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The decomposer’s art: Ideas of music in the poetry of Wallace Stevens

Boring, Barbara Holmes, Ph.D.

The Ohio State University, 1987

Copyright ©1987 by Boring, Barbara Holmes. All rights reserved.

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University Microfilms International THE DECOMPOSER’S ART:

IDEAS OF MUSIC IN THE POETRY OF WALLACE STEVENS

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of the Ohio State University

by

Barbara Holmes Boring, B.A., M.A. a a a * *

The Ohio State University

1987

Dissertation Committee: Approved by

John Muste

Anthony Libby Adviser Daniel Barnes Department of English ©1987

BARBARA HOLMES BORING

All Rights Reserved VITA

1980...... B.A. Ohio State University

1982...... M.A. Ohio State University

1980-1986 Teaching Associate, Department of English, Ohio State University

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: Modern British and American Literature Other: Interdisciplinary Poetics Fiction American Literature to 1900 English Renaissance Literature

ii TABLE OF CONTENTS

VITA...... ii

PREFACE...... iv

CHAPTER ONE ...... 1 INTRODUCTION: THE THING HUMMED

CHAPTER TWO ...... 45 INEVITABLE MODULATIONS

CHAPTER THREE...... 88 FROM UBIQUITOUS THUNDER TO STILL SMALLER SOUNDS

CHAPTER FOUR...... 146 A NEW RESEMBLANCE

CHAPTER FIVE...... 202 REFLECTIONS AND RECONFIGURATIONS

CONCLUSION...... 236

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CITED...... 241

iii PREFACE

In the bulk of criticism dealing with Wallace

Stevens' poetry, music has not been given the attention it

deserves. A few critics have touched on the subject, have

even analysed, albeit briefly, the effects of the medium

on the poet's method. For example J. Hi 11is Hiller,

Northrop Frye, Helen Vendler, and John Hollander have all

discussed Stevens and music. But no consistent analysis

to date has adequately considered the convergence of

poetry and music in Stevens’ poetry. Even though, as

contemporary composer Stephen Paulus notes, Stevens’

poetry is full of musical ideas, and even though the poet

demonstrated a lifelong interest in poetry’s "sister art,"

no large scale study of Stevens has included music in its

agenda. It is the purpose of this dissertation to elaborate on this subject of the poet and music: to

understand Stevens’ attitude toward the "art" of music, and to discover how he incorporated that attitude into his own poetry. Finally, my aim is to further discover how

Stevens’ musical insight affected composers who looked to his poems for inspiration.

The presentation of the musical parallel should serve two purposes. Literary scholars, and laypersons as well,

iv may be able to observe the poems from a perspective that

would clarify some of the illusory effects of the later

poems--explain their difficulty--and the apparent

nonchalance of the early ones. And to the extent that

this interdisciplinary study successfully investigates a

convergence of two similar, though unique, art forms, it

should advance the cause of tandem appraisals for future

critics interested in the role of the musician in the

poet's craft. To ignore Wallace Stevens’ abundant

references to music--its structure, expressive potential,

acoustical properties, and philosophical dimensions--is to

deny the poet a full response to his works. So often in

Stevens criticism a poem or passage containing several

figures, images, or references to music is explicated and analyzed in apparent disregard of the importance of the musical analogue or reference. But like the multifarious voices that sing in contrapuntal association throughout all of J . S. Bach's musical textures, not a thread of any

Stevens poem is Incidental to the fabric of the whole piece. Remove one syllable, word, or phrase and you interfere with the poem's character, as you would a fugue's by removing a note or sequence. To ignore any aspect of a Stevens poem or a work by Bach is to rearrange the mind of its creator--to misread the text.

My method relies on biographical data from Stevens’ essays; his poems; his library of books and recordings;

v hia letters and journals; and biographer Peter Brazeau's interviews with the poet’s friends, family, colleagues, and business acquaintances. 1 have also turned to

Stevens’1iterary and musical predecessors, poets and composers who may have influenced him along the way to achieving his pre-eminent status in this century.

Finally, with the further intent of "rereading'’ Stevens through the musical setting, I have provided an analysis of two recent settings of Stevens’ poems by contemporary

American composers Roger Reynolds and Stephen Paulus.

The five chapters of this dissertation approach the ideas of music in Stevens' poetry from several different perspectives. Crucial to each is the sum of biographical and critical data indicating Stevens’ disposition toward music as both subject and strategy for poetry. Profoundly influenced by the English and American Romantic poets, as well as several composers and philosophers, Stevens adapted his Innate musical sense to the project of

"decomposing" an original idea as a first step in the process of interchanging or exchanging its elements to form a new version. Many of Stevens’ musical images and structures proved particularly useful to him as he

“performed'' his poems in the language of open-endedness, temporariness, or, as he would call it, "endless elaboration."

vi Three chapters of my dissertation discuss Stevens' decompositions! or performative techniques- two focus on the musical figure--the bird, the human singer, the instrumentalist, the dancer, and others; another focuses on the musical form (particularly ‘Theme and Variations").

All three chapters analyze Stevens in relation to his predecessors--musicians and poets--by providing new readings of poems based on Stevens* interdisciplinary ‘new romantic" aesthetic. The fifth and last chapter of my study explores the validity of my central hypothesis of

“developing variation'' as the basis of Stevens' style as it appears in an avant-garde setting of "The Emperor of

Ice-Cream" by Roger Reynolds. Another setting, by Stephen

Paulus, considers the antiphonal character of "Sunday

Morning."

As the aforementioned musical settings and the bulk of the Stevens canon indicate, the art of the decomposer is not limited by system or medium. Indeed, as the century advances, more and more artists change places, so to speak, recognizing themselves, like Stevens before them, in homogeneous settings "in which hundreds of eyes, in one mind, see at once." The ideas of music in Stevens’ poetry are simply one way "on which to play//. . .a new aspect, bright in discovery."

vii CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION

THE THING HUMMED

On December 8, 1936, during his debut as a lecturer

at Harvard, Wallace Stevens characteristically aligned the

process of hearing with that of creating the "pure" poem.

In "The Irrational Element in Poetry" (his topic for that

day), Stevens explained that the complementary gestures of

sound and movement both account for and direct the

creation of poems consonant with the modern poet’s desire

for freedom, or change:

You can compose in whatever form you like. . .It matters immensely. The slightest sound matters. The moat momentary rhythm matters. You can do as you please, yet everything matters. . . .You have somehow to know the sound that is the exact sound; and you do in fact know, without knowing how. . . What is true of sounds is true of everything: the feeling for words, without regard to their sound, for example. There is in short, an unwritten rhetoric that is always changing and to which the poet must always be turning.1

In 1940, with the publication of "Of Modern Poetry,"

Stevens would restate--this time more ingeniously--his abiding concern with the correspondence between the sound and shape of the world around him and works of art committed to expressing that reality. According to

Stevens, the so-called "modern sound"--in effect, reality

1 2

in the guise of the modern poem--would be recognizable as

sound ‘passing through sudden rightnesses" (CP 240). The resulting "speech of the place" would approximate a new construction of thought, heard in the "delicatest ear of the mind." The listener would be able to distinguish between "souvenir" and "satisfaction"--past and present— for the poet would announce the new poetics in the wiry- stringed twang of the appropriately local guitar. And like an actor on a new stage, this performing musician would "face the men of the time and. . .meet/The women of the time." An embodiment of his audience, he would express, listening to himself, the motions inherent in the satisfactory activities of life around him— the man skating, for instance, or the woman dancing or combing her hair. In short, the poet would have to sound out that unwritten and ever-changing rhetoric recognizable to him as an "exact sound" or expression of reality.

The Stevens poem would not define thought and feeling; rather, it would embody them in the same motion and sense that music "embodies a certain type of movement" rather than expresses it. In an attempt to define the authentic musical expression, contemporary composer and conductor Roger Sessions seems to have understood Stevens’ impulse to communicate "exact sound"--emotions stripped of associations--and to have understood also the essence of attitudes and gestures behind feelings. Such are the 3

movements “of our inner being which animate our emotions

and give them theiir dynamic content" says Sessions (The

Musical Experience of Composer. Performer. Listener. 2b-

26). He continues:

. . .I believe that music "expresses" something very definite, and that it expresses it in the most pre­ cise way. In embodying movement, in the most subtle and most delicate manner possible, it communicates the attitudes inherent in, and implied by, that movement; its speed, its energy, its elan or impulse, its tenseness or relaxation, its agitation or its tranquility, its decisiveness or its hesitation. It communicates in a marvelously vivid and exact way the dynamics and the abstract qualities of emotion. (24)

Thus sound-~more precisely, music--originates from the

rhythmic impetus to produce it. Stevens’ Peter Quince not

only recognizes the correspondence between the sounds he

makes on his clavier and his thoughts and feelings, but

also that the latter are embodiments of an inner music

which refuses to be limited by metaphor or analogy.

"Music is feeling, then, not sound/And thus it is that

what I feel,/Here in this room, desiring you,/Thinking of

your blue-shadowed silk,/Is music" (CP 90), says Quince

the musician. Quince’s keyboard renderings are thus tangible evidence of his desire for the "you" of blue-

shadowed silk. Granted, his music is like "the

strain/Waked in the elders by Susanna," but it is not wholly dependent on the Biblical analogue for its validity. The music exists abstractly beneath the level 4 of perception in the same form as the feeling which provokes Its conception, and the drama of Susanna and the

Elders simply expresses what would otherwise be ineffable.

There is no distinction for Quince, therefore, between fictions or modalities. At his instrument, Quince is both poet and musician, but neither one nor the other.

"Peter Quince at the Clavier" is an appropriate poem,

I think, to demonstrate a convergence of the musical and poetical arts in Stevens’ poetry, for it is the first clear-cut expression, after "The Comedian as the Letter

C," of emotion and thought as musical gesture. But the seminal poem is "Of Modern Poetry," in that it is antecedent to the large-mannered acoustical and rhythmical experiments which constitute Credences of Summer. Auroras of Autumn. and The Rock, and because it partially resolves the intellectual and emotional tensions intrinsic to the poems written prior to its publication (1940). "Of Modern

Poetry's" peremptory vitality mediates between the youthful elan and heady intellectualism of Harmonium■

Ideas of Order, and "The Man with the Blue Guitar," respectively, and the relaxed wisdom of many of the late poems. More importantly, the poem contains not only the most frequently used musical trope in the Stevens canon-- the musician as poet, or poet as musician--but it demonstrates as well the referential vagueness (e.g. indefinite pronouns) and overall dysrhythmia of the poetic 5 mind in the act of findinfe, discovering "rightnesses," as it were. The poem meditates as it speaks; its sound is an exact incarnation of its self.

All poets, naturally, have been and will continue to be intrigued with sound production and the hearing apparatus, but few since the Renaissance have so suffused their poems with what John Hollander calls "systematic sound." Hollander describes the origins of Stevens’ odd music, referring specifically to Harmonium:

Pianos, oboes, orchestras, mandolins, guitars, claviers, tambourines, and song; the musics of Mozart and Brahms, and all the bird songs and other noises of nature; the sounds of language deconstructed into vocables, the visionary phonetics of transcendent tongues; music claimed for language as well as language claimed for music; music abstract and concrete; music simply or complexly figurative--from the clattering of bucks to a scrawny cry from outside. . . .To say that all this music--high, low, noisy, verbal-~is metaphorical is surely not enough. ("The Sound of the Music," 235)

There are more instruments. Virtually every instrument found in a modern orchestra (with a few left over) adds to a prodigious catalogue of musical forms and various combinations of vocal and instrumental performances. "In the way you speak/You arrange, the thing is posed,/What in nature merely grows," Stevens claims in "Add This to

Rhetoric." Likewise manner— "The poses of speech, of paint, /Of music’’--in the majority of Stevens* poems, 6 becomes the madrigal, sonatina, round, waltz, bagatelle, rhapsody, fugue (the list is long).

Stevens’ usually pointed references to composers, mythological and legendary musical figures, literary musical types, and newly-imagined singers and players, in combination with instruments and ensembles (orchestras, choirs, consorts), produce a poetry rich in acoustical and imagistic variation. It is a sound system in which, for instance, a mere title fuses musical timbre with the tone of a speaker’s voice ("Asides on the Oboe"), or a quick reference to a composer superimposes the chromatically rich textures of a musical style onto a poetic one

("Anglais Mort a Florence"). Orpheus, Peter Quince, the

Muses; choirs, bugles, lutes, bassoons (even gramophones); dithyrambs, canzones, arias, improvisations and variations; music rhetorical, expressive, philosophic; music monophonic, polyphonic, tonal, bitonal, polyrhythmic, contrapuntal; music artificial, organic, composed or decomposed; music balanced, chaotic, suspended, resolved; music as will, desire, subjection, or joy--the uncommon complex of terms and analogical referents may bewilder or even overwhelm the unwary reader.

In poetry the value of so much sound and movement depends upon a discerning imagination shaped by an overall musical instinct. The qualities a poet must possess to 7 both constitute and refine this sense distinguish Stevens’ words of magnitude from, for example, Poe’s

"tintinnabulations" or from what Auden calls the "hollow chiming" of the 'Francophile gaggle of pure songsters" when referring to Mallarme and company (Unsuspected

Eloquence. Winn, 323). Indeed, the reason Stevens has chosen music to be that vital mode which "formulates the words" (CP 259) rather than architecture, or sculpture, or the dance, or even painting {which occupies a subdominant referential position in his works), resides in those attributes that distinguish musician from painter, the one governed by sound from the one governed by sight. Music dominates the Stevens canon because the poet was a profoundly musical man. He was both listener and shaper, who, like musician/critic Paul Rosenfeld, of whom he speaks, "lived for a world composed of music, but which did not whirl round in music alone" (OP 259), "This constant shaping, as distinguished from constancy of shape, is characteristic of the poet," Stevens says further in homage to Rosenfeld, thereby seeming to describe himself, the modern poet, "conscious of the creative forces of his generation."

One recognizes, says James Baird in his study of structure in the poetry of Stevens, "that the art of

Stevens is distinguished by a vocabulary from music: variations, scales, fugues, modes of the tonic and the 8 dominant, keys, instruments of the major orchestral

choirs, modulations, and effects which should be named as

arpeggios and glissandos." Furthermore, continues Baird,

"the play of the imagination in the poetry of Stevens, its

brilliance and its swift passage especially in the early

and middle periods, suggests Stevens as the musician's

poet" fThe Dome and the Rock, xxiii). Only Auden and

Pound in his milieu compare, I think, with this

"musician’s poet" in knowledge of music beyond the

rudimentary. They were, however, considerably better

educated, formally, in the art.

Pound went so far as to produce his own treatise on

music theory (Anthell and the Treatise on Harmony. 1927)

after years of eclectic albeit serious music study. He

wrote music criticism, composed an opera fVillon^. and

his musico-theoretical contributions to the often

misunderstood ad hoc compendium of "Imagiste" directives

no doubt frustrated more than one Imagist ephebe of less

imposing musical gifts. "Don’t imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music," warns Pound

in "A Retrospect" (5). Further, the neophyte must “know assonance and alliteration, rhyme immediate and delayed, simple and polyphonic, as a musician would expect to know harmony and counterpoint and all the minutiae of his craft" (6). Finally, and Pound is adamant, "behave as a musician, a good musician, when dealing with that phase of 9

your art which has exact parallels in music. The same

laws govern, and you are bound by no others." The

relationship between poetry and music, Pound declares, is

a close one: poets uninterested in music "are, or become,

bad poets.. . . poets should never be too long out of

touch with musicians. Poets who will not study music are

defective" ("Vers Libre," Essays. 437). To behave as a

"good" musician, however, one must, first of all, be one;

only the musician both understands and conceives of

experience in an attitude of sonorous and rhythmic

expression and design.

