Eight Poems on Wallace Stevens
WALLACE STEVENS: THE LATE INVENTORY
Lately, I have been reviewing past events,
seem to have inventoried everything important,
image after image springing newborn from this old head.
And selection, selectivity—yes, only certain images
will make due, harmonize, ring true, join sights
and sounds that fit me, my personality and mood.
Yes, that’s the key. That musicality—that sense
of myself heightened, taking me to . . . Oh, yes,
to that . . . To that too— to that tintinnabulation
I discovered long ago in youth; from that solitary cry
at my window back to those other sights and sounds
that transported us to summer—the cricket’s call, the cat’s,
the sounds of my past life that time brings back—
Rossini’s opera and sung words so sweet-sounding.
Life’s this sense-filled medley of becoming, becoming
substantial in one’s own place—fields, forests and mountains.
WALLACE STEVENS AND WALDEN POND
Wallace Stevens had his own Walden Pond—
he lived there, apart, in his later years, in poems,
the one that took the place of a mountain, for example,
wherein he searched for the right outlook where
he could lay down, by himself, in grassy solitude,
and look down on the sea from his high, solitary home.
It had been necessary to find his own place, a direction,
separate, apart; and he found it. He found Walden again,
in falling water near mountains, in a solitude of cataracts,
in a river he keenly felt, the one that never flowed twice
in the same direction through his mind and imagination.
He needed to find places like that, ideal places to go to,
not to his ordinary life on Westerly Terrace, nor downtown
to the offices of The Hartford where he wrote surety contracts—
he discovered Walden in the fields, forests and mountains
that populated his mind, the mind of his poems—he sauntered
about in them, took his time, didn’t think twice. His plight
proved the same as Thoreau’s, as that of nearly all Americans—
live a life of quiet . . . He had choices to make; and made them;
he wanted things, things to touch, and he happily touched them.
It was money he needed to make to enjoy them; he made it.
That was the choice. The compromise. Then he was old,
and there had been no more trips to Key West since 1940,
when he had argued with Frost a final time. Yes, final time,
Stevens watched it desperately from his porch at Walden
in 1955 as the falling waters ponded near the Monadnocks,
the southern New Hampshire mountains Thoreau knew well.
WALLACE STEVENS’ LATE POEMS AND THE READER
When wisdom comes, it comes late,
the wisdom of frailty included.
"Poor" is a fine adjective, "poverty" a fine noun.
Try them on. Get used to them. They're us.
Though he grew older, frailer, his imagination never faltered.
He grew to appreciate a divergent point of view—
he grew to appreciate his daughter.
He grew to question himself at a deeper level,
in so doing reviving long-lost, long-forgotten feelings.
What more could he have asked for?
These late poems are Stevens at his finest, his most profound:
"The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down."
It seems especially so tonight. Yes, tonight,
before it’s too late to say so.
WALLACE STEVENS’ VOICE IN “OF MERE BEING”, OTHER LATE POEMS
The bird’s scrawny cry heard. Outside his window.
Things spoke for themselves in Stevens’ late poems,
and he internalized their sounds as he grew old, older:
he was listening for a certain key, in search of certain
sounds as he knew full-well that the sensible world
was far stronger than any metaphor he could conjure.
Wherefore then that gold-feathered bird, that palm?
They are as real as we are: calls issued from outside
his Hartford home all the way down to a Key West
hotel room window. Sights and sounds—the rustle
of palm fronds at night. He sought a certain measure
to give voice to emotions that belonged to him alone.
WALLACE STEVENS SPEAKS TO HIS READERS, HIS RIVAL POETS
We can only write what we know about
or imagine. We own our experiences:
they pervade everything, filter the imagination.
I wrote 'Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour'
in old age. I couldn't have written it earlier
had I wanted to—I needed the experience
of loneliness, of old age, the knowledge
'which arranged the rendezvous' before
I could imagine wrapping us in a shawl,
before I could imagine that highest candle swelling
the darkness, within whose light we all dwell.
No one else could have written this poem.
No one. No reason, then, to envy me for it.
WALLACE STEVENS AND THE SYLVIA SALMI PORTRAIT PHOTO
I thought you might want to know,
the book jacket—the portrait photo
by Sylvia Salmi is on the front cover
of the latest edition of The Collected Poems.
