could,
Once again--
It moves about, quietly
And attentively.
Its old hands touch me.
Its breath touches me. 
But sometimes its breath is a little cold,
Just a little,
And I know
That it is only the night-wind.

-- Wallace Stevens --
from Art and Nature: An Illustrated Anthology of Nature Poetry


I rest in it,
As one would rest,
If one could,
Once again--

Does this suggest that his mother has died?  He would "rest" if he "could/Once again" which I see as saying that he can no longer do this, which leaves the night-wind as a substitute and perhaps a reminder.

It is that "breath" that is a "little cold" that I wonder about.   The comfort of having an old mother attentive once again is qualified by that breath that is a little cold.  Is that the cold of the grave?  

As usual, I find Stevens' poetry to be intriguing as well as enigmatic.

Wallace Stevens: The Snow Man

             The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the juniper shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

-- Wallace Stevens --
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens


One must be a part of nature--"One must have a mind of winter"-- to be able to look upon the winter scene and not invest it with human feelings--"and not to think/Of any misery in the sound of the wind."   This is the pathetic fallacy, investing nature with human emotions, and it appears frequently in literature and in poetry and in common speech--the sullen cloudy sky, the raging storm, and the cheerful little breeze.

And, any who can avoid the pathetic fallacy "beholds/Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."  In other words, this person sees only what is there and adds nothing to it.

I think this is what Emerson was saying in his essay, "Nature"  --.  .  .  nature is not always tricked  in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs is overspread with melancholy to-day.  Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.  To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire has sadness in it.  Then there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend.  The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.

I think it is a reciprocal relationship in that we are influenced by what is about us and what we perceive is influenced by our feelings and thoughts at that moment.  Perhaps only a snow man can avoid the pathetic fallacy, "one with a mind of winter," one who is "nothing himself."   

Wallace Stevens: "From the Misery of Don Joost"

From the Misery of Don Joost

I have finished my combat with the sun;
And my body, the old animal,
Knows nothing more.

The powerful seasons bred and killed,
And were themselves the genii
Of their own ends.

Oh, but the very self of the storm
Of sun and slaves, breeding and death,
The old animal,

The senses and feeling, the very sound
And sight, and all there was of the storm,
Knows nothing more.

-- Wallace Stevens --

As I have mentioned in previous posts, Wallace Stevens intrigues me.   Possibly part of his attraction for me is the problem I have with his poetry.  I find them, to a great extent, mystifying.  I'm not speaking here of any deep, dark underlying symbolism, but of the overt, sometimes literal, meaning of his poems.

This one I find a bit more understandable, thanks to a clue I found in the Wikipedia entry on this poem.  Don Joost, according to a letter Stevens wrote in response to a question about "Don Joost," is a "jovial Don Quixote."   I agree with the author of the entry that this may be Don Quixote, but he certainly isn't jovial.  Don Quixote's struggles with the giants and warlocks and enemy armies were all in his mind.  He creatively transformed mundane reality into something magical and marvelous.  In a sense, this is what the poet does or tries to do--to transform mundane reality so that one sees it anew, sees it differently.  Joseph Conrad expressed a similar desire  when he wrote "by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel... before all, to make you see. That – and no more, and it is everything."

The overall sense, as I read it, is the end of life or perhaps of his creative life.  All is gone, sight and sense and sound and feeling.  Nothing is left and even the storm, perhaps the struggle between creativity and mediocrity, has ended.

In addition, the seasons, which may stand for the seasons of life, a common and universal symbol for the ages of man in poetry going back long before Shakespeare,  have ended and were the cause of their own ends. They could not last forever. 

I can almost see the title as being truncated: the full title might be "Escape From the Misery of Don Joost."   The only lasting escape from the struggle to be, to do, to create,  is death.

But, then again, I have often been accused of over-reading, and this may be just another example of one of my besetting sins. It is for you to decide.

Wallace Stevens: The House was Quiet and the World Was Calm

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the evening, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm.  The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
is he reader leaning late and reading there.

-- Wallace Stevens --



Another title for this poem could be "Meditations on Reading."  Or, perhaps that could be a subtitle for I really don't want to give up the title for it fits the poem so well, for when I am reading, the house is quiet, regardless of how noisy it may really be, and the world is calm, in spite of the daily headlines.  The title flows as do the words on the page.

This poem best describes the act of reading, as least as far as I am concerned.   The flowing into a union of the reader, the writer, the ideas/words, and the night convey what I experience when I look back at a time when I was absorbed in a book.  I am somewhere else and only partially me.   To say I am only reading words on a page is true, but only partially true.  It is not the whole truth.  Emily Dickinson said some thing very similar when she wrote, "There is no frigate like a book/To take us Lands away."