Auden*s contributions to tandem appraisals of music

and poetry are recorded in Worte and Noten (conceived as a

lecture for the opening of the 1968 Salzburg Festival); in

"Notes on Music and Opera" from his own The Dyer*s Hand

(1962); and in his poems. Although a librettist, Auden, unlike Pound, neither theorized about nor composed

significant music. His poems, nonetheless, demonstrate an unusual dexterity and knowledge of musical forms requisite to the reinstatement of medieval musico-poetics into modern versions of the ballade, rondeau, villanelle,

sestina, and canzone, to name a few. According to James

Winn, Auden was rarely guilty of an empty line, and considered himself a true virtuoso (323). But Auden was careful not to confuse virtuoso poetics with musical mastery: his "The Composer" distinguishes the absolute 10

medium of the composer from the other arts:

All others translate: the painter sketches A visible world to love or reject, Rummaging into his living, the poet fetches The images out that hurt and connect. From Life to Art by painstaking adaption, Relying on us to cover the rift; Only your notes are pure contraption, Only your song is an absolute gift. (148)

Thus Auden is a "good’' musician--capable of "dealing with

that phase of. . .art which," according to Pound, "has

exact parallels to music." And, like Pound, and Stevens,

Auden is keenly tuned to the distinctions between "pure

contraption," "hollow chiming," "tintinnabulation," and

what Stevens refers to metaphorically as "vital music," or

poetry that aspires to purity with the poet’s desire to

compose "a single line" of truth: "Equal to memory, one

line in which/The vital music formulates the words" (CP

259). In such a quest, says Milton Bates quoting Stevens,

"one’s real subject. . .is not the nominal subject but the poetic subject," poetry being the true concern and the stated subject merely costume.2

Stevens' search for the pure poem evolved naturally enough through the ungainly process of becoming an expert listener. Sharing neither Pound’s nor Auden’s musicological avocation and formal training, Stevens, nonetheless, acquired a musical sense so critically acute that a conjunction of the poetical and musical arts in his work was inevitable. Stevens authored no treatises on the subject of music, but his layman's knowledge of music was so sophisticated and his appreciation for the art so genuine, that today's reappraisals of his works in terms of their interdisciplinary focus are understandable.

Continually engaged in the activity of developing what

Sessions defines as the "Musical Ear"--that not only discriminates, but associates and coordinates musical impressions and sonorities--Stevens demonstrates the gifted listener's response to the world around him.

Listening with a musical ear, says Sessions, "is not a passive function." One’s ear does not simply register or merely draw patterns of tonal sensation; rather, it "feels and thinks," constantly "[seeking] new relations and

[developing] new resources in the service of musical expression" (26).

Like a composer's, Stevens’ temperament seemed to be nourished and satisfied by some aspect of what composer

Igor Stravinsky has defined as the "auditive shape" (Craft and Stravinsky, Conversations. 15). Michael Stegman's recent catalogue of Stevens’ phonograph records indicates that the poet had access to a collection of musical shapes, or ideas, "of considerable size and scope"

("Wallace Stevens and Music," 79). The discography lists approximately 456 records and eighty-nine composers ranging historically from Palestrina to Stravinsky. 12

Several multi-record collections are included as single

units, so that well over five-hundred recordings comprised

Stevens' actual working music library. For example, the

Beethoven collection lists thirty-seven entries, one of

which includes the complete sonatas published by the

Beethoven Society. Altogether, Stevens’ record library

afforded him the uncommon opportunity to absorb an

impressively rich variety of musical styles stretching

from the early Renaissance to the twentieth century.

Representative pre-classic works display the

polyphonic a-canella style of Palestrina based upon the

principles of counterpoint, imitation, melodic movement,

consonance and dissonance; the late sixteenth-century

madrigal technique of Monteverdi, with its smooth

combination of homophonic and contrapuntal partwriting and

freedom in the use of declamatory harmonies and

dissonances; and the architechtonically fugal style of J.

S. Bach, which mediates between harmonic and contrapuntal forces, and emphasises rhythmic strength, clarity of form, and grandeur of proportion. Representative classic to modern works in Stevens’ collection include Mozart,

Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, Mahler, Debussy, Verdi,

Schoenberg, and Stravinsky. Their works, as well as those of lesser-known composers, emphasize thematic and motival development and variation; symphonic orchestration; modal, tonal, and chromatic improvisation; tonal and chromatic 13

harmony; bitonality, polytonality, and polyrhythmics; and

operatic and non-dramatic vocal techniques. Although, as

Stegman reports, music of the late Romantic period

dominates the collection, Stevens acquired recordings from

more composers of twentieth-century music. The twentieth-

century composers are, however, the more conservative ones not usually associated with the avant-garde. One

Schoenberg piece is the "impressionistic" Verklarte Nacht.

says Stegman, yet Stevens’ selections do show "an acute

awareness of the modern composers of his own generation, and a refreshing "catholicity of taste" overall (80).

Stevens’ library of recordings, if listened to habitually and imaginatively, could have adequately nourished a genuine and compelling interest in music. The

Bach material alone could have provided the poet a valuable theoretical compendium for the development of his aesthetic of interrelatedness and interaction, in effect, a contrapuntal aesthetic that informs Stevens’ many variations. "Cross-reflections, modifications, counter­ balance, complements, giving and taking are illimitable," says Stevens in a 1940 letter to a friend. "They make things interdependent, and their inter-dependence sustains them and gives them pleasure. . .there is an exquisite pleasure and harmony in these inter-relations, circuits."

Thus the poet explains away, in language borrowed from music theory, what he had once boyishly conceived of as a 14

law of contrasts, "building the world out of blocks," or chords, in favor of contrasting but parallel association and motion (L 368):

The chord destroys its elements by uniting them in a chord. They then cease to exist separately. On the other hand, discord exaggerates the separation between its elements. These propositions are stated in a variety of terms. (L 363)

Indeed, these "propositions" are stated in a myriad of terms throughout the Stevens canon of poetry and prose, and, as such, disengage him theoretically from Romantics

Emerson and Whitman, for whom "separation" was only a prior condition toward the eventual unification of non­ disparate elements.

Although Stevens began to collect recordings (among other things) early with his move to Hartford,

Connecticut, in 1916, other sources contributed to his musical sense and may have equally helped shape his

"interdisciplinary" aesthetic. Prior to the move north from New York City, he had enjoyed easy contact with the

New York Philharmonic, various opera companies, and Town

Hall. The phonograph collection was meant to supplement his relatively infrequent visits to New York concert halls after the move to Connecticut, as well as his wife’s piano playing, and the often-played radio. Daughter Holly

Stevens remembers that she grew up with music in the 15 house, "listening to records usually unavailable, since

Dad was a steady customer of the Gramophone Shop in New

York." On Saturdays and Sundays the radio came on "for the opera and the New York Philharmonic” (Stegnan, 79),

Stevens' daughter also recalls that "during the week, when he came home from work, he listened to his records" and that in 1930 "he subscribed to the visiting orchestra series" in Hartford "and continued the subscription until he died." The last concert Stevens and his daughter attended together was in the spring of 1955.*

Thus the poet continued to sustain an early and profound curiosity about the art of sound and rhythm. As a boy Stevens had shared his family’s piano in Reading,

Pennsylvania, as well as the parlored and organlike harmonium owned by a close neighbor. The reedy sound of the harmonium eventually found its way into a whole volume of Stevens’ poems, and other local musics affected the speech idioms sprinkled throughout The Collected Poems.

One of the young poet’s frequent letters to his mother recounted his impressions of a band of local musicians, another his brother’s "sentimental" mandolin playing. As a Harvard man, Stevens sang bass in his college quartet and played at the guitar. Later, in Hartford, the poet sang to his wife's piano accompaniment, and spent frequent evenings with the gramophone. 16

Friends and acquaintances recall, often with

amazement, Stevens' well-endowed musical sense., Margaret

Powers, wife of Stevens* friend and business associate,

James, remembers the poet's occasional visits to New York and his "encyclopedic" knowledge about the arts. Mrs.

Powers recalls a musical evening at a concert with

Stevens:

1 was so surprised that he knew so much about music, the form of a fugue and that sort of thing. He was very familiar with whatever we were hearing that night, and he said, 'Now you watch that theme; it’s coming up later.' (Brazeau, 89)

In 1936 Stevens also impressed composer Arthur

Berger, then a Harvard graduate student in music. Almost twenty years later, Stevens’ biographer Peter Brazeau relates, Berger paid his respects to the memory of the day

Stevens lectured at Harvard in his own musical setting of

Ideas of Order. Berger remembers the advice Stevens gave to the poet as he delivered “The Irrational Element in

Poetry" to the Harvard audience:

. . .it is probably the purpose of each of us to write poetry to find the good, which, in the Platonic sense, is synonymous with God. One writes poetry, then, in order to approach the good in what is harmonious and orderly. . . . It is conceivable that a poet may arise of such a scope that he can set the abstraction on which so much depends to music. (OP 222) 17

The words harmonious and orderly, says Berger, were

’advice*’ Stevens was giving to "the poet "in musical terms"

and certainly left an impression (Brazeau, 163).

Composer John Gruen, when interviewed by Brazeau in

1976, admitted to an early fondness for Stevens* poetry,

especially "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird."

Gruen fell instantly "in love" with the poem and later

wrote what he considered his best song cycle (of the same

name) in appreciation .* Stevens, says Gruen, "must have

been aware of the fact that his poetry did lend itself to

musical setting because it is so musical to begin with"

(Brazeau, 205). Stevens, however, was apparently not

conscious of his own poetry’s adaptability to music, for

when, in 1953, he was asked by Gruen to listen to an at-

home first performance of the song cycle, the poet

confessed an uneasiness concerning his ability to judge

its merit. From the man who felt comfortable with fugal

analysis and who spent long evenings listening to

Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, and opera, another self-

effacing comment preceding the performance of "Blackbird"

was surely meant to spare the eager novice composer, or at

least put him at ease: ”1 don't have a good ear, and 1 d o n ’t respond to music very much" (Brazeau, 208).

Not all of Stevens’ reading public were so favorably

impressed with his musical poetics. Brazeau recalls poet and friend Wilbur Snow's disapponted reaction to the 1923 18

publication of Harmonium:

When Wallace Stevens' poem "Peter Quince at the Clavier" came out several years ago many of us thought we discovered a new and valuable note in American poetry. . .Last year the long awaited volume came out. . .and many of us were frankly disappointed. The music of "Peter Quince" was here, to be sure, in many of the poems, but the thought that should be wedded to music in poetry was conspicious by its absence. . . . A Dial reviewer once called this type of thing "poetry by subtraction," that is, poetry with the ideas removed and the sounds retained. Before Mr. Stevens can come into his own he must prove himself to be more than Just a music maker. (Brazeau, 244)

To the contrary, ideas have not been removed from the poetry; rather, much of Harmonium1s expressive content-- its substance--derives from the ironic grating of disparate and contending ideas, sounds, and motions.

Neither Harmonium nor poems from subsequent collections lacks thought, unless the shape of an idea shall be defined as absolute or invariable. Fortunately, careful readings of Stevens have, in recent years, largely discouraged such untutored and incautious pronouncements as Snow's. One must, after all, discriminate between categories of what Snow recognized as verbal music in order to separate Stevens' highly literary and rhetorical music from, for instance, Gertrude Stein’s more absolute intonings. Stanza two of Stevens' "Things of August" (a late poem) would likely have received, in the 1920s, a derogatory appraisal from a critic like Snow. At first 19

hearing it seems little more than eloquent verbiage, or

verbal music, a linguistic phenomenon defined by Peter

Scher as that acoustical quality of literature which

implies, invokes, imitates, or otherwise indirectly

approaches actual music ("Literature and Music," 229):

We make, although inside an egg, Variations on the words spread sail.

The morning-glories grow in the egg. It is full of the myrrh and camphor of summer

And Adirondack glittering. The cat hawks it and the hawk cats it and we say spread sail.

Spread sail, we say spread white, spread way. The shell is a shore. The egg of the sea

And the egg of the sky are in shells, in walls, in skins And the egg of the earth lies deep within an egg.

Spread outward. Crack the round dome. Break through. Have liberty not as the air within a grave

Or down a well. Breathe freedom, oh, my native, In the space of horizons that neither love nor hate. (CP 490)

Cracking the annoying and redundant "round" (a musical term of repetitive self-containment) of distichs is equivalent to liberating the speech from summer’s unvarying rhetoric, which, in turn, is equivalent to "air within a grave." The poem’s numerous variations in theme, word and syntax, rhythm and meter are as refreshing as some of Whitman’s more compelling vers llbre experiments.

Rhythmically, the Stevens poem is brilliantly unpredictable. The phrase undulates, expanding and 20

contracting, it seems, to the pulse of the impatient

embryo (theme or motive). In enjambed lines the caesuras

shift, and the meter "cracks" at the crucial center of the

poem into three lines of forceful, monosyllabic variation.

The spondees in line seven provide the percussion needed

to disperse the elements into lyric anapests, after which

the lines continue to expand and contract toward the final

"space of horizons," and free from categorical boundaries.

Unlike the musical round, or circle canon, Stevens’

poem breaks the limits of the circle by undermining the

round’s principle concept: the melody shall consist of

sections of equal length, which make pleasant harmony with

each other. This must be accomplished while each singer

returns from the conclusion of the melody to its

beginning. Variation in the circle canon occurs ad

1ihltum. among single voices, but because the melody of a

round always consists of sections of equal length,

expressive content is sacrificed to mathematical precision. Expansion and contraction occur within the

circle of prescribed melodic and rhythmic construction.

The images in "Things of August" ii, however, like the poem’s meter and rhythm, expand beyond the referential and derivitive (i.e. mythic egg, shell, sail) to the specific

anatomy of soaring Adirondack, expanding earth and sky, evolving sea and shore.

Stevens the poet shared composer Charles Ives’s sense 21

that "maturity of desire involves the 'violence* of

transformation" (Kramer, 174). And for Stevens, the form

that best appropriated the complementary impulses of

climax and repose, linear progression and circuity,

dependence and independence, concord and discord basic to

the violently transformative act was the modern version of

the musical Theme and Variations. "Things of August" ii,

small as it may be, occupies significant space in Stevens*

"endless reshaping of a basic shape,"5 the poet’s

"principle of developing variation" accounting, in part,

for his reputation as a difficult poet.

The determinate status of the Stevens poem, however,

makes it translatable thematically, unlike Stein’s Tender

Buttons. From "This is the Dress, Aider”:

Aider, why aider why whow, whow stop touch, aider wow, aider stop the muncher, muncher munchers. A Jack in kill her, a Jack in, makes a meadowed king, makes a to let.5

The Stein poem is verbal music (as Scher defines it), whereas Stevens' is, more accurately, musical

verbalization. Without references, the former is

gramatically and syntactically intranslatable, its arrangement of rhythms and sonorities apparently

explaining its "meaning." Consider also the following excerpt from "Seepferdschen and Flugfische," by Hugo Ball,

leader of the Zurich Dada circle: 22 tressli bessli negogen leila flusch kata ballubasch sack hitti zopp, . .

zitti kitillabi blllabi zikko di zakkobam fisch kitti bisch. . .

tressli bessli negogen grugru blaulala violabimini bisch violabimini bimini bimini fusch kata ballubasch zick hiti zopp (Winn, 320)

James Winn says that much of the ‘charm" of Ball's poem is purely musical. "It has strong rhythm. . .marked cadences. . .variation," and we "might even describe it as an imprecisely notated, percussive, vaguely pitched piece of minimal music" (320). But, adds Winn, we are encouraged to look for some kind of meaning because of the real words "fisch" and "viola"; and, "blaulala" and

"Leila" sound like "distortions of the song of Wagner’s

Rhine maidens, ’Weialalaleia.*" Encouragement or no, we soon, however, give up the quest for some kind of meaning other than the purely musical one.

Stevens, like Stein and Ball, constructed poems as a

"way of happening rather than an account of what has happened," as a way of perceiving rather than a description of how things look (Perloff, 85). Unlike the objectivists, though, Stevens recognized the unique status of music and did not confuse it with poetry (or any other medium). Pure poetry would exploit language and rhythm, 23 while pure music would exploit sound and rhythm; a component of language would be sound, but a component of sound could never be language. Stevens knew that the poet is like the composer in that he is always thinking in terms of tone, rhythm, and movement--but in verbal terms.