She took others, the one of you smiling,
hands folded together, fingers interlaced,
the sun profiling your face, but it's this one,
the serious demeanor that has outperformed,
outlasted all the rest—your eyes thought-filled
yet pensive, looking far away off yet far in,
suggesting neither goal nor final destination
at which you, your mind, might arrive as
your left hand gripped the fabric of your suit,
your right bicep. Since 1989, The Collected
has been at my side, the gift of a fellow poet,
demanding my attention: the sun shining upon
your forehead, the left-hand side of your face.
Had you been the loneliest man in Hartford,
being without even when with? Had you been
feeling doubt-filled and meaningless, largely
used up near the end? Had you been promising
yourself one last trip to Key West near the end?
Had everyone you had ever known—the living
and the dead—been absent yet forever present?
Could you hear that desolate cry in that key still—
that same sound and stillness, the only thing having,
and worth having? We've all made the same mistakes:
the meaning is not in money nor the world's callings.
You had gone into hiding, the hermit hidden amongst
his metaphors, even now as I see you sitting there—
"so much alone... so far beyond the casual solitudes."
Those invisible shelters, where were they old friend?
The essential theme? The panoramas of meaning?
The "panoramas are not what they used to be,
and Claude has been dead a long time."
WALLACE STEVENS IN SOLILOQUY: THE CHANGING WORLD CARES NOTHING FOR US
The changing world cares nothing for us;
my father's letter gave me no choice but to succeed,
and at the time I remember writing this: "The old Biblical injunction to make
the earth fertile and to earn one's bread in the sweat of one's brow
are one's first instructions" . . . So I learned and repeated this, but
"It is decidedly wrong to start there with one's tastes fully developed
& to have to forego all satisfaction of them for a vague number of years."
But forego them I did for I knew the world cared nothing for me,
or for anyone else: "As the hearse rattled up the street over the cobbles,
in the stiffling heat of the sun, with not a single person paying the least attention
to it and with only four or five carriages behind it at a distance I realized much
that I had doubtingly suspected before—There are few hero-worshippers.
Therefore, few heroes." Looking back, I understand now why I worked so hard,
ascended to a vice presidency and bought the best home in the neighborhood;
but now I sleep alone too, realize my poverty and include you in it.
I had failed to care as I should have some time ago, but cannot write about that.
That would prove too disarming, too shaming. So I sleep alone in my big room,
my wife in hers. Our daughter moved out some time ago to live elsewhere.
READING WALLACE STEVENS: A SECOND POEM FOR KATIE
FOLLOWING HER 41ST BIRTHDAY AND A WALK IN THE FIELDS
Life is absurd. But many oaks are true,
hold their greens while other turn, wild grape
turning—yellow and brown—on this autumn
afternoon, the mourning doves travelling
from tree to tree, enjoying the sun it seems,
the French mulberry the last to bloom and fruit
as I walk amid wild, light-blue morning glory,
perhaps as Thoreau once did in his vast solitude.
This afternoon feels like one vast unfinished
sentence in which I can sense myself in time.
Life is absurd; we live and breathe it,
but try as it may life asks mostly questions.
Your father wears a big nose and moustache
to work today. He plays the fool, the clown,
which makes good sense: he reconciles nonsense.
He puts up with things fairly easily; has far
more patience than me though we share
certain habits of thought and mind, yet differ
temperamentally. Biologically determined?
The foundation of personality? Birth order?
Life is absurd. Does your father walk the fields
near home like me? Some parallels do exist—
times and places that no longer are. Ask him.
It is an illusion we were ever alive,/Lived in
The houses of mothers, arranged ourselves . . .
The back fields run up to Rauber Hill and Big Rock.
Your grandmother and Aunt Mary pick blueberries
on Brown Road with Louie, your father and me.
Did such gatherings actually occur, so long ago,
in the hills, or does memory simply invent them?
Life is absurd. This is what it means to age.
But out here I am at my best amongst myriad
rocks, plants and wild flowers. In this I am
alive, akin, as we are kin. We live parallel lives:
yesterday, you were a one-year-old at a local pool;
today, you are forty-one and the mother of two.
And tomorrow? Life plays out. Autumn skies
turn bare. 裸の秋の空 She cries a cold cry.
She walks these fields. Send her on her way.
And so this poem—encompassed—addresses you.
Life is absurd. Early this morning, I read
two poems by Stevens, quoted some lines,
and instantly knew I would take this walk,
write this poem—the thought came, gratefully,
and I accepted. And so you become the woman
looking at a vase of flowers, the essential red,
the central color, creator of a form and an order
which renders abstractions concrete a la Juan Gris.
You make life sensible, harmonious, easy for awhile.
We age. Laugh. Smile. With you I can relate.