Wallace Stevens: "The Reader"

I may have mentioned this before, but I will say it again:  Wallace Stevens is an acquired taste, at least that's how I see him.  I can't say he's one of my favorite poets, but every so often I have to browse through my copy of a collection of  his poems,  The Pa/m at the End of the Mind.  So far most of his poems puzzle me to the extent I'm not even sure that I'm getting the overt sense of them, much less anything deeper.  But, once in awhile I encounter one of his quirky ones that strikes a chord somewhere.  Here's the most recent example, and it's an autumn poem also:


The Reader

All night I sat reading a book,
Sat reading as if in a book
Of somber pages.

It was autumn and falling stars
Covered the shrivelled forms
Crouched in the moonlight.

No lamp was burning as I read,
A voice was mumbling, "Everything
Falls back to coldness,

Even the musky muscadines,
The melons, the vermilion pears
Of the leafless garden."

The somber pages bore no print
Except the trace of burning stars
In the frosty heaven.

-- Wallace Stevens --



                                   "Everything
Falls back to coldness,

Even the musky muscadines,
The melons, the vermilion pears
Of the leafless garden."

 Stevens doesn't seem to be celebrating a rich harvest here, as many autumn poems do.   This is a more somber poem.  He might be contemplating autumn as the prelude to winter and death.

Wallace Stevens: Anecdote of the Jar

This is one of Wallace Stevens' most familiar and most anthologized poems.  It's also an example of how memory can play tricks on one.  For years I've been remembering  a somewhat different poem, and all because of one misremembered verb.


Anecdote of the Jar

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.


 My problem was the verb in the first line:  I remembered the first line as "I found a jar in Tennessee,"  not "I placed a jar in Tennessee."  For years I had thought that he had stumbled across that jar on a hill in the midst of  wilderness, and, therefore, it was a magical discovery.  When I came across it again a short time ago, I was surprised to find that the poet had placed that jar on the hill.  Now, I must see this as more of an experiment than a bit of magic. The question now changes from how that jar got there to why he put it there. Once I got the verb right, I was able to answer the question of how it got there, but now I'm uncertain as to why he put it there.  As frequently happens, answering one question brings up a second.

I wonder if my substitution of  "placed"  by  "found" can be, perhaps partly, attributed to the poem itself.  The first two stanzas have a strong internal rhyme: the "ound" sound.  "Round" and "surround" appear in the first stanza.  In the second stanza we read "around,"  "round," and "ground."  It may have been this that influenced me to substitute "found" for "placed."

What is it about that jar that causes it to become the dominating element in the scene?  Situated on a hill certainly would draw one's attention to it, for would be the central component, and all around would now be seen in some way as being in subordinate to it. While the plants and trees and bushes have not moved, they would now seem to be ordered by the jar, "no longer wild."

 The power of being on the top of the hill is also a  common theme in art and literature.   I am reminded of castles and lonely mansions that command the surrounding territory because of their position.  Of course, it's also a powerful symbol for Christians--the cross on a hill outside of Jerusalem which features in many paintings and murals.

The jar is unlike anything else in Tennessee (a bit of poetic license here, as there surely are many jars in Tennessee) for it is a manufactured thing and therefore sterile, lifeless.  No bird or bush could ever come from the jar. It might be this quality that helps to give  it "dominion everywhere."   The jar is round, with no beginning and no stopping place,  and if I were to come across it and walk around it, I would come back to where I began, which is also the movement in the poem.  The poem begins with a jar in Tennessee and ends with that same jar in Tennessee.

Like most of Stevens' poetry, I get the feeling that I"m getting only a part of it and much is escaping me.  Or, perhaps I should just read the poem and take it as it is.

  

Wallace Stevens: October 2, 1879 to August 2, 1955

An intriguing poem by Wallace Stevens. Actually, I'm not sure what to make of it.


The Silver Plough-Boy

A black figure dances in a black field.
It seizes a sheet, from the ground, from a bush, as if spread there
by some wash-woman for the night.
It wraps the sheet around its body, until the black figure is silver.
It dances down a furrow, in the early light, back of a crazy plough,
the green blades following.
How soon the silver fades in the dust! How soon the black figure
slips from the wrinkled sheet! How softly the sheet falls
to the ground!


The silver sheet--moonlight?

the black figure/green blades following: a god/deity responsible for fostering the growth of crops?