The pure poem for Stevens would be "[the] poem of the mind in the act of finding," but in the service of language-- its associations and grammars. And that system would have to be decomposed and recomposed to liberate it, not from its own unique capacity to mean, but from its metaphorical decadence. Stevens’ techniques of revision, or recomposition, not only break from what Barbara Herrnstein

Smith calls the closed system of poems "that have nothing to reveal but the operations of their own laws" (Poetic

Closure. 30), but they also rescue and reconstitute the essential properties of metaphor, language, and thought from the systematic repetitions of tradition. "A variation between the sound of words in one age and the sound of words in another age is an instance of the pressure of reality," says Stevens in "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words" (NA 13), as if in compliance with

Pound's belief that "every emotion and every phase of emotion has some toneless phrase, some rhythm-phrase to express it."7 For Stevens, reality translates to rhythm, or reality is a transcription of rhythm; either way the poetical concern converges with the musical, and the 24

"thing [we] hum appears to be/The rhythm of this celestial

pantonine" (CP 243).

*******

Just as his poems and the comments of friends,

relatives, and associates reveal Stevens' marked

sensitivity to music and its concerns, so the poet’s prose

essays, letters, and journals further disclose a

liberality of taste concordant with an aesthetic based at

once on mobility, changefulness, and apposition. Indeed,

Stevens’ ideas about music everywhere indicate an

improvisatory and generally varying attitude--sometimes frivolous, often abstract, occasionally mystical, and ever critical. His prose is sprinkled with references to composers, instruments, orchestras, conductors, choral societies, musical styles and philosophies. Even Bing

Crosby finds his way among opera singers, jazz trombonists, drum-majors, and an Ivesian cacophony of the streets: ", . ,a chorus of barber-shop harmonies, horses’ hoofs on the road, beating harness, crunching wheels, creaking stages" (L 177). More significant, however, may be Stevens’ frequent inquiries into the meaning, effect, and status of music, all of which touch on both the similarities and the differences among the sister arts.

In a letter dated January 17, 1909, to his future 25

wife, Elsie, Stevens echoes the persona of his early-

composed sonnets--poems that share significantly with

Keats (and other Romantics)--by connecting music with the

spirit of fancy, or the imagination: "1 like to write

most when the young Ariel sits. . .at the head of my pen

and whispers to me--many things; for I like his fancies,

and his occasional music" (L 123). But another letter,

again to Elsie, written not quite two months later,

introduces a theme that would resonate through Stevens’

oeuvre. Although the tone is still juvenescent and

hyperbolic (why, after all, capitalize memory?), the

interrogation the thirty-year-old poet conducts into the

mysterious effect of music is anything but fanciful:

What is. . .the vague effect we feel when we hear music, without ever defining it?. . .It is considered that music, stirring something within us, stirs the Memory. I do not mean our personal Memory. . .but our inherited Memory, the Memory we have derived from those who lived before us in our own race, and in other races, illimitable, in which we resume the whole past life of the world, all the emotions, passions, experiences of the millions and millions of men and women now dead, whose lives have insensibly passed into our own, and compose them.--It is a Memory deep in the mind, with images, so vague that only the vagueness of Music, touching it subtly, vaguely awakens. . . (L 136)

Thus, it seems that Stevens has anticipated composer Roger

Sessions, who, in addition to acknowledging music's ability to communicate the qualities that embody, define, and qualify movement, recognizes music's connection with 26

the core of our being. Movement, of course, is a

fundamental acoustical property of sound--thus it is a

component of time. We gain our experience, says Sessions,

through movement, which is our sensation of time.

Sessions joins movement with sound when he recognizes the

existence of a subconscious level underlying whatever

thoughts and emotions are expressed by words or music:

I would. . .say that music is significant for us as human beings principally because it embodies movement of a specifically human type that goes to the roots of our being and takes shape in the inner gestures which embody our deepest and most intimate responses. This is of itself not yet art; it is not yet even language. But it is the material of which musical art is made, and to which musical art gives significance. (19)

Consequently, the musical archetype: to Sessions the root of being, to Stevens the ground beneath "the visible rock, the audible" (CP 375); to both, composer and poet, the

"inner gesture," or that "something within us" that approximates the as yet unmeasured essence of being.

Subsequent inquiries into the mysterious effects of music would appear sporadically--without the romantic intoning--in Stevens' essays and letters. In 1948,

"Effects of Analogy," delivered first as a lecture at

Yale, confirmed the fact of Stevens’ long-held concern with the music of poetry, contemporary music, and music’s psychological effects. The music of poetry, according to

Stevens, once meant "metrical poetry with regular rhyme schemes repeated stanza after stanza,*' with all stanzas

alike in form. Thus it was a "music" in the constant and

recurrent sound, and more specifically, a harmonious

albeit repetitious blend of sound and rhythm (NA 124).

During his career, Stevens would negate this type of

regulated euphony consistently and without regrets, but

without calling for an unmusical poetry. He cites T. S.

Eliot to illustrate "what is meant by music today," or

poetry containing rhymes at irregular intervals, and

containing strong "cadences" (NA 125). Stevens apparently

understood the difference between the musical usage of

"cadence" and the more popular one, for Eliot's "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" illustrates a dominant sense of

secondary and primary closure equal to musical half and full cadences. In the Eliot poem the falling inflections of voice (cadences) are inconsistently placed, thus the poet's music is consistent with "what is meant by music today." The irregularity of rhyme approximates metrically the cadential/melodic formula, and the overall result is

"like a change from Haydn to a voice intoning" (125).

According to Stevens, the modern voice contains a "figure concealed," who often disrupts the "measured voice" (the euphonious one) with "feeling for what he says." He may be a triangle or cymbal player, as it were, striking the instrument of necessity, or simply a speaker whose 28

Schoenbergian Sprechstimme becomes the music of the

future.

Whether or not the music is of past, present, or

future, its performance is 'exactly as if we had listened

with complete sympathy to an emotional recital" (125).

There is no difference, Stevens concludes, between

poetry's music and the voice of a narrative musician

"telling the tale or speaking out his sense of the world."

In either case, the "music" is a communication of emotion,

a configuration of inharmonious flux, or monotonous

despair, or measured joy, or all of these. In compliance

with reality, the convergence of poetry and music helps us

find "our way through the dark not by aid of any sense but

by an instinct"; and it cannot be otherwise, for the

poet's subject, like the musician's, is "an eloquence and

it is that eloquence that we call music every day" (NA

126) .

*******

In a journal entry dated July 7, 1900, the young

Wallace Stevens recorded his immediate response to a short

story he had been reading. During his walk in the

Pennsylvania countryside near Berkeley he had concluded that R. L. Stevenson's "Providence and the Guitar" was a story carefully written but artificial in content. 29

Berthelini (the protagonist) is, complains Stevens, "a

paper doll and entirely literary" and illustrates the

"difference between literary creations and natural men"

(Souvenirs and Prophecies. H. Stevens, 41-42).

The guitar-packing dandy, Berthelini, who was "always the

world's centre for himself," thought life was "a work of

art superiorly composed" ("Providence," Stevenson, 221).

He walked through life "like a child in a perpetual

dramatic performance," singing from half a dozen comic

songs, twanging a guitar to the crisp or romantic

accompaniment of his own voice. And he knew nothing but

what was agreeable, draped as he was in the "outrageous

bravery of velvet jacket and flapped hat" (197).

Nevertheless, this parodic figure seems to have found his way into several of Stevens’ fictions, disguised first as

an aspect of the aging amorist of "Le Monocle De Mon

Oncle," then of Crispin, "lutanist of fleas, the knave, the thane," and again of the unredoubtable man with the blue guitar, "A shearsman of sorts." The guitar-player figure is, indeed, a musical trope among several others

"borrowed" from literature.

Other sources of musical interest to Stevens were the poems of English Romantics Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats; and Americans Emerson and Whitman. Although he swore no allegiance to any predecessor, Stevens listened carefully and imaginatively to those poets commonly referred to as musical. Shelley's guitar, Keats's

nightingale, Whitman’s mockingbird, Emerson's bard--

variants of these figures and others help shape Stevens’

aesthetic of changefulness. Stevens' revisions of the

eloquent nightingale into blackbird, duck, sparrow, crow,

pigeon; or a nameless chorister "whose c preceded the

choir"; or the oxymoronic silent rhapsodist, vividly

confirm his dissatisfaction with the "old romantic," whose

annoying overtones sounded well into the twentieth century

in supposedly experimental art forms.

As important to Stevens’ aesthetic as the romantic

poets and other fiction writers, were several composers, philosophers, and critics, among whom the musicians are more imposing. Stevens confessed to an early fascination with Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, and later Schoenberg and

Stravinsky caught his attention. The French

Impressionists, too, were among his favorites. But it was the composer Brahms who became Stevens* silent mentor in an attitude of expression and taste. In "Anglais Mort a

Florence" the speaker refers to one (a poet?) with whom

Brahms was a "dark familiar," an "alternate/In speech."

Once "[he] was that music and himself"; at one time he and the music were "particles of order, a single majesty" (CP

146-49). The subject in the poem, an Englishman, music having begun to fail him, is no longer consoled by the dark companion whose spirit warded off the "naked moon." 31

Brahms has left, and he is lifeless in an "uncertainty" of memory and desire. Like the speaker in "Farewell to

Florida," the Englishman is "free again" (CP 117), but he seems no more enhanced by the diminutive and deepened hue of the colors around him than the former by the ambiguous slush of his "North." Both poems, in the manner of "Bad

Strains of a Gay Waltz" and "Mozart, 1935" (also from

Ideas of Order), waver between the certainty of a musically precise or emotionally secure past and the skepticism of a future in which the waltz is "no longer a mode of desire, a mode/Of revealing desire" (CP 121).

The fact that Stevens has chosen Brahms as the figure closest to himself in an attitude of "certainty," that the composer functions as a spiritual self in the midst of stagnation, indicates a more than passing interest on the part of the poet for the composer. One need only consult

The Collected Poems and then listen with a keen ear to a sampling of Brahms's more familiar offerings to recognize a correspondence between the two artists concerning matters of technique and form, as well as theme. Stevens too had a "keen ear" for Brahms; the poet knew the way of the composer in the process of transforming or revising the past to meet the needs of the present. For that process, of course, Stevens is well known. Bome of his more remarkable long poems (and some of the short ones) 32 utilise techniques approximating musical theme and variation practice.

Brahms’s art, like the best of Stevens, tends to be indirect and ambiguous. Recently he has been called a

Modernist in the sense that his work, not wholly appreciated in his own time, conforms in spirit and practice with the unbalanced and quirky twentieth century.

In 1947 Schoenberg called him "Brahms the Progressive" for satisfying the author of twelve-tone technique’s requirements of asymmetrical phrase construction, complex thematic and motivic development, harmonic and metrical ambiguity, and obscure formal boundaries. No wonder the critics of his time found Brahms’s music "forbiddingly difficult and learned, lacking in direct sensuous appeal, even arid" ("Brahms as Modernist," Youngren, 90). Similar accusations were leveled against Stevens in his time (and still are), yet Stevens’ "variations"--like Brahms*s-~ though often "obscure and difficult to follow. . .always

[give] the impression of having something of the greatest importance to communicate" (90). The influence of Brahms on Stevens is most apparent in the poet’s use of variation forms, which Brahms developed into a high art. This subject will be fully discussed in my fifth chapter, entitled "A New Resemblance."

Brahms was only one of several musicians to figure prominently in the development of the Stevens sound. Composers Igor Stravinsky, Erik Satie, Arnold Schoenberg, and music critic Paul Rosenfeld comprise an unlikely and unruly ensemble of musical styles and philosophies playing to Stevens’ critical ear during the making of Harmonium.

Ideas of Order. The Man With the Blue Guitar, and Parts of a World. This apparently incongruous gathering of forces became, albeit unwittingly, a renewable source for the poet committed to producing the 'rhapsody of things as they are" (CP 183). Of the little quartet, Paul Rosenfeld was both arranger and conductor, for in his profession as music critic his role as shaper was secure. His colorful reviews of Stravinsky, Satie, and Schoenberg, and of

Stevens himself, no doubt contributed to the poet’s understanding of musical idea and form and the role of the muslc-maker in modern society.

In his study of sources for "The Comedian as the

Letter C," Sidney Feshbach discovered a connection between

Stevens and French composer Erik Satie. Specifically,

Feshbach was curious about a string of epithets characterising Crispin--e.g. "the Socrates/Of snails, musician of pears" (CP 27), "hero without palms/Or

Jugglery, without regalia" (35), "lutanist of fleas, the knave, the thane" (28)— as well as the overall emphasis of musical imagery in the original and finished versions of the poem. His curiosity led Feshbach to Erik Satie, a minor French composer known in America through his anti- 34

impressionistic symphonic drama Socrate. the ballet

Parade. and various pieces for piano. Stevens, it seems,

"heard" of Satie from Rosenfeld in 1921 while he was

working on a poem for a Poetry competition. While

composing "From the Journal of Crispin," Stevens probably

read Rosenfeld’s "Satie and Socrate" published in Vanity

Fair in December of 1921. The review of Satie's life and works is, suggests Feshbach, in its style and idea remarkably consonant with Stevens’ method in "Comedian."

Whether or not Stevens actually heard Satie’s rebellious music--and it is likely that he did--the composer's history as depicted in Rosenfeld's review "provides not only a few specifics, such as the ideas of a Socrates of snails and a musician of pears, but also the broader narrative sweep, which seems something like a partially detailed map of the career of Crispin" (Feshbach, 816).

Moreover, to better understand the career of Crispin is, I suggest, to comprehend more fully Stevens' subsequent usage of the composer/performer figure in the role of poet/hero or poet/seer. In any case, music provides analogues for metaphors of communication or is itself the unsymbolical and unadorned language for something that cannot be said (see my chapter “From Ubiquitous Thunder to

Still Smaller Sounds").

As a regular subscriber to The Musical Quarterly.

Stevens may have come upon more references to Satie (e.g. 35

Chenneviere’s "Erik Satie and the Music of Irony," 1919),

or he may have read Satie’s own "A Hymn in Praise of the

Critics" in a September, 1921, issue of Vanity Fair.*

Rosenfeld, however, is the more likely source not only for

connections between Stevens and Satie but also between

Stevens and Schoenberg and Stravinsky. Stevens knew and

acknowledged his enjoyment of Stravinsky’s music,

according to Wilson Taylor, one of Stevens' business

associates who attended concerts with the poet in the

thirties. To appreciate Stravinsky is to recognize the

composer’s genius for rhythmic and orchestral innovation.

In his ballets Stravinsky introduced the temper of the

twentieth century, "nervous and ironic and violent," in

sharp, rigid, and asymmetrical melodies; "uncouth" chords; and rhythms "rectangular and sheer and emphatic" that

lunge, beat, and reiterate, dancing with the "steely perfect tirelessness of the machine." Rosenfeld’s poetic assessment of the Stravinsky sound is from his

"Stravinsky" in Musical Portraits. 1920. Most notable in relation to Stevens are the critic’s elaborate descriptions of Stravinsky’s expressive imagination in concert with the pulse of modern life. In comparing

Stravinsky with Debussy, Rosenfeld almost seems to be speaking of one of Stevens’ modern poet/heros:

But Stravinsky, on the other hand, is in the very midst of the thing so distant from the other man. For him, the material world is very 36 real, sharp, Immediate. He loves it, enjoys it, is excited by its many forms. He is vividly responsive to its traffic. Things make an immediate and biting impression on him, stimulate in him pleasure and pain. He feels their edge and knows it heavy, feels their motion in all its violence. There is in Stravinsky an almost frenetic delight in the processes that go on about him. (128)

Like Satie, Stravinsky challenged the evanescent and

subtle variations of the impressionists in love with an opaque world of perfume and fading sounds, a "golden

sensuality" (127). And like Satie and Stravinsky, Stevens disputed an effete Romanticism in works of art that lashed

"more fiercely than the wind,/As the mind, to find out what will suffice, destroys/Romantic tenements of rose and ice" (CP 239). In "Thunder by the Musician," that mind,

"according to the composer," becomes the one man, or

"butcher," who in a short narrative remarkably reminiscent of the "Internal Dance and Lullaby" from Stravinsky’s The

Firebird. holds in his hand "the suave egg-diamond" that flashes like "vicious music":

Slowly, one man, savager than the rest, Rose up, tallest, in the black sun, Stood up straight in the air, struck off The clutch of others.