WALLACE STEVENS: THE LATE INVENTORY
Lately, I have been reviewing past events,
seem to have inventoried everything important,
image after image springing newborn from this old head.
And selection, selectivity—yes, only certain images
will make due, harmonize, ring true, join sights
and sounds that fit me, my personality and mood.
Yes, that’s the key. That musicality—that sense
of myself heightened, taking me to . . . Oh, yes,
to that . . . To that too— to that tintinnabulation
I discovered long ago in youth; from that solitary cry
at my window back to those other sights and sounds
that transported us to summer—the cricket’s call, the cat’s,
the sounds of my past life that time brings back—
Rossini’s opera and sung words so sweet-sounding.
Life’s this sense-filled medley of becoming, becoming
substantial in one’s own place—fields, forests and mountains.
WALLACE STEVENS AND WALDEN POND
Wallace Stevens had his own Walden Pond—
he lived there, apart, in his later years, in poems,
the one that took the place of a mountain, for example,
wherein he searched for the right outlook where
he could lay down, by himself, in grassy solitude,
and look down on the sea from his high, solitary home.
It had been necessary to find his own place, a direction,
separate, apart; and he found it. He found Walden again,
in falling water near mountains, in a solitude of cataracts,
in a river he keenly felt, the one that never flowed twice
in the same direction through his mind and imagination.
He needed to find places like that, ideal places to go to,
not to his ordinary life on Westerly Terrace, nor downtown
to the offices of The Hartford where he wrote surety contracts—
he discovered Walden in the fields, forests and mountains
that populated his mind, the mind of his poems—he sauntered
about in them, took his time, didn’t think twice. His plight
proved the same as Thoreau’s, as that of nearly all Americans—
live a life of quiet . . . He had choices to make; and made them;
he wanted things, things to touch, and he happily touched them.
It was money he needed to make to enjoy them; he made it.
That was the choice. The compromise. Then he was old,
and there had been no more trips to Key West since 1940,
when he had argued with Frost a final time. Yes, final time,
Stevens watched it desperately from his porch at Walden
in 1955 as the falling waters ponded near the Monadnocks,
the southern New Hampshire mountains Thoreau knew well.
WALLACE STEVENS’ LATE POEMS AND THE READER
When wisdom comes, it comes late,
the wisdom of frailty included.
"Poor" is a fine adjective, "poverty" a fine noun.
Try them on. Get used to them. They're us.
Though he grew older, frailer, his imagination never faltered.
He grew to appreciate a divergent point of view—
he grew to appreciate his daughter.
He grew to question himself at a deeper level,
in so doing reviving long-lost, long-forgotten feelings.
What more could he have asked for?
These late poems are Stevens at his finest, his most profound:
"The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down."
It seems especially so tonight. Yes, tonight,
before it’s too late to say so.
WALLACE STEVENS’ VOICE IN “OF MERE BEING”, OTHER LATE POEMS
The bird’s scrawny cry heard. Outside his window.
Things spoke for themselves in Stevens’ late poems,
and he internalized their sounds as he grew old, older:
he was listening for a certain key, in search of certain
sounds as he knew full-well that the sensible world
was far stronger than any metaphor he could conjure.
Wherefore then that gold-feathered bird, that palm?
They are as real as we are: calls issued from outside
his Hartford home all the way down to a Key West
hotel room window. Sights and sounds—the rustle
of palm fronds at night. He sought a certain measure
to give voice to emotions that belonged to him alone.
WALLACE STEVENS SPEAKS TO HIS READERS, HIS RIVAL POETS
We can only write what we know about
or imagine. We own our experiences:
they pervade everything, filter the imagination.
I wrote 'Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour'
in old age. I couldn't have written it earlier
had I wanted to—I needed the experience
of loneliness, of old age, the knowledge
'which arranged the rendezvous' before
I could imagine wrapping us in a shawl,
before I could imagine that highest candle swelling
the darkness, within whose light we all dwell.
No one else could have written this poem.
No one. No reason, then, to envy me for it.
WALLACE STEVENS AND THE SYLVIA SALMI PORTRAIT PHOTO
I thought you might want to know,
the book jacket—the portrait photo
by Sylvia Salmi is on the front cover
of the latest edition of The Collected Poems.