Fall Equinox

Like last year, the first day of autumn, or the Fall Equinox, doesn't seem much like fall here in Tucson, where the temperature is expected to hit 100. But, the Sun and the Stars have decreed that today is the day, so here's a few poems that may be closer to reality in a month or so.

For you in northern climes, therefore:



Under the Harvest Moon

Under the harvest moon,
When the soft silver
Drips shimmering
Over the garden nights,
Death, the gray mocker,
Comes and whispers to you
As a beautiful friend
Who remembers.

Under the summer roses
When the fragrant crimson
Lurks in the dusk
Of the wild red leaves,
Love, with little hands,
Comes and touches you
with a thousand memories,
And asks you
Beautiful, unanswerable questions.

-- Carl Sandburg --


(Autumn--the season of memories . . .)




Yellow autumn moon . . .
Unimpressed the scarecrow stands
Simply looking bored

-- Issa --
from A Little Treasury of Haiku






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 a bird and the name of a nameless air
I have never--shall never hear. And yet beneath
The stillness that comes to me out of this, 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.

--Wallace Stevens --


(I find this the most puzzling of the autumn poems.)




#656

The name - of it - is "Autumn" -
The hue - of it - is Blood -
An Artery - upon the Hill -
A Vein - along the Road -

Great Globules - in the Alleys -
And Oh, the Shower of Stain -
When winds - upset the Basin -
And spill the Scarlet Rain -

It sprinkles Bonnets - far slow -
It gathers ruddy Pools -
Then - eddies like a Rose - away -
Upon Vermilion Wheels -

-- Emily Dickinson --
from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
ed. Thomas H. Johnson


Autumn Note

The little flowers of yesterday
Have all forgotten May.
The last gold leaf
Has turned to brown.
The last bright day is grey.
The cold of winter comes apace
And you have gone away.

-- Langston Hughes --





Gathering Leaves

Spades take up leaves
No better than spoons,
And bags full of leaves
Are light as balloons.

I make a great noise
Of rustling all day
Like rabbit and deer
Running away.

But the mountains I raise
Elude my embrace,
Flowing over my arms
And into my face.

I may load and unload
Again and again
Till I fill the whole shed,
And what have I then?

Next to nothing for weight,
And since they grew duller
From contact with earth,
Next to nothing for color.

Next to nothing for use.
But a crop is a crop,
And who's to say where
The harvest shall stop?

-- Robert Frost --


(That last line raises some questions, doesn't it? Frost has a habit of doing that. Does the poem end on an ominous note?)




Dry cheerful cricket
Chirping, keeps the autumn gay . . .
Contemptuous of frost

-- Basho --
from A Little Treasury of Haiku
(This poem also seems to end on an ominous note.)

(Just noticed the double tie-ins with the previous poem.)

Robert Frost: March 26, 1874 --Jan 29, 1963

While browsing through Frost's Collected Poems, this poem jumped out at me. It was an interesting poem in its own right, it reminded me of another of Frost's poems, and it seemed to make an interesting match to a poem by Wallace Stevens that I had just posted several days ago. So, here is one of Frost's lesser known poems:

Good Hours

I had for my winter evening walk--
No one at all with whom to talk,
But I had the cottages in a row
Up to their shining eyes in snow.

And I thought I had the folk within:
I had the sound of a violin,
I had a glimpse through curtain laces
O youthful forms and youthful faces.

I had such company outward bound
I went till there were no cottages found.
I turned and repented, but coming back
I saw no window but that was black.

Over the snow my creaking feet
Disturbed the slumbering village street
Like profanation, by your leave,
At ten o'clock of a winter eve.

-- Robert Frost --





Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock

The houses are haunted
By white nightgowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.

-- Wallace Stevens --


Both are set at ten o'clock in the evening. I wonder why that's such a popular hour. And in both poems, it appears as though the narrator is out walking along the city street.

Is the mood of the two walkers similar?

Wallace Stevens: "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock

I wouldn't say that Wallace Stevens is one of my favorite poets, but, to be honest, I really haven't read very many of his poems. So, it's more, possibly, the case of neglecting him, rather than disliking him. However, he seems a bit cerebral to me. But, I have found several of his poems that I do like. The following, "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock" is one of them.



Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock

The houses are haunted
By white nightgowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.



Uniformity here is the villain? Lack of imagination?

I like the opening lines

"The houses are haunted
By white nightgowns."


It's ironic that the houses are haunted by those who probably wouldn't dream of haunts. They are ghosts and ghosts are what remains of the dead. I guess the narrator feels that these people are dead in some way. Only the old sailor who has traveled much has interesting dreams.