And, according to the composer, this butcher, Held in his hand the suave egg-diamond That had flashed (like vicious music that ends In transparent accords). (CP 220)

These two stanzas, as well as the remaining four, confront the idea of violence in the service of aesthetic heroism. 37

Just as Stravinsky's Ivan in The Firebird carries the

mortal soul of his enemy in the form of a giant egg,

dashing it to the ground to free himself from Kaschei's

enchantment, Stevens* one man "savager than the rest"

releases his own heroic soul in the thunderous music of

"Ten thousand, men hewn and tumbling." The composer

referred to by Stevens, could be, in light of the

correspondence of image and theme, Stravinsky.

The language of Rosenfeld's review of Schoenberg’s music further establishes Stevens* fascination for the critic's expressive summaries of musical figures.

Rosenfeld was Stevens' friend, and in a 1925 review of

Harmonium the critic reveals a sensitivity to the poet's work which may have accounted for the friendship. To

Rosenfeld, certain elements of Stevens’ poems would

"thrust the art of poetry toward unknown boundaries" (40).

As a musician, says Rosenfeld, Stevens reveals himself "an almost impeccable craftsman," a liberator of sensation, whose forms curiously constrain powerful and latent emotions:

He resembles one born, say, for the grand piano who, while lovingly touching the keys as only the born pianist can, nevertheless persists in using certain processes appropriate to the reed organ, and consequently produces a strange and hybrid music, half Stravinsky and half hymn tune. That chamber orchestra of his, with its range of novel and delightful sounds--he has a genuine feeling for it. He loves its odd and piercing timbres, and toys bewitchingly with them. And still, we get 38

no indication of its real limits. (37)

Rosenfeld is e q u a l l y candid when referring to

Schoenberg, and his review of 1920 may have been Stevens’

only source for knowing Schoenberg’s most significant

music. To Rosenfeld, Schoenberg was the “great troubling

presence of modern music," and with him we enter "the

arctic zone of musical art." "None of the old beacons,"

complains Rosenfeld, "can guide us longer in these frozen

wastes" where strange and menacing forms surround us, "and

the light is bleak and chill and faint." Schoenberg's

late compositions “withhold themselves; they refuse our contact; they seem “icy and brain-spun," like "men formed not out of flesh and bone and blood, but out of glass"

(64). In Five Orchestral Pieces the "alternately rich and aciduous color is faded; an icy green predominates," adds

Rosenfeld (70). Often with Schoenberg within a particularly airless and frigid piece an "old Romantic allegiance" reaffirms itself; indeed, sometimes even

Brahms is recalled to provide a "scholarly dignity, a magistral richness, a chiaroscuro" from the "silence of the study" (67). With Schoenberg the biting intellect prevails; in Stevens it is occasionally embodied in the manner of one of his acadamecians or in the likes of a

Canon Aspirin, or a snowman. Often with icy detachment,

Stevens would employ a Schoenberg!an intellect in great 39

toneless experiments willing to "refuse lyric emotions,"

as Helen Vendler puts it. "[T]onelessness is the ultimate

lyric risk," says Vendler in "Appollo’s Harsher Songs"

(14-15), an interrogation of those poems "in which a

brutality of thought or diction reveals feelings obscured

by playfulness or obliqueness in his more decorative

poems" (10).

Brahms, Stravinsky, Satie (and Debussy), Schoenberg,

and Rosenfeld all helped make Wallace Stevens what several

of his commentators call the musician’s poet. Each voice,

however, was only a version, a response, in a multitude of

aesthetic theories available to Stevens during his

productive years. Stevens read philosophers Santayana and

Focillon, both of whom meditated upon the subject of

musical art and stylistics. And he read the letters that

virtuoso pianist/composer Ferruccio Busoni wrote to his

wife, Gerda. Published in 1938, the letters are vividly

documented accounts of the eccentric pianist's tours

throughout Europe and America, accounts in which he

articulated incisively his philosophical ideas about music. Busoni as a performer is best remembered as

introducing the modern style, of removing much of the romantic nonsense from piano playing. He, like Stevens, would have cracked "the round dome," have broken through; he would have had liberty "not as the air within a grave," but "in the space of horizons." And like the others, both 40

Busoni and Stevens, composer and poet, would compose in prolific sounds "producing the things that are spoken" (CP

287).

*******

It is, of course, impossible to account for each sound or motion or theory that becomes a part of any poet's craft. Thus I have chosen for my study only those persons with whom the musical Stevens had a marked affinity (or quarrel) either in temperament or technique.

I have selected those composers, performers, poets, philosophers, critics who obviously contributed to the making of a poetic self alive in improvisations of sound, a self whose "music of the mass of meaning/. . .clings to the mind like that right sound, that song/. . .that remains and sings/In the high imagination, triumphantly"

(CP 256). It is possible, however, to measure almost exactly the effect of Stevens’ "music" on his listeners.

Many composers have set Stevens' poems to music and in a variety of media. They have composed songs and choruses for male and female voices, theatrical pieces, small and large orchestral ensembles, and works for full orchestra ranging in style from romantic to avant-garde.

One work, The Emperor of Ice Cream, by Roger Reynolds is an elaborately "staged" theater piece based upon a setting 41

of Stevens* poem by the same name, but with the aim of

reconfiguring the linguistic and thematic elements of the

poem in order to dramatise "Let be be finale of seem."

Reynolds stresses the physical basis of reality, its local

and immediate manifestations; his improvisational setting,

in fact, seems to be a test of effort between the

juxtaposed boisterous concupiscence of the first stanza

and the mute impotence of the second.

Other settings, excepting Stephen Paulus’

Reflections: Four Movements on a Theme of Wallace Stevens,

are impressionistic vocalizations and small instrumental

ensembles hoping to capture only a mood or feeling

generated by a completed text. Vincent Persichetti's

Harmonium, a song cycle for soprano and piano, and Infanta

Marina. for viola and piano, fall into this category.

Paulus* short orchestral piece for chamber orchestra, however, works with several musical fragments from

Stevens’ "Sunday Morning," which in their conciseness recognize a form to contain the unresolved "sweet questionings" that generate what Paulus calls the questioning and testing format of the poem. Reynolds’ version of "Emperor" and Paulus’ Reflections. unlike the

Persichetti works, capture what I call the decompositional aspects of a Stevens poem, just as Stevens adapted his innate musical sense to the project of "decomposing" an original idea as a first step in the process of 42 interchanging or exchanging its elements to form a new version. Reynolds especially seems to understand Stevens the decomposer, for his setting is a dramatic quasi- operatic presentation of the poem's implicitly indeterminate rhythmic and linguistic format.

Each of the aforementioned musical settings, constitutes a "reading" of a particular Stevens poem or poems, and, as such, should be appraised with others of its kind, other readings. With such a method, the composer is, indeed, a decomposer. More specifically, he is a literary critic (as Stevens is a music critic) whose special gifts reach through linguistic boundaries to the essential matter of the pure poem--its music:

Stevens’rock, "the gray particular of man's life (CP 528); Coleridge’s shaping spirit of the imagination; Brahms's ur-motive. ENDNOTES

1 Wallace Stevens, "The Irrational Element in Poetry1' in O p u s Posthumous. ed. Samuel French Morse (New York: Knopf, 1966) 226. Hereafter, citations from this work and from the following by Stevens will abbreviated, with page numbers, as follows: Opus Posthumous as (OP); The Collected Poem3 of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1977) as (CP); The Necessary Angel (New York: Knopf, 1951) as (NA); and Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1966) as (L).

2 Milton J. Bates, Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self (Berkeley: U of California P, 1985) 127-28. In reference to this topic of nominal versus poetic subject, consult also Bates's citation of Stevens’ reply to a letter from Stevens T. Mason. The letter of December 8, 1936, is reprinted, together with Stevens' reply in the Wallace Stevens Journal 4 (1980): 34-36. See also Stevens* discussion of the “true subject" and the other that is "the poetry of the subject" in “The Irrational Element in Poetry" (OP 221). 3 Holly Stevens, note to author, 21 August 1985. * John Gruen’s Thirteen Wavs of Looking at a Blackbird is listed in his Song Cycles. It was recorded on Contemporary Records (AP 121) but is no longer available. See J. M. Edelstein, ed., "Bibliography Checklist, Sections F and G “ in Wallace Stevens: A Descriptive Bibliography (Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh, 1973).

5 Arnold Schoenberg, "Linear Counterpoint" from Walter Frisch, Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation (Berkeley: U of California P, 1984) 290.

® Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981). Perloff uses "This is the Dress, Aider" in her comprehensive chapter on Stein entitled "The Poetry as Word-System: The Art of Gertrude Stein."

7 Ezra Pound, "Vorticism" from Gaudier-Brzeska. reprinted in The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature. ed. Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson, Jr. (New York: Oxford UP, 1977) 147. 43 44

8 See Sidney Feshbach, "A Source for ’The Comedian as the Letter C,’“ Texa3 Studies in Literature and Language XI (Sp 1969): 811-18; Rudhyar Chenneviere, "Erik Satie and the Music of Irony," trans. F. H. Martens, Musical Quarterly 4 (October 1919) 469-78; Holly Stevens' information to Feshbach concerning her father’s steady subscription to the Musical Quarterly. Feshbach is convinced that the quarterly would be "very useful in the poetry and poetics of Stevens." CHAPTER II:

INEVITABLE MODULATIONS

1. Last Night's Music

No less important than certain composers to the development of Stevens’ muaico-poetics were several poets who immediately preceded Stevens, especially the English

Romantics whose works he studied at Harvard. In an early sonnet written as a class requirement and published in The

Harvard Advocate in May of 1899, Stevens acknowledged his affinity with the Romantic tradition while at the same time beginning to question its more vital assumptions.

The poem is well-known for the response it generated from

George Santayana, and it is probably Stevens’ most successful early work among an array of embarrassingly self-conscious lyrics:1

Cathedrals are not built along the sea The tender bells would jangle on the hoar And iron winds; the graceful turrets roar With bitter storms the long night angrily; And through the precious organ pipes would be A low and constant murmur of the shore That down those golden shafts would rudely pour A mighty and a lasting melody. And those who knelt within the gilded stalls Would have vast outlook for their weary eyes; There, they would see high shadows on the walls From passing vessels in their fall and rise. Through gaudy windows there would come too soon The low and splendid rising of the moon. (SP 32-33)

45 46

Under the dominion of the classroom, the poem fulfills

nicely--except for its emphasis on the primacy of

hearing--the requirements of Petrarchan sonnet form, its

Italianate rhythms and rhetoric residing within the safe

boundaries of lyric convention. Only Stevens’ imagery

reveals a poet who would later be near to obsession with

‘[striving] to sing what none/Have sung" (SP 34), somehow

answering (in competition with Whitman) Emerson’s call

for a singer whose "chords should ring as blows the

breeze,/Free, peremptory, clear" (Poems. "Merlin," 120).

The acoustical admixture in "Cathedrals," produced in part

through the ironic proximity of adjective and verb in the

three musical images (e.g. tender bells Jangling), is

enough to upset the lyric’s usual thematic euphony.

Stevens' music is arrogantly assertive, attached as it is to a Christian setting, while at the same time "rudely" recomposing the regular harmonies and rhythms of the cathedral organist’s heaven-inspired compositions. As if

Coleridge’s "Kubla Khan" were his model, Stevens composes a "mingled measure"--his own medley of natural sound and

God-inspired artifice. Rather than revive Coleridge’s false paradise, however, Stevens substitutes what amounts to an unholy dissonance for a maid's "symphony and song," her “music loud and long" (Coleridge, 431). Stevens’

"mighty and lasting melody," hypothetical though it may be, is like the rattle of Yeats's pebbles under a receding 47 wave of poetic tradition in “The Nineteenth Century and

After" (Collected Poema. 235). Both poems record dramatically and metaphorically the breakup, although not the destruction, of an old order. The cathedral is not destroyed; rather, remnants of its structure survive to aid the process of rebuilding. Though Stevens said more than once that the gods had come to nothing, that they had not merely "gone over the horizon to disappear for a time"

(OP 206), he demonstrates in his poems that they, like other forms, do indeed live on--and he, the poet, curiously assures their survival. John Ashbery, who often sounds like Stevens, responds, it seems, directly to

"Cathedrals" in "The Mythological Poet." Here again the music associated with the sea threatens the untumultuous music of the ancient sanctuary:

The music brought us what it seemed We had long desired, but in a form So rarefied there was no emptiness Of sensation, as if pleasure Might persist, like a dear friend Walking toward one in a dream. It was the toothless murmuring Of ancient willows, who kept their trouble In a stage of music. Without tumult Snow-capped mountains and heart-shaped Cathedral windows were contained There, until only infinity Remained of beauty. . .

. . .a new Music, innocent and monstrous as the ocean’s bright display of teeth Fell on the jousting willows. We are sick, they said. It is a warning We were not meant to understand. (Some Trees, 34) 46

In another sonnet, written Just a month before

"Cathedrals," Stevens again associates sound and theme.

Here he unites "dead melody" with paradise, and "grievous music" with first youth, anticipating with this musical trope the ambiguous dualism of "Sunday Morning.” A later poem from Ideas of Order, however, could be a master trope, containing in miniature the musical figures, images, and metaphors Stevens habitually uses to vary a theme. The poem is "A Fish-Scale Sunrise":

Melodious skeletons, for all of last night's music Today is today and the dancing is done.

Dew lies on the instruments of straw that you were playing, The ruts in your empty road are red.

You Jim and you Margaret and you singer of La Paloma, The cocks are crowing and crowing loud,

And although my mind perceives the force behind the moment, The mind is smaller than the eye.

The sun rises green and blue in the fields and in the heavens. The clouds foretell a swampy rain. (CP 160-61)

Here music--playing an instrument, singing, dancing--is vital, but even as it lives in performance, its energy is diminished by a consciousness tuned to the inauspicious

"loud crowing" of the present moment. A sunrise, a heaven, a sentimental tune; a mind, a body: each image is stripped of its sheen while functioning in a metonymic complex illustrating the temporariness of satisfactions-- 49

spiritual, aesthetic, intellectual, sensual. Water (dew and rain), ordinarily associated with renewal, engenders the murky, ambiguous swamp, which may or may not reconstitute what is left in death. In another context, more crucial to an understanding of Stevens, rhetorical death issues from a linguistic swill: "The twilight overfull/Of wormy metaphors" (CP 162); "A few words tuned/and tuned and tuned" (CP 161).

"Music, running the scale of meaning between the ordinary sense of the word and its symbolic senses, is

Stevens' most pervasive figure," says Frank Doggett in his informative albeit abbreviated analysis of Stevens' images of sound and motion (Stevens' Poetry of Thought. 189).

Indeed, the sonorous event is the one Stevens chooses for his readers to really understand the significance of universal motion and change to the conscious poetic mind.

Music, literal or figurative, is the essence of life; it either initiates or manifests an event, o r it- is the action itself. Hovering between fact and symbol, Stevens often cannot choose between music as universal principle, or as detail (metonymy, synechdoche) or replica (metaphor, analogy) of such a principle. Like the Romantics before him, Stevens consistently turns to musical form and idea to articulate his aesthetic. But unlike the Romantics, he modifies lyric expression to include the rhetoric and mechanics of unornamented discourse, retaining thereby the tradition of figurative musical structuring while

experimenting with tonal, harmonic, metrical, and thematic

elements. Like Blake, Stevens is, in a sense, an

aberration; in one poem he echoes Milton’s pathos for being denied the nightingale’s splendid warblings, and in

another he happily audits the muted, unlyrical strain of a thin brown bird. Extending himself in and through rhapsodic lyrics of the romantic expressionist to the non- melodic drones of the minimalist composer, Stevens continually alters form--deep structures, surface textures, images--in the service of modernization. Like the sea surface full of clouds, reality changes momentarily; it shifts and slides and reverberates, and the composer of pure poetry must be alert to record its moves. He must be the "harmonious skeptic" (CP 122), whose contradictory "new romantic" compositions-- transformed lyrics--will reinstate modes of desire consonant with the cries of men (his own included).