She took others, the one of you smiling,
hands folded together, fingers interlaced,
the sun profiling your face, but it's this one,
the serious demeanor that has outperformed,
outlasted all the rest—your eyes thought-filled
yet pensive, looking far away off yet far in,
suggesting neither goal nor final destination
at which you, your mind, might arrive as
your left hand gripped the fabric of your suit,
your right bicep. Since 1989, The Collected
has been at my side, the gift of a fellow poet,
demanding my attention: the sun shining upon
your forehead, the left-hand side of your face.
Had you been the loneliest man in Hartford,
being without even when with? Had you been
feeling doubt-filled and meaningless, largely
used up near the end? Had you been promising
yourself one last trip to Key West near the end?
Had everyone you had ever known—the living
and the dead—been absent yet forever present?
Could you hear that desolate cry in that key still—
that same sound and stillness, the only thing having,
and worth having? We've all made the same mistakes:
the meaning is not in money nor the world's callings.
You had gone into hiding, the hermit hidden amongst
his metaphors, even now as I see you sitting there—
"so much alone... so far beyond the casual solitudes."
Those invisible shelters, where were they old friend?
The essential theme? The panoramas of meaning?
The "panoramas are not what they used to be,
and Claude has been dead a long time."
WALLACE STEVENS IN SOLILOQUY: THE CHANGING WORLD CARES NOTHING FOR US
The changing world cares nothing for us;
my father's letter gave me no choice but to succeed,
and at the time I remember writing this: "The old Biblical injunction to make
the earth fertile and to earn one's bread in the sweat of one's brow
are one's first instructions" . . . So I learned and repeated this, but
"It is decidedly wrong to start there with one's tastes fully developed
& to have to forego all satisfaction of them for a vague number of years."
But forego them I did for I knew the world cared nothing for me,
or for anyone else: "As the hearse rattled up the street over the cobbles,
in the stiffling heat of the sun, with not a single person paying the least attention
to it and with only four or five carriages behind it at a distance I realized much
that I had doubtingly suspected before—There are few hero-worshippers.
Therefore, few heroes." Looking back, I understand now why I worked so hard,
ascended to a vice presidency and bought the best home in the neighborhood;
but now I sleep alone too, realize my poverty and include you in it.
I had failed to care as I should have some time ago, but cannot write about that.
That would prove too disarming, too shaming. So I sleep alone in my big room,
my wife in hers. Our daughter moved out some time ago to live elsewhere.
READING WALLACE STEVENS: A SECOND POEM FOR KATIE
FOLLOWING HER 41ST BIRTHDAY AND A WALK IN THE FIELDS
Life is absurd. But many oaks are true,
hold their greens while other turn, wild grape
turning—yellow and brown—on this autumn
afternoon, the mourning doves travelling
from tree to tree, enjoying the sun it seems,
the French mulberry the last to bloom and fruit
as I walk amid wild, light-blue morning glory,
perhaps as Thoreau once did in his vast solitude.
This afternoon feels like one vast unfinished
sentence in which I can sense myself in time.
Life is absurd; we live and breathe it,
but try as it may life asks mostly questions.
Your father wears a big nose and moustache
to work today. He plays the fool, the clown,
which makes good sense: he reconciles nonsense.
He puts up with things fairly easily; has far
more patience than me though we share
certain habits of thought and mind, yet differ
temperamentally. Biologically determined?
The foundation of personality? Birth order?
Life is absurd. Does your father walk the fields
near home like me? Some parallels do exist—
times and places that no longer are. Ask him.
It is an illusion we were ever alive,/Lived in
The houses of mothers, arranged ourselves . . .
The back fields run up to Rauber Hill and Big Rock.
Your grandmother and Aunt Mary pick blueberries
on Brown Road with Louie, your father and me.
Did such gatherings actually occur, so long ago,
in the hills, or does memory simply invent them?
Life is absurd. This is what it means to age.
But out here I am at my best amongst myriad
rocks, plants and wild flowers. In this I am
alive, akin, as we are kin. We live parallel lives:
yesterday, you were a one-year-old at a local pool;
today, you are forty-one and the mother of two.
And tomorrow? Life plays out. Autumn skies
turn bare. 裸の秋の空 She cries a cold cry.
She walks these fields. Send her on her way.
And so this poem—encompassed—addresses you.
Life is absurd. Early this morning, I read
two poems by Stevens, quoted some lines,
and instantly knew I would take this walk,
write this poem—the thought came, gratefully,
and I accepted. And so you become the woman
looking at a vase of flowers, the essential red,
the central color, creator of a form and an order
which renders abstractions concrete a la Juan Gris.
You make life sensible, harmonious, easy for awhile.
We age. Laugh. Smile. With you I can relate.