Milton Bates suggests that Stevens' "Sailing After

Lunch" is a "prospectus for a new romantic poetry," and at the same time a "confession that Stevens had not yet sloughed off the old, pejorative romanticism" (Wallace

Stevens. 166). That so-called prospectus had been duly noted by Stevens in a letter to Ronald Latimer in March of

1935 prior to the poem’s publication. Its curious definition of romantic poetry had originally sounded in a 51

review preface to William Carlos Williams' Collected

Poems. 1921-1931. All poetry is essentially romantic,

says Stevens, but one must distinguish between the old

romantic--the style usually referred to in the pejorative

sense--and the new, which is "just the opposite of what is

spoken of as romantic" (L 277). With the new romantic

"the most casual things take on transcendence"--

"composed," by the poet, "of the particulars of reality"

(NA 130)--as “what people speak of as the romantic" is

eliminated from poetry. Stevens' letter is abstruse--too

general to provide even what Stevens supposes he has

defined as a "temporary theory of poetry" (L 277). Parts of the poem say it better. First the old:

My old boat goes round on a crutch And doesn't get under way. I t ’s the time of the year And the time of the day.

Perhaps it's the lunch that we had Or the lunch that we should have had. But I am, in any case, A most inappropriate man In a most unpropitious place.

Then the new:

To say the light wind worries the sail, To say the water is swift today,

To expunge all people and be a pupil Of the gorgeous wheel and so to give That slight transcendence to the dirty sail, By light, the way one feels, sharp white, And then rush brightly through the summer air. (CP 120-21) 52

The boat of the "old romantic" travels its predictable

mundane round; the "new romantic's" boat, dirty as its

sail may be, rushes ahead, propelled by enlightened

perceptions.

Stevens' review of Marianne Moore's Selected Poems

argues against a romantic theory of poetry which "merely

connotes obsolescence" and for a theory which means always

"the thing living and at the same time imaginative, the

youthful" (OP 248). The romantic in our day, continues,

Stevens, means "an uncommon intelligence. It means in a

time like our own of violent feelings, equally violent

feelings and the most skilful expression of the genuine"

(249). A thing is romantic when it is "wonderful rather than probable. . .strange, unexpected. . .unique, etc."

Above all, the romantic must "always be living," a hybridisation. And, says Stevens, citing an appropriate musical example, it is "[a]ny playing of a well-known concerto by an unknown artist" (250). One can, it seems, like William Carlos Williams, have a romantic of one’s own by "rejecting the accepted sense of things" (252).

Stevens is, of course, with his many examples (there are more), simply saying that the romantic must change, become

"modern," to avoid pejorative criticism. But the old concept--the label, the form— survives in “the celestial ennui of apartments," sending us, says Stevens, "back to the first idea, the quick/Of this invention" (CP 381). 53

Thus in "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction," the "romantic

intoning, the declaimed clairvoyance/Are parts of

apotheosis, appropriate/And of its nature, the idiom thereof" (CP 387), Or, as Helen Vendler so adroitly puts

it in her well-known essay on Stevens and Keats’s "To

Autumn," "Stevens is modern as Cezanne is modern; he keeps his inherited shapes. . . .Stevens’ ’copies’ never forget their originals" (21).

A more than ordinary concern with romantic intonation

(expression and theory) helped to insure that Stevens would invoke the favored muse of his nineteenth-century predecessors. Although, as M. H. Abrams informs us, the use of painting to "illuminate the essential character of poetry" survives into the nineteenth century, its usage is casual, and music becomes "the art frequently pointed to as having a profound affinity with poetry." Music, in the nineteenth century, as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and

Shelley note in their poems, becomes the art "most immediately expressive of spirit and emotion, constituting the very pulse and quiddity of passion made public"

(Abrams, 50). Music is used by the romantic poets to illustrate the nature of lyric poetry as a poetry of

"language, answering to the music of the joind" (51).

These poets generally, like philosophers Rousseau and

Herder, think of music as a "magical language of the feelings," of musical/lyrical fictions as expressions of 54

the soul. Moreover, as a non-imitative art, non-

programmatic music reigns supreme. Unlike speech it

streams out before us independent of external objects, whereas in verbal language, says Schlegel, "the expression of feeling always depends on connection with the idea"

(Abrams, 93). Indeed, lyric poetry serves "only indirectly" for the expression of feeling. Thus the romantic poets utilize the language of music in metaphors that fix on the tension between its apparent freedom and the word’s subjugation to connotation and denotation.

Because to the romantic poet music often came closest to revealing the inner, emotional "spirit" of man, the imagination, neither inhibited nor stifled by convention, was likely to express itself in poems describing the compositions of various singers and instrumentalists.

Predictably, the vocabulary that articulated the processes whereby the poet/musician struggled to achieve imaginative independence (often he failed) incorporated a veritable glossary of musical terms. Melody, harmony, measure, dissonance, consonance, cdncord, discord, song, symphony, and so forth, worked their way into poems as analogue, metaphor, and simile, and the compositions of various birds, instrumentalists, and mythic bards vibrated in concert with weather systems and other natural phenomena.

The palpable music of Keats’s nightingale, for example, became a much-used trope to link the poetic imagination to 55

an external and transcendent realm. This musical figure,

as well as others connecting Stevens musically to the

English Romantics and to Americans Whitman and Emerson, will be the concern of the remainder of this chapter and the next.

2. Not a Bird For Me

Referred to elsewhere in "The Comedian as the Letter

C" as a "passionately niggling nightingale," the elusive

European nightbird of Keats’s ode becomes Stevens* symbol for the poet of evasion: "In Yucatan, the Maya sonneteers/Of the Caribbean amphitheatre,/In spite of hawk and falcon, green toucan/And jay, still to the nightbird made their plea" (CP 30). The moonlight (or romantic) fiction disappears, eventually, for Crispin, but the "plum survives its poems," as it were, and the poet/persona longs for his "diviner young" (43), the aspiring poems of apprenticeship. Stopped in “the door-yard by his own capacious bloom"--the four "blithe instruments/Of different struts" he calls daughter--Crispin turns fatalist. His lyrics, no longer "pruned to the fertile main,/And sown again by the stiffest realist," survive in 56 "perfectly revolved" and "portentous accents,

syllables,/And sounds of music coining to accord/Upon his

lap" (45). Hardly distinguishable finally from the pleas

of the Maya sonneteers, Crispin’s "proclamations of the

pure" place him approximately where he began, in doubt

about his status as pure poet. Like the nightingale to

the Maya sonneteer, the girl child has become the mature

poet's curious evasion. Unlike the mysterious bird,

however, she belongs to the non-transcendent realm of

domestic custom.

Although Stevens knows, like Crispin, that the songs of the invisible bird belong in another place and time, the Keatsian nightingale does, in fact, as John Hollander suggests, "sum up a whole tradition" for the poet ("The

Sound of the Music," 246). Here, in America, where there are neither the night-singing birds that inspired and astonished English poets, nor, adds Hollander, the songs of those "full-throated larks" that contended with the nightingale’s special music, there was no "easily audited poetic bird for Stevens." Nor would Stevens have listened had there been. I suspect that Stevens retrieved the image of the moonstruck singer more for the purpose of sounding his own local and sometimes minimal music in contrapuntal association with or in opposition to the rich sonorities of the furtive bird, than to revive the

Romantic's "magical language of feelings" (Abrams, 51). In an early poem from Harmonium. "The Plot Against the

Giant," Stevens acknowledges that not only will sound (as

opposed to odor and color) undo the "yokel" who comes

“maundering," but that the rounded labial heard against or

within a world of harsh gutturals constitutes an enhanced

acoustical/ aesthetic experience. The same type of

qualitative relationship occurs in "Infanta Marina,"

another early poem, in which the motions of a wrist become

"grandiose gestures" of thought in a motionless setting of

sand, palms, twilight. Like Crispin’s nightingale figure

in the Caribbean setting containing hawk, falcon, green

toucan, jay, and raspberry tanager, the round sound in one poem, the smooth gesture in another, coexist with other objects or circumstances of their respective settings in interesting metonymic or appositional associations.

At this juncture, 1 wish to distinguish between

Stevens’ aesthetic of interrelatedness and another kind, more familiar, whose base is antagonistic. Usually, in discussions of Stevens’ musical images and structures, critics incautiously generalize the musical term

"contrapuntal" (as they do "theme and variation,"

"cadence," and others). The word, unfortunately, is used all too often incorrectly, without reference to its definition in music. A contrapuntal relationship between parts is, to the untutored commentator, one that always grows out of opposition. Thus, elements of theme, 56 language, and structure that exist in an attitude of

conflict are invariably labeled contrapuntal, and others,

perhaps more amiable and linked in subtle textures of

dependence, are dismissed as pleasantly harmonic, vertical

or chordal. Contrapuntal association, however, while

always implying a certain linear individuality in a

texture of parts which have distinctive melodic and

rhythmic significance, is not always antithetical or

antagonistic. More often than not, as in a fugue,

voices--more precisely, strands of melody or rhythm

exclusive of the subject, which is frequently self-

propulsive--generate new versions of themselves (i.e.

countersubject, contrapuntal associate, answer). A fugal

countersubject, for instance, is usually a contrast to the

subject in rhythm and direction, but the two may be

related by motive or some other thematic element. A fugue

may have several countersubjects which function either

above or below the subject and which must be

interchangeable (or contrapuntally invertible) with the

subject. The emphasis, one notices, is hardly ever

dissociative; the fugue’s beauty, indeed the beauty of most contrapuntal music, derives from the variety of thematic, harmonic, and rhythmic associations inherent in any particular alignment of so-call ‘independent" parts.

In like manner, Crispin’s nightingale exists in horizontal/vertical association not only with other birds 59

in the Caribbean setting— hawk, falcon, toucan, jay,

tanager--but more importantly with others of its kind, other night-singers, other nightingales, in settings diverse and remote in time.

The particular passage of "The Comedian as the Letter

C" containing the above image energizes a portion of experience at what T. S. Eliot calls "a point of intersection," a horizontal/vertical alignment in which

“the immediate meaning" of a word creates "immediate meaning in that context to all the other meanings which it has had in other contexts." Eliot concentrates theoretically on the music of the word, while I include, and focus on the phrase, image, or larger linguistic structure ("The Music of Poetry," 32-33). I also extend

Eliot’s "point of intersection" to include these elements in spatial juxtaposition. Accordingly, two types of sonority occur in Stevens* poetry. One type provides powerful musical metaphors and references in the service of persuasion and expression; the other, in temporal and/or spatial relation to its intersecting partner, produces a music roughly equivalent in texture to linear counterpoint, with its emphasis on independence of closely related parts. Occasionally, however, juxtaposed images occur in Stevens’ poetry-~no doubt inspired by the same forces that account for like responses in painting and music--as impressionistic sequences which resolve and die 60 in chordal stasis, having no life other than their momentary sounding. Usually associated with Stevens' only moderately successful experiments with Imagist techniques, such occurrences are rare. These early poems (usually from Harmonium) nevertheless figure prominently as diminutive chordal responses within (and against) the grandiose principle of linearity in theme and variation present in Stevens' later works. As such, they pale in comparison to those sprawling "meditations" of Stevens* late period (see my Chapter IV).

Of the many horizontal/vertical intersections in

Stevens’ poetry that contain elements of apposition in time and space, one of the more noteworthy instances occurs in the beginning of "Credences of Summer," a poem celebrating noon’s bounty:

How in midsummer come and all fools slaughtered And spring’s infuriations over and a long way To the first autumnal inhalations, young broods Are in the grass, the roses are heavy with a weight Of fragrance and the mind lays by its trouble.

How the mind lays by its trouble and considers. The fidgets of remembrance come to this. This is the last day of a certain year Beyond which there is nothing left of time. It comes to this and the imagination's life.

There is nothing more inscribed nor thought nor felt And this must comfort the heart’s core against Its false disasters--these fathers standing round, These mothers touching, speaking, being near, These lovers waiting in the soft dry grass. (CP 372)

The first canto is sufficient to demonstrate the 61 convergence of method and theme in a musically rich

amalgam designed to consolidate feeling with thought, body

with mind, lyric or song with narrative--summer with 'the

barrenness/Of the fertile thing that can attain no more" (ii, 373).

Each of the poem’s ten cantos contains three five-

line stanzas. This apparent tripartition is offset

occasionally, however, by a binary substructure which

threatens the symmetry of the canto, while at the same

time aligning certain thematic and rhetorical strands.

For example, the fifteen lines of the first canto do not

divide according to the neat dialectical pattern of unity

in achieved synthesis, but rather into an almost equal and

twofold distribution, which superimposes a synthetic

symmetry onto the stanzaic one. The result of this two-

gainst-three or three-against-two syncopation (hemiola) is

rhythmic displacement, a disturbance which in this case

helps regulate structure in the service of theme. For it

is theme finally that distinguishes Stevens from the

French Symbolists and others whose non-referential

symbols, according to Marjorie Perloff, are generated by words on the page. They are symbols "no longer grounded in a coherent discourse, so that it becomes impossible to decide which. . .associations are relevant and which are not" (18).

Although hardly like Eliot's "reverberating echo 62 chamber[s]“ of symbolic figures and places (Perloff, 19),

Stevens’ poetic landscapes are rarely indeterminate. Even as Stevens begins the first canto of ‘’Credences" in the impersonal language of cycles, several contrapuntal associations create intersections of structural and thematic relevancy. One crossing occurs as the five lines of lyric incantation comprising stanza one encounter the seven and one-half lines of discursive meditation that proceed to the middle of the third line of stanza three; another when the "mind" that "considers" is reintegrated into the purely physical and untroubled lyricism of the final two and one-half lines. Altogether, the canto contains approximately seven and one-half lines each of two modes, each by way of commenting on what is possible against the "fidgets of remembrance," or the desire for what is not. Neither mode dominates. Nor is there a need for modal synthesis, for the "touching, speaking, being near," as it were, is enough to sustain the imagination’s life.

More precisely, the aforementioned crossings or intersections are accomplished through modulation similar to change of key in musical composition. The first modulation begins in the manner of a transition bridging the gap between stanzas one and two. Avoiding the unwanted effect of abruptness, the first line of stanza two repeats portions of the first*. "Now" imitates the 63 accented introductory "Mow" as it combines with and

reintroduces the ending of stanza one; "and" finishes the

transitioni reproducing the expansive condition of the

originals in stanza one. Overall, the modulation is a

smooth passage from the pastoral images and cantabile

sonorities of the first stanza to the imageless recitation of the second.

The second modulation is sudden. Separated by no more than a dash, the vague assertions of thought-- shifting pronouns, nondescript phrases, abstract nouns--

jump to what seems to be an enhancement of the first stanza’s pastoral physicality and simplicity, a return to the forgetfulness which flows into and out of the "fidgets of remembrance." The meditative mode is, however, no less important than the lyrical: juxtaposed as they are, one feeds off of the other in a manner of exchange, a manner both visible and audible in the canto’s structure and texture. Together, "touching" occasionally to produce momentary vertical alignment within the horizontal fabric of the canto, the modes, in contrapuntal apposition, produce a more complex music than any mere juxtaposition of letters or words could achieve.

The mechanics of lyricism thus anticipate and support another technique, the discursive, which in turn expresses itself in relation to the former. Never are the two rhetorics--lyrical and discursive--opposed in this aesthetic of accomodation. Indeed, they ceaselessly attract and repel each other, as in canto vii when 'summer in the common fields" becomes the stimulus of the deep- woods response of the singers, who "had to avert themselves/Or else avert the object" (CP 376). “Deep in the woods "[t]hey sang desiring an object that was near": always in Stevens these so-called "marriage" hymns symbolize--as in "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" iv, in the "ceremonial hymn" of noon or epithalamion of Bawda and the Captain--elemental coexistence "come face to face," in

"neither heaven nor hell" (CP 401). Even the "trumpet of morning" in canto viii of "Credences" makes its entrance in apposition to another. The trumpet sound is announced

"successor of the invisible," a "substitute in stratagems/Of the spirit" (CP 376).

In like manner, as I have noted previously, Stevens’ musical bird is frequently a substitute who may occupy the empty space left by the one who sings no more, or share the space with an invisible but assertively vocal bird who challenges the newcomer’s right to "make a sound,/Which is not part of the listener’s own sense" (CP 377), as would the "cock bright" atop the bean pole in "Credences" ix.

In either case— each of which is subject to variation according to locale--the sonorous image becomes an index to the activity of imagining and realising poems composed in "the manner of the time" (CP 378). A sequence of 65 musical images in ’Credences*' further illustrates my point.

Cantos vii, viii, and ix, in juxtaposition, comprise one of those ‘’hybridisations’’ that Stevens liked to call the "new romantic." It is one of those collaborations that if misunderstood forces critical apologies for

Stevens "old romantic" bias, when in fact it renounces, in part, the very apparatus of romance. Moreover, the poem’s central theme reaches full development as the musical images resolve the discrepancy between romantic evasions and the desire for what is possible. The singers in canto vii are reminiscent of Keats's “light-winged Dryad of the trees" who sang "of summer in full-throated ease" (Keats,

279), the nightingale whose mindless songs inspired lyrics of forgetfulness in a summer landscape of "beechen green, and shadows numberless" (279). Stevens' singers, however, as personae for the poet, understand their "unreal songs" as part of the poetic process of evasion: deep in the woods they sing, aware that in the face of "summer in the common fields," and as they perform the acts of capture, scrutiny, and subjugation to proclaim meaning for their efforts, they give up the impulse to sing. The common reality of summer, the "barrenness/Of the fertile thing that can attain no more" (CP 373) is the "hard prise" fully realized by the poet.

Remote from the incantatory rhythms and weighted 66

sonorities of midsummer and the obscurities of the deep woods, the blaring trumpet in canto viii seems to oppose the singing voice in canto vii. More likely, however, this musical image is a substitution for the latter in a sequence of transformations ending in canto x. As J.

Hillis Miller suggests in Poets of Reality. Stevens’ poems are often "a series of fluid transformations in which objects modulate into one another. . . .One image melts away and is replaced by another which is a further example of mobility and instability” (227-28). Miller cites

"Domination of Black” and its images of leaves, flames, peacocks, planets, and so forth, to stress his point that the poetic space of such poems is created by "the interrelation of a series of images which are equivalents of each other. . . .each [having] the same quality of firstness" (227). Although I would go further toward distinguishing degrees of fluidity and recognizing the fine points of those modulatory techniques that are invariably a part of the difference (an abrupt modulation without transition could hardly be thought of as a melt),

I agree with Miller’s thesis that Stevens' constructions are for the most part linear and non-hierarchical, and,

"like the universe of Heraclitus," systems of constant interchange between elements.

In canto viii of "Credences" the "trumpet of morning," blowing "in the clouds and through/The sky," is the "visible announced" and noisy successor to the invisible singers of the previous stanza. Another substitution, another type of poetic response in relation to the previous poem of unreality, the sharp cry of the disembodied trumpet of the mind hails its own visibility as criterion for sharing the day, replacing "stratagems/Of the spirit." Its resounding cry, "like ten thousand tumblers tumbling down," becomes the violent diction of the poet within the multitude, aware of his poetic obligation but, like the man with the blue guitar, not sure that minds "grown venerable in the unreal" are aware of themselves as substitutions. This hero of brass and blare (qualities audible in the stanza's onomatopoetic emphasis on sibilants and the strong consonant "t") celebrates, as did the pianist in "Mozart, 1935" or the

"harmonious skeptic" in "Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz," another mode of desire, in this case consonant with morning and its bright hope.

Yet another version in this complex of musical images describing alternative methods for the poet, canto ix has the poet, now a bird, creating a new order that includes change. Producing a temporary dissonance as it reverses the retrograde motion of the preceding stanzas (the heroic, youthful clarion of morning having followed the muted song of summer, or noon), the image proceeds through time, away from the hyperbolic diction of morning's 68

‘'sharp” external unreality in canto viii toward a sound

bare but resonant with summer’s temporarily decadent

landscape:

Fly low, cock bright, and stop on a bean pole. Let Your brown breast redden, while you wait for warmth. With one eye watch the willow, motionless. The gardener's cat is dead, the gardener gone And last year’s garden grows salacious weeds.

A complex of emotions falls apart, In an abandoned spot. Soft, civil bird, The decay that you regard: of the arranged And of the spirit of the arranged, douceurs, Tristesses, the fund of life and death, suave bush

And polished beast, this complex falls apart. And on your bean pole, it may be, you detect Another complex of other emotions, not So soft, so civil, and you make a sound, Which is not part of the listener’s own sense. (CP 377)

Here Stevens suspends the poetic self in a temporary stasis, a motionless silence which is finally potentially restorative. The bright bird simply waits, observant above the seasonal wreckage, for the warmth which invariably brings into manifestation potential form--the sound. This new sound, a rearrangement of an existing complex or form, unlike the poet’s previous choices, however, may (Stevens is never sure) upset the poet/listener state of equilibrium hoped for as the result of a falling apart, or a breaking down.

The virile figure of the flashy or brightly-colored cock bird as a persona for the poet is one Stevens favors when he wishes to focus on a certain quality of 69 expression. Usually this figure in relation to less vibrant, quieter birds, becomes a trope in which the male bird symbolizes universal dynamism. Often blatantly phallic, like the “turkey-cock" in "Ploughing on Sunday," or the "perfect cock"--above "the forest of parakeets"--in

"The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws," the bird produces the only racket capable of disturbing the vast silence.

For example, the Prufrockian speaker of "Le Monocle De Mon

Oncle" ii compares himself, for whom "choirs of welcome choir for [him] farewell," to the gaudy spectacle of the red bird in flight across a golden floor, seeking out a choir, in the midst of the elemental wind and water. This early poem about the failure of the middle-aged poet to maintain "bravura adequate to [the] great hymn" (16), is one of many in which male gender is associated with music, motion, and force.

In later poems, especially those written after

Transport to Summer. Stevens is not so sure that the great hymns, or the magnificent spring "choirs of welcome" are any more vital than any other sound system with the potential for disturbing the monotony of convention.

Indeed, in "Credences" ix it is the hush, "[s]o soft, so civil," the "warmth" of potential sound, rather than the actual sound, that creates the "not/So soft, so civil" new order which is not part of the listener’s own sense."

Logically transformed from the assertive phallic trumpet 70

in canto viii to the iess commanding structure of the bean

pole decorated by a brown bird--notwithstanding the

creature's ability to "redden"--the bird/persona

symbolizes the latent power visible in the motionless,

dead garden, the "abandoned spot" foreshadowed in the

poem's numerous early references to "nothing." The

sequence ends deceptively, avoiding full closure, but in

accord with the contours of its theme.

In the next, and final, canto the author can neither

speak nor hear; rather, he is dispersed into multiple

"personae of summer," and it is they who speak--who

neither sing nor play on instruments--in the "manner of

the time." They reside, somehow, outside of the author's

meditation on the season, "Free, for a moment, from malice

and sudden cry,/Complete in a completed scene,

speaking/Their parts as in a youthful happiness" (CP 378).

These "roseate characters," part of "the mottled mood of

summer’s whole" resolve the whole poem, remote from its beginning in the sensuous weight of noon’s lyric celebration, but removed also from the poem's alternative rhetorical strategies. Perhaps the resolution through multiplicity, no matter how "mottled"--or "belted/And knotted, sashed and seamed"--is the only one to contain the "huge decorum," or manner of the time. Recalling the composite "shearsman" of "The Man With the Blue Guitar" and the actor/instrumentalist of "Of Modern Poetry," whose 71

mind was to contain his audience listening to himself, the

characters playing the parts of summer further dramatize

Stevens* aesthetic preference for independent though not

mutually exclusive modes. Stevens sounds almost like

Whitman in "Song of Myself" 18, who hears music all around

him, and, as Hollander notes, "comprehends the dramaturgy

of independent part and vertical harmony striving for

phenomenological priority" ("The Sound of the Music,"

243) :

I hear not the volumes of sound merely, I am moved by the exquisite meanings, I listen to the different voices winding in and out, striving, contending with fiery vehemence to excell each other in emotion; I do not think the performers know themselves— but now 1 think 1 begin to know them. (Hollander, 242)

Stevens' unsystematic "system," aptly composed in the polyphonically rich melodic and rhythmic texture of

"Credences," avoids the annoying dualisms and forced unities of so many of his early poems. And, to the extent that it mirrors the flux of reality exact with the poet’s experience of the world, Stevens* system frees him for the task of composing those prodigious works of his late period--large symphonic variations and improvisations in which impermanence is a constant:

Alpha continues to begin Omega is refreshed at every end. (CP 469) 72

* * * * * * 4c

A small piece from Stevens’ dark middle period-- commencing with Ideas of Order. to include The Man With the Blue Guitar, and end in the poems gathered in Parts of a World— works antithetically to Stevens’ revitalised trope of discordia concors. In "Autumn Refrain" it is not the elaborately orchestrated layerings and blendings of poesy’s many voices in response to the inconstant universe, or even one splendid season’s "rhetoric of a language without words" (CP 374), that invigorate the poet. Rather, the feeble overtones of response within a mind barely able to challenge the blank final silence of

"evening gone" provide the poet's only stimulus. The nightingale appears again, but this time the figure barely survives its redundant musical setting.

"Autumn Refrain"--the title implies a musical reference specifically to that part of a musical composition (usually a song) repeated with little or no variation from stanza to stanza, or in the case of instrumental music, from section to section. Like the almost two dozen other musical titles in the Stevens canon, this one tends to be ignored in favor of more obvious links in the structural design. In fact, having heard that many of Stevens’ titles (musical and otherwise) were often mischieviously attached or assigned to poems, 73 commentators tend to dismiss them, thus overlooking

valuable clues to meaning. For example, the title "The

Bagatelles the Madrigals" (CP 213) resolves the poem’s

central conflict between emotion and thought if one

understands that a Bagatelle and a Madrigal, conjoined in

the title unpunctuated, as it appears on the page, are

really two dramatically distinct musical forms. The

Bagatelle (from the French "trifle") is a short non-vocal

character piece, usually for piano, serving as a vehicle

of expression for variations of shifting thought and

emotion. The Madrigal, as Stevens would have known it in

the works of Monteverdi, is a more highly structured,

atrophic, and usually polyphonic vocal piece in which

expression is closely allied with, if not wholly dependent on, the text.2 The former was a favorite of the Romantic composers, the latter a Medieval-Renaissance precursor of opera. The differences are obvious; morever, I contend, that like distinctions between the poem’s image of a snake transformed to a human mind and the song emerging from that form are almost as obvious with the help of the title’s curious musical reference. The poem’s final stanza focuses on this metonymically blended image, a type characteristic of Stevens and referring to nothing outside itself--a fusion replicated in the unusual title:

(This is one of the thoughts Of the mind that forms itself Out of all the minds, 74

One of the songs of that dominance.) (CP 213)

Just as this and other poems like “Asides on the

Oboe" (where instrumental timbre and tone color provide an

index to verbal tone) rely on the reader's recognition of

a musical reference, “Autumn Refrain" requires an appreciation for musical detail. That detail comprises a host of musical references and allusions which, when assimilated into the verbal material, produce startling if not pleasurable tonal and rhythmic effects. Almost every line contains some fragment of musical detail, some more obvious than others: e.g. form ("refrain," "air"), metrics

("measureless measures"), quality of sound, or timbre

("skreak and skritter," "desolate sound"), silence ("the stillness"), tonality ("the key"). Less apparent are the musical allusions to the singer and the song

("nightingale," "words about," "evasions") and the acoustical phenomenon known as the overtone series

("residuum"). The composite effects of referential and verbal-stanzaic detail produce an almost annoyingly musical poem in which virtually every aspect of structure supports the analogy of the poet and the singer conjoined.

Indeed, in "Autumn Refrain" poetry is music:

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 75 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 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. (CP 160)

The singer in the poem, the maker of the refrain, is none other than the familiar nightbird, the nightingale, no longer "passionately niggling" in the midst of a

Caribbean aviary, but here a pathetic image of the self.

The song is, ironically, not an Air, but merely its refrain. As the title and the poem's numerous repetitions indicate, the Air is little other than residuum or, in musical terms, the residual effects of an original vibration or main sound— a complex of overtones.3 In relation to their original, to which they respond in kind

(in a series of harmonics), overtones are weak in amplitude and corresponding clarity. Stevens' "skreaking and skrittering residuum," however, "desolate" as its sound may be in comparison to the poet's imagined memory of the sublime and uninhibited (measureless) sonorities of the original, is preferable to complete cessation of sound. For example, the "harmonic" vibrations from only two of the several words that generate repetitive sequences in "Autumn Refrain" would be enough to keep the lines alive. The qualitatively descriptive words "gone" 76

and "still," both designating absence, ironically fill the

stanza with slightly altered versions of themselves.

Vibrating in a string of variations, the word "gone" sets

the process in motion. First the evening goes, then the

grackles; the sun goes next, and at last, "everything

gone." With absence, stillness; and the residual

variations on the quality of the absence occur as the

stillness completes its response "in kind," before the

last hollow "gone" has died away. The stillness of nearly

complete absence, "everything gone," although motionless

in the physical sense (of being, sitting still), moves in

the sense that it can be named: "stillness is all in the k e y . "

This type of minimal music, and that other, of

imaginative despair--the overtones (one is tempted to use the more descriptive "undertone") born of the grackles' skreak and skritter, a further and ironic echo of the romantic nightingale's nameless air that the poet has never heard-~have been duly noted in Harold Bloom's informative discussion of the word "residuum." Residuum

"means rather more than something that remains after a part has been removed," says Bloom .* In "Extracts from

Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas," the "heart’s residuum" becomes "the music" which is "the acutest end/Of speech." Bloom also refers to "An Ordinary Evening in

New Haven" xx, where "The town was a residuum,/A neuter" 77

but "remained alive in its imaginative and emotional

transcripts" (Bloom, 92). An even later poem, not mentioned by Bloom, obliquely but positively uses the trope to explain the "slight dithering" which agitates the poetic imagination in old age. In "Prologues to What is

Possible," it is the residual event, the response from a self "that had not yet been loosed," which produces the cadential epiphany:

A flick which addeded to what was real and its vocabulary, The way some first thing coming into Northern trees Adds to them the whole vocabulary of the South, The way the earliest single light in the evening sky, in spring, Creates a fresh universe out of nothingness by adding itself, The way a look or a touch reveals its unexpected magnitudes. (CP 517)

The flick, like the something in "Autumn Refrain" that resides "beneath/The stillness of everything gone," and translated into the redundant refrain constituting the poet's desolate sounding "air," is an impulse similar to the kind that inspires some of the contemporary static drone pieces of minimalist composers. These pieces are, however--like the Stevens poems motivated by fragments of other figurations and bits of memory--hardly static. They pulse and move, "but with a strange inner life of minutely shifting timbres arising from the slight variations of overtone-structure in the tone(s) sounded— as, for example, when a violinist’s bow moves across the string with ever-so-slight changes of pressure not willed by the

performer" (Music in the United States. 266). This new

music Stevens could not have known; its conceptual frame

had been prepared In the works of John Cage and his

contemporaries, their predecessors being any number of

avant-garde composers of whose startling works Stevens was

probably, and by choice, ignorant. It is likely that the

similarities between minimalist composer and poet grew out

of a correspondent urge in both arts to isolate and

somehow purify something approximating an ultimate art

experience, without recourse to anything other than

present acoustical reality--to Stevens the "syllables that

rise/From the floor, rising in speech we do not speak" (CP

311). That urge found its way into the fabric of

Stevens' poems whenever a theme or figure was singled out to express "an ecstasy of its associates,/Variations in the tones of a single sound,/The last, or sounds so single they seemed one" (CP 316). In "Autumn Refrain" the nightingale initiates such a purification process, as well as the monotonously intoned stanza which is a replica of that process, its "plaintive anthem" having survived the years between Keats and Stevens (Keats, 281).

Whether or not one can accept Vendler’s reductive, albeit persuasive contention that Keats’s "To Autumn" offered to Stevens "an irresistible antecedent model" to which he returned again and again throughout his long 79 career, one cannot miss the general importance of Keats in the life of Stevens. Comparisons of the two poets have been frequent and are by now conclusive: Stevens was

indeed indebted to his Romantic predecessor in various and significant ways. "Autumn Refrain," however, connects

Stevens not only with Keats, but with Milton, Coleridge, and Whitman as well, for each, in refiguring the mythological Philomel (Whitman, like Stevens, adapted species to locale), drew upon the analogical or symbolical connection of poet and bird, poem and song, setting and mood. Only Stevens would introduce the available noise of the grackle (or blackbird or crow) as suitable substitution for the virile imagination of the modern poet.

The poem that introduces Ideas of Order, the volume containing "Autumn Refrain," dramatizes rhetorically

Stevens’ desire for a poetic voice to contain the sounds of the present. "Farewell to Florida" is the mature

Crispin’s hopeful resolution to shed, as a snake leaves its skin, his past associations with the romantic moon and musical "whisperings from the reefs." The poem’s consistently lyrical tone, however, indicates that the poet cannot, at least as the poem is being composed, ride free, in his northbound ship of hope, of the "mind" that

"will never speak to [him) again." Even as the waves of the southern sea "fly back," it is the music of the past 80

that ironically shapes the powerful last stanza containing

the image of the poet assaulted by public and private

demand. Supposedly free of the mind that had bound him

round (even "the moon/Rides clear of her mind"), the

poet's ambiguously expressive rhetoric indicates that he

will exchange one redundancy for another--her hot "South

of pine and coral and coraline sea" for his "North," which

is "the violent mind/That is their mind, these men," and

"that will bind/[him3 round" (CP 117-18).

In "Farewell to Florida," each stanza--like the wave

that makes "a refrain/Of this"--is carved by numerous,

though non-transforming, repetitions which erode away the

good intentions of the poet thinking himself, from his

high vantage point, "free again." "Autumn Refrain,"

however, demonstrates a more determined attempt to

overcome what Harold Bloom rightly names the "most

reductive decade of Stevens' creative life" (Bloom, 92).

The introduction of the "residuum" into the conceptual

framework of the poem, and the addition in verbal

approximations of the barely audible system of overtones,

or natural harmonics, indicate an imaginative though not powerful breakthrough in a series of nostalgic lyrics usually concerned with the failure of humanity to adjust to time and change.

Outmoded musical forms--the rhapsody, the waltz,

Mozart's divertimenti, the euphonious music of the 81 spheres, hymns, even Whitman's songs and chants*"appear in

Ideas of Order as analogues of an aesthetic in need of

"the future emerging out of us" (CP 151). But it is the nightingale's music--"plaintive anthem" from a "world unseen" (Keats, 260)--that Stevens uses most productively to announce another music, "not yet written," but to be (CP 168).

Although Bloom has called "Autumn Refrain" a "debate between the grackles and Keats" (91), I wonder, along with

Hollander, if "the nightingale in the poem is not "Milton’s as much as it is Keats’s" (Hollander, 248). Hollander cites Milton’s first sonnet--"0 Nightingalei"--which

"broods on the voice of the nightingale" and wonders if it is an emblem of love or of poesy (248). Milton's young poet complains, "thou from year to year has sung too late/For my relief" (Milton, 53); but Stevens' emphatic “I shall never--shall never hear that bird," like Eliot’s less passionate "I do not think that they will sing to me"

(Eliot, 7), shifts in emphasis from the bird to the bard.

Milton’s poet has somehow missed the song each year--the point being that were the bird to "timely sing," some

“hopeless doom," a season without love and/or poetry, might be averted. Both Stevens and Eliot know that it is no longer possible to hear the bird, for, as Hollander says of Stevens' situation, "it is not that the bird sings too late, but that it is all too late in the year and in 82 the day, and always will be" (249). The poet, I would

add, simply cannot hear, perhaps has never heard--except

in the memory of his imagination--that unfettered

mythologized music so dear to the romantic spirit of

Keats. As if he had forgotten the force of his

declamatory 'Her mind will never speak to me again," in

"Farewell to Florida," the poet now insists that there is

a certain type of music he has never heard.

Clearly the strains of the furtive Keatsian

nightingale "haply" at song while “Queen-Moon is on her

throne" (Keats, 28), alluded to whenever the poet refers

to the moon and the evasions of the nightingale, perform

the same function as the sirenish whisperings out of the

sepulchral south in the former poem. But in "Autumn

Refrain" the old music has been gone a long time, long

enough for the poet to deny the fact of its expressively

seductive power, long enough too, it seems, for him to have opened his ears to another song. In another poem,

"blatter of grackles" becomes the logical substitution for the poetic voice among the modern dumpheap of romantic

images. As one "rejects/The trash," the old romantic fiction,

That's the moment when the moon creeps up To the bubbling of bassoons. That’s the time One looks at the elephant-colorings of tires. Everything is shed; and the moon comes up as the moon (All its images are in the dump) and you see As a man (not like an image of a man), You see the moon rise in the empty sky. 83

One sits and beats an old tin can, lard pail. One beats and beats for that which one believes. That’s what one wants to get near. (CP 201-203)

The thick, reedy bubble of bassoons, the makeshift tinny drumbeat, the obtrusive, noisy blatter of the unattractive grackle: this ungainly medley from "The Man on the Dump" all but drowns out the ecstatic warble of the nightingale's refrain. Apparently, in the intervening years between the 1935 publication of Ideas of Order and the publication in 1942 of Parts of a World, which included "The Man on the Dump," Stevens had adapted his voice sufficiently to the artistic climate of his time to produce finally, in "Of Modern Poetry," that right sound, that song that "lashes more fiercely than the wind,/As the mind, to find what will suffice, destroys/Romantic tenements of rose and ice" ("Man and Bottle," CP 239). In just four more years the full-throated ease of the poet’s new voice would be audible in the polyphonic abundance of

"Credences of Summer," for it is in the late poems that the mind of the virtuoso poet surfaces in variations that

"refresh life so that we share,/For a moment, in the first idea" (CP 362).

The process of adaptation which finally allowed

Stevens to think of himself as a modern poet, one of the

"new romantic" generation playing their own versions of a 84 "well-known concerto," places Stevens closer to Coleridge

than to any other romantic poet of the nineteenth century.

Both poets knew keenly the arduous task of trying to

reconcile in verse both internal and external reality.

Many a poet fails because he cannot distinguish his own voice from another, cannot recognize, as Stevens put it, what is "merely oneself" solacing itself in peevish birds

(CP 203). Stevens sounds a little like Coleridge in the latter's "The Nightingale," who admonishes the poet who would adopt the so-called "melancholy" strains of the night-singer*s song out of some "remembrance of a grievous wrong,/Or slow distemper, or neglected love," and filling

"all things with himself," make "all gentle sounds tell back the tale/Of his own sorrow" (248). Moreso than

Whitman, whose American version of the night-singer filled the "stillness of everything gone" with the nostalgic, tenderly expressive melodies of solitary mockingbirds and hermit thrushes, Coleridge knew, along with Stevens, that the breath of the poet had better echo a "different lore."

The chant of the poet in touch with the "particulars of reality" and created by his sense of the world (NA 130) distinguishes itself from the one composed of borrowed conceits. For Stevens, the nightingale's mellifluous songs give way to the noisome sonorities of crows and grackles; heavenly choirs and the hymns of "haunted heaven" are superceded by the "jovial hullabaloo" accompanied by "squiggling aaxaphones" (CP 59); a jazz

guitar player's metalic drone drowns out the sweet-tuned

accompaniments of the Orphean lyre. Indeed, Stevens' "new

romantic" compositions--his hybrid copies that never forget their originals— are born, it seems, out of the

same request for "music agreeable to his own nerves" (NA

48) as composer Charles Ives's. Neither are interested, finally, in the "dried out progressions in expediency" that can be arranged over and over again in habit-forming sounds:

Why must the scarecrow of the keyboard. . .stare in to every measure? Why can't a musical thought be presented as it is born--perchance “a bastard of the slums," or a daughter of a bishop"--and

if it happens to go better later on a bass-drum than upon a harp, get a good bass-drummer. . . (Ives, Essays Before a Sonata)

Desiring "the exhilarations of changes" (CP 288), the poet and the composer conduct their assaults against the "sound like any other." But Stevens' refigured musical figure3-- human singers, instrumentalists, composers--unlike Ives’s musical quotations embedded in a dissonant present, acquire a freshness "never formed to mind or voice." With his singer whose voice "made/The sky acutest at its vanishing" (CP 129), Stevens discovers his own poetic self, his own unique voice that rises out of the fact that 66 he is a man, and nothing else:

The cry is part. My solitaria Are the meditations of a central mind. I hear the motions of the spirit and the sound Of what is secret becomes, for me, a voice That is my own voice speaking in my ear. (CP 298) ENDNOTES

1 Holly Stevens, Souvenirs and Prophecies: The Young Wallace Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977) 32. Hereafter quotations from the text shall be indicated as (SP) accompanied by page number. Holly Stevens writes, "The ninth sonnet, also dated March 12, has become the most famous of the sequence, since it is the one to which George Santayana wrote a sonnet in response, after reading it. "

2 Michael 0. Stegman, "Wallace Stevens and Music: A Discography of Stevens’ Phonograph Record Collection," Wallace Stevens Journal 3 (Fall, 1979): 79-97. On p. 90 Stegman lists eight madrigals and one opera (vocal excerpts) by Claudio Monteverdi. Apel’s The Harvard Dictionary of Music, under the heading of "The 16th- Century Italian Madrigal" (418), places the composer among other madrigaliats writing between 1580 and 1620, the late period in the development of the form. Monteverdi’s style was elaborate--full of declamatory and colorful effects-- and some of his later works became increasingly colored. Most of Stevens’ selections are from Monteverdi’s late period; out of eight recordings, only two madrigals are from the early books.

3 For a more in-depth description of overtones, consult Apel’s essay on "Acoustics" (11-16).

* For an acoustical parallel to Bloom’s something "that remains after a part has been removed," consult Apel's section on harmonics (13), which describes a simple experiment on the piano: "Depress the key of C without producing a sound, i.e., merely raise the damper of the key of C; then strike forcefully the key of C (1) and release it at once; the higher C, corresponding to the tone of the depressed key, will clearly be heard. The experiment can be repeated by depressing the keys of G, c, g, etc., and striking each time the key of C (1). . . .The explanation of the phenomenon is found in the fact that the harmonics C, G, c. . .produced by the fundamental, generate, by way of resonance, sympathetic vibrations in the shorter strings corresponding to these tones."

87 CHAPTER THREE:

FROM UBIQUITOUS THUNDER TO STILL SMALLER SOUNDS

1. More Than a Voice

As Wallace Stevens attempted to free himself from the

fundamental conceptions of Romanticism and declare, as

Vendler puts it, his "modern originality," he faced the

difficult project of adapting the technical vocabulary of a

"great original" to those reversals of thought requiring

translation into his system of poetics. Committed as he was

to the retention of "inherited shapes," the poet was slow to

discover, and thus replicate, the voice speaking in his own ear. Harmonium. Stevens’ first published collection of poems, is full of the question asked in the last poem of the volume: "What syllable are you seeking,/Vocalissimus/. . .

Speak it" (CP 113), but not until "The Idea of Order at Key

West" does he attempt a precise answer. It is the fully human singer, finally--not the wind, or the bird--whose art approximates the answer that will distinguish Stevens from his predecessors. A striding and singing girl/woman upstages the constant and over-troped voice of the sea to the amazement of her two furtive listeners (and her reading audience), and in the process her artsong inadvertently becomes the ars nova to contain the restless imagination of

88 89

her poetic creator. The song--and I stress the fact that

the artwork is song, music--of the unnamed, though

remarkable, female is, indeed, Stevens’ first appropriation

of a form to contain his slowly evolving, modern self.

Heretofore, Stevens' skeptical and eccentric lyrics

have only suggested ways in which those romantically

deceptive "still finer, more implacable chords" might be

transposed into modes to appease the critical ear that

invariably demands a tune beyond us, yet ourselves.

"Anatomy of Monotony" ii, anticipating "Idea of Order" with

its lone figure walking in a natural musical setting, states the aesthetic problem but can enact no solution. Grief is the perceiving spirit's only response to the bare knowledge of the exquisite cosmic dance's ironic source:

The body walks forth naked in the sun And, out of tenderness or grief, the sun Gives comfort, so that other bodies come, Twinning our phantasy and our device, And apt in versatile motion, touch and sound To make the body covetous in desire Of the still finer, more implacable chords. So be it. Yet the spaciousness and light In which the body walks and is deceived, Falls from that fatal and that barer sky, And this the spirit sees and is aggrieved. {CP 108)

Written just three years (1930) before "Idea of Order,"

"Anatomy of Monotony" is altogether remote from it in tone and scope, a fact indicating that Stevens had rather quickly adapted his attitude of what Bloom calls willful truncation in the knowledge of the powerlessness of poetry, to one of 90

what I call willful enhancement in the discovery of poetry's

regenerative potential. In some ways a confusing poem,

"Idea of Order," clearly restores power to the grieving

artist.

What makes it so successful, in spite of its obscure

moments, is the poem's dramatic format. The interaction

of artist/maker with sea, sea with song, auditor/critic

with artist, sea, song, and the other auditor becomes a

dense but energetic polyvocal texture of exchange between perceived and perceiver. And there is the matter of

characterization. Heretofore, few of Stevens' poems have

so vividly characterized poetic process. Not since

Susanna's music "touched the bawdy strings" of her elders as they witnessed her "fall," has a poetic figure drawn so much vitality from the poet. With "Idea of Order" the solitary elegiac voice, full of lament and desire, is replaced by the potent intonings of the critical mind in an expressive performance of observation, analysis, and interpretation.

Stevens, of course, had listened thoughtfully to predecessors Coleridge, Wordsworth, Yeats, Whitman, and

Emerson prior to making his own tune. Santayana’s ideas, too, as well as several of Stevens' own early poems from

Harmonium. pushed the poet in the direction of the musical presentation in "Idea of Order." With the possible exception of Whitman's, however, none of these prior voices focuses on the musical composition in quite the

manner of Stevens, thus insuring that the work of art

exceed its usual figurative purpose. In "Idea of Order,

song is not just another instance of the substitution of

one art for another— song being poem, and singer, of

course, poet. Rather, the artform is one of converging

structures, more powerful, finally for the fact of that

bifurcation. Stevens' poem, unlike its predecessors,

recognises the unique expressive power of words sung to music.

Of the precursor poems, Wordsworth’s "The Solitary

Reaper" has received more attention, and for good reason

Stevens obviously meant for his poem to comment on the earlier version. To better note both similarities and dissimilarities between romantic and modern (or "new romantic," as Stevens would say), I quote the Wordsworth poem in full:

Behold her, single in the field, Yon solitary Highland Lass! Reaping and singing by herself; Stop here, or gently pass! Alone she cuts and binds the grain, And sings a melancholy strain; 0 listen! for the Vale profound Is overflowing with the sound.

No Nightingale did ever chaunt More welcome notes to weary bands Of travelers in some shady haunt, Among Arabian sands: A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird, Breaking the silence of the seas Among the farthest Hebrides. 92

Will no one tell me what she sings?-- Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow For old, unhappy, far-off things, And battles long ago: Or is it some more humble lay, Familiar matter of to-day? Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain, That has been, and may be again?

What’er the theme, the Maiden sang As if her song could have no ending; I saw her singing at her work, And o'er the sickle bending;-- I listened, motionless and still; And, as I mounted up the hill, The music in my heart I bore, Long after it was heard no more. (367-68)

First the similarities. Both poets observe a solitary, singing female in a natural setting, integrated with her surroundings, whose song generates questions from her observer/auditors. Moreover, both listeners enlist the help of others--readers, other observers--to unravel the song’s ostensible meaning. Both speakers narrate their poem from positions temporally and spatially removed from the subject; one senses that they saw and heard the singer and then remembered themselves at that activity. Finally,

Wordsworth and Stevens shift point-of-view from the singer, to an analysis of her song, to a revelatory or interpretative comment by way of conclusion.

At this point I should also note the similarities between Stevens' poem and the little-known "A Crazed

Girl," by Yeats. This short poem also recalls the

Wordsworthian prototype; it too casts a female singer in a 93

transformative role:

That crazed girl improvising her music Her poetry, dancing upon the shore, Her soul in division from itself Climbing, falling she knew not where, Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship, Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing Heroically lost, heroically found.

No matter what disaster occurred She stood in desperate music wound, Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph Where the bales and the baskets lay No common intelligible sound But sang, ’O sea-starved, hungry sea.’ (301)

Yeats’s singer, like the others, is female, and she

inhabits, for the duration of her musical effort, at least

a portion of a natural setting. Her steamship ‘home,"

near the seashore, no doubt contributes to the tone of her

composition. Like the songs of the other solitaries, hers

is sung for her own pleasure or consolation, and it eludes

the immediate understanding of her listeners.

Clearly, Stevens' "Idea of Order" has been drawn with

the two earlier poems in mind. Too many issues overlap

for the correspondent imagery to be accidental. But

Stevens enlarges those issues and supplies answers to questions of little or no concern to his predecessors. As his title indicates, Stevens conducts an aesthetic inquiry that attempts to do nothing less than invoke the music (or order) inherent in the reality of a familiar but non- symbolical setting of shifting boundaries. By 94

understanding the composer/singer's relation to those

surroundings, he can discover and then appraise his own

poetic efforts. The girl's song~-her art--is a measure of

the process by which the poetic imagination assimilates and transforms physical reality; and in this respect it is

object. But it is subject, too, for it more than

"translates" that reality. Thus song--a poem set to the voice’s musical accompaniment--represents the fusion of two seemingly mutually exclusive modes of understanding.

Before looking at "Idea of Order" more closely, I wish to remark on the implications of my last statement.

Stevens has done more, by allowing the poet’s craft to be invaded by another’s, than simply draw on a familiar metaphor of expressive power manifested in the combined forces of two powerful modes. Generally and habitually, poets have referred to their precious artifacts as

"songs," remembering perhaps the mythical bard Orpheus’ expressively persuasive vocal dexterity, not to mention his virtuoso accompaniments on the sweet-sounding lyre

(hence, the "lyric"). In western antiquity and through subsequent early centuries of literary and music history,

"song" referred to any poem that was to be sung, often by the poet himself, and often with musical accompaniment.

Gradually, however, song came to mean, at least to literati, no more than a particularly lyrical or songlike poem. Thus, even today some poems whose sounds mimic 95 musical sound and rhythm patterns are considered

interchangeable with song. And the art of real song, that

is, any melodious utterance into words or some other

linguistic shape, gets lost in the shadowy province of

literary figuration.

Both Wordsworth and Yeats have willingly sacrificed

music to poetry in the interest of theme. In "A Crazed

Girl" the music improvised, one quickly learns, is

actually poetry, poetry that expresses the girl’s divided,

deranged self. Her words alone close the poem, making

clear their relation to her state of mind; music is

dropped in favor of poetry. Wordsworth, closer to the

intent of Stevens, invites an audience to listen to the

sound so marvelous it overflows the vale, outdoing

nightingale and cuckoo. He early emphasizes the musical

dimension of the creative act. But just as quickly,

Wordsworth connects the girl’s song, as it were, to the

old tropes of tragedy, lyric, and epic by way of contrast.

Indeed, the poet wonders if her mournful and apparently

wordless song is none other than an expression of, for

example, a battle remote in history or of a natural sorrow

connected with loss. He cannot, however, be sure, for he

cannot make out her wordless theme. Not asking the

question "What is a song?" he asks "What is it about?"

The poet’s epiphany derives from what he cannot know

rather than from what he may discover. Wordsworth’s 96 mysterious girl is hardly distinguishable from Keats’s

nightingale; both remain hidden from the mundane activity

of understanding.

The examples so far adduced explain the use of

musical imagery to create a text which justifies turning

poem into song, poet into musician for the sake of

heightening literature's expressive effects. Neither

Wordsworth nor Yeats, however, is genuinely concerned with

the "art" of song, with the form of the synthesis which,

informs Lawrence Kramer, "reconciles music and poetry,

intonation and speech, as means of expression." Nor do they conduct other than superficial inquiries into the occasions for those collaborations to which Milton, according to Kramer, compares the "original synthesizing power of divine creation" (125). "Idea of Order" is unusual with respect to its sustained emphasis on the exact origin of the vocal line, the "raw material" of the great song, and the distinctions between song as appropriation or as imitation of a "text" (Kramer, 126).

Stevens* poem also manages to hover somewhere in the middle territory between literal and figurative usage of the musical image, although his earlier efforts were for the most part replete with musical metaphors and tropes.

In part, because of its specific locale (Key West), its one real auditor aside from the speaker (in spite of

Stevens’ stubborn denial, the reference is to formalist 97

critic Ramon Fernandez), and its performer/persona with

only vague connections to mythic figures, "Idea of Order"

exhibits a refreshing candor missing from its Harmonium

precursors. Several of these anticipatory poems, however,

deserve comment, of which all but two assign the role of transformer or restorer to a woman or girl. According to

approximate dates of authorship, the first two poems

(1915) are only remotely tied to the one written a generation later. But several factors make "Sunday

Morning" and "Peter Quince at the Clavier" seem contemporary with-"Idea of Order."

Most obvious is the inclusion of the female into the poet/persona complex. As is usual with Stevens, both early poems concern the process of writing poetry, as well as other matters tangential to that effort. And they each endow the female with a significant portion of creative energy. For instance, the questioning and testing format of "Sunday Morning" is the productive invention of the meditating woman, alone in an environment conducive to her inquiries. Her questionings (contained within quotation marks) are quickly tested and lead to answers which may or may not confirm a former opinion or attitude. Critics frequently attribute these "answers"--more specifically, discussions--to Stevens the poet, author of the poero'- questions are asked by a woman (Stevens’ mother, or wife) and answered by a man; thus, the meditating mind is divided, self against self, in a rhetorical drama. In

such a scenario, the female is that aspect of mind aware

only of its desire "for contentment" or "imperishable

bliss." Alone she can only inspire the poetic process with her interminable questioning. I disagree with such

readings, however, preferring rather to assign the male poet--i.e. Stevens--the duplicate roles of questioner and tester. He, the one who occasionally remarks "She says,' also conducts an inquiry (see stanza vi), one that complements and enlarges the issues she raises. According to my reading of the poem, the two voices--personae--stay locked in the constant antiphonal motion of poetic argument, each meeting equally the need of the other.

Like the artist in "Idea of Order," the daydreaming woman in "Sunday Morning" is given no name, no history, to connect her to an extra-poetic source. She exists unique to her setting. Susanna of "Peter Quince at the Clavier," however, is a wholly literary creature. The protagonist of Peter Quince’s version of the Biblical narrative,

Susanna derives her strength from a bufoonish mechanical’s skill with musical invention. The elaborate conceit develops the contrast between the music of lyric chastity and that of noisy lust. In what approximates a musical contest reminiscent of the mythic one between Apollo, the lyre player, and Pan, the piper, the "maiden's choral"-- more specifically Susanna’s music analogous to the sweet- sounding "lyric" viol--overwhelms the throbbing basses and bawdy strings of her opponents, the elders. Her innocent skill as a musician, suggesting an association with divine excellence (beauty), redeems her from the fall, her

"shame," and assures her immortality. But for all of

Susanna's virtuous power, she is, after all, an allegorical figure, subject to symbolical conditions imposed on her from without. Indeed, Quince uses the story of Susanna and the elders to illustrate the frustration of his own "red-eyed" desire for the one of

"blue-shadowed silk" (CP 89-92).

The diminutive "Infanta Marina," companion poem to

"The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage," and written in 1921, replaces Quince’s performance of thought and feeling with a young girl's mute motions— or gestures--of thought. Although the Infanta partakes of the sea and the evening, the only sound audible in the twilight scene is the utterance of their flow around her. Like Frost’s Eve in "Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same," who added her own "daylong voice" to the song of the birds, the

Infanta insinuates herself into her environment--but without speaking. A simple turn of the wrist evokes a natural music from the elements; she and the sea and the evening enact a form of communication that derives from prehistoric and ancient dance, in which the subtlest points are often made not with words but with gestures. 100

Seaside, the silent, but expressive, Infanta is child to

the later poet/musician in the full radiance of artistic

maturity. She is like the Paltry Nude, the child Venus,

ceaselessly and irretrievably making her way among the

spring waves "on the first-found weed," noiselessly eager

“for the brine and bellowing/Of high interiors of the sea"

(CP 48), ingenuously ignorant of her elusive power.

Also written in 1921, "Tea at the Palaa of Hoon"

(CP 65) recounts the poet’s first palpable recognition of

the origin of his poems. Again the sea figures

prominently as a metaphor for the sweeping surge called

inspiration, but this time the poet's persona is the

Emersonian Hoon, who himself speaks the words that

liberate him from his own transcendentally inspired

“hymns." "I was myself the compass of that sea," says

Hoon in answer to his own aesthetic interrogation. "I was

the world in which I walked, and what I saw/0r heard or

felt came not but from myself." Finally at odds with his

former self, the ephebe announces the pre-eminence of mind

in acts of perception. "Hoon" reads like an outline to the more ornately textured “Idea of Order," for the latter

poem also disavows an external source for what Stevens himself called the transcendent analogue.

The unbridled lyricism of "To the One of Fictive

Music" (1922) almost manages to disguise a similar and patent denial of the imagination as other. In what 101

amounts to an extended parodic invocation of the muse

(note the word play, "musing the obscure"), Stevens writes

his own song in the manner of Dryden’s "A Song for St.

Cecilia's Day." Like the seventeenth-century festival

hymn of praise to the Roman St. Cecilia, Christian martyr

and patroness of music, Stevens’ "song" develops the

analogy of cosmic with musical harmony. But Stevens' aim

is to naturalise the muse--"Sister and mother and diviner

love"--by first associating her with the mundane birth of

human consciousness and then commenting on the fictive

source of her existence:

Now, of the music summoned by the birth That separates us from the wind and sea, Yet leaves us in them, until earth becomes, By being so much of the things we are, Gross effigy and simulacrum, none Gives motion to perfection more serene Than yours, out of our imperfections wrought, Most rare, or ever of more kindred air In the laborious weaving that you wear. (CP 87)

Unlike the diminutive Infanta (who manages to retain an identity in spite of her similarity to Marina in

Shakespeare's Pericles. and to Venus), the female figure in "To the One of Fictive Music" is a wholly synthetic monstrosity working under the direction of the parodic imagination. According to Joseph Riddel, "the conventional homage to the muse, once a devotional exercise, has become a tired gambit," to Stevens (The

Clairvoyant Eye. 67). Not an unearthly mother, or, like 102

St. Cecilia, a mystical patroness, Stevens’ "musician" is

the "body of the world itself," imperfect, but adorned by

the poetic imagination in motions "more serene," most

rare. As such, this "Unreal" and weakly configured

musical figure is destined to recede ever further into the

hazy background of metaphor and analogy, her vibratory

energy deflected by the numerous obstacles devised by her

creator to check the flow of our "feigning with the

strange unlike, whence springs/The difference that

heavenly pity brings" (CP 88),

Antithetical to the helpless muse, whose function it

is to appear during the moment of invocation, is the

"maker of the song" in "Idea of Order," whose function it

is to appropriate for herself the imperfect environment of the near and the clear and the "strange unlike" (88).

Here she is willful performer, composer/poet and formidable heir to Emerson’s Merlin, decomposing old tropes in a bardic explosion of sound beyond the "jingling serenader’s art" or "tinkle of piano strings” (Emerson,

"Merlin," 120):

She sang beyond the genius of the sea. The water never formed to mind or voice, Like a body wholly body, fluttering Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry, That was not ours although we understood, Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she. The song and water were not medleyed sound Even if what she sang was what she heard, 103

Since what she sang was uttered word by word. It may be that in all her phrases stirred The grinding water and the gasping wind; But it was she and not the sea we heard.

For she was the maker of the song she sang. The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea Was merely a place by which she walked to sing. (CP 128-29)

These first two stanzas and part of the third focus on the

artist and her song. As assertive as a musical motif,

"she" is the self-propulsive agent of all subsequent

development in both her song and the one Stevens arranges

in response to that song. Virtually all motion and sound,

after her entrance, in some way relate to her.

In the above stanzas, and continuing on through four

and five, the rhetorical emphasis on sibilant phonemes and alliteration issues from the initial "S" that begins the poem. Embedded within the fabric of the sibilant strings,

"she" (with the possessive pronoun "her") dominates the seaside performance. Even the standard iambic pentameter line (Stevens’ favorite) undulates unpredictably around the rhythmic stress of a sibilant or the assertive possessive. Like the musico-poetical artifact that exceeds and excells the dumb "genius" of the mindless, crying sea, yet appropriates that "raw material" as part of its form, Stevens’ line performs a rhythmic approximation of the singer’s uninhibited stride in a curious collaboration with the swirl and splash of the regulated surf. 104 In addition to the line's fluctuating rhythm, the

contours of Stevens’ superstructure manifest the

expressive component of the singer’s art. Harold Bloom

partially addresses this interest when he suggests, in

reference to the second stanza, that it "denies mimesis in

favor of an expressive theory of poetry" (99). Other

stanzas, as well, illustrate Bloom’s point based on the

poem’s thematic emphasis, an emphasis, moreover, which

deserves further comment. Stevens’ "rhetoric," however,

is not limited to extratextual references in support of

his expressive theory. The overall lopsided or

asymmetrical stanzaic design of "Idea of Order"

underscores the eccentric power of the artist’s work. The

poem comprises seven stanzas of uneven proportion, each--

except for the first two--quantitatively disjunct in

relation to the other. The longest stanza occurs in the

middle of the poem, with three shorter ones on either side

in the following pattern of distribution:

7-7-6-13-10-8-5

A cursory glance at this stanzaic profile might fail

to recognize the anomaly resulting from a slight

displacement in each of the two units comprising the three

stanzas on either side of the central (and longer) one,

and functioning as buttresses in support of that center.

Twenty lines precede the fourth stanza; twenty-three lines

follow. This subtle imbalance produces a minimal 105

disturbance, but one, nonetheless, organically suited to the poem's exploratory theme. The subtle "lift" given to one side of the triadic unit strengthens its conceptual format, one that I would describe as a critical performance in response to a performance of another kind.

Rhetorically, ’’Idea of Order" moves simply in an elaborate thematic texture of proposition and interrogation. The logical rhetorical scheme is a familiar one: observation (1-3), analysis of object (4), interpretation/conclusion (5-7). The thematic pattern almost matches the rhetorical one, although its boundaries are not so sharply drawn. For example, in the first three stanzas the emphasis is on the artist and the anatomy of her artsong. At the end of the third stanza, and functioning as a rationale for the analysis to follow, the observer/speaker begins his interrogation, performing, as it were, his response to the "text" which is her song, just as she has performed her response to the text around her, the sea:

Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew It was the spirit that we sought and knew That we should ask this often as she sang. (129)

I use the descriptive "performance" for two reasons, the first to distinguish Stevens’ "particular version of romantic organicism," as Michael Davidson call it, "in which poetry evolves according to laws discovered in the 106 act of composition" (141). This act, or performance, transforms a poetry of "place"--again Davidson is help- ful--into a poetry of "occasions" (144). I would further describe the latter as a poetry of extension, or exploration, in which temporal boundaries exist only for the duration of a particular occasion for composing, reading, listening. These performances, as it were, expand the thematic range to include not only themselves but subsequent events, each being merely one more in a continuous string of possible "ideas" or

"interpretations." Implicit in this performative theoretical perspective is a poetics of "decomposition": the language of open-endedness, temporariness--endless elaboration, as Stevens would call it--a language "able to work out the fullest implications of its subject by constantly exposing itself to change" (Davidson, 146).

Another reason for my usage of "performance" to analyze Stevens’ exploratory stance in relation to acts of composition concerns the poet's own tendency to use either the term itself or a similar one. Occasionally, Stevens refers to a dramatic performance, in which the poet is an actor, on stage, as in "Of Modern Poetry." But more often the performer sings, or plays an instrument, or even conducts an instrumental or vocal ensemble. As I have said elsewhere, this performing musician is the figure

Stevens prefers whenever he focuses on the poetic act. 107

This rationale also provides a partial explanation

for my usage of "decomposer" as it describes both the

poet--Stevens--and any number of his musical personae.

Because traditionally the composer is the maker, or

creator, of a musical work--be it sonata, symphony,

chorale, or other form--my focus, the musical one, allows me the traditional usage of the term without confusing modalities. But I have another reason for reaching across disciplines, and that is to distinguish a process--the one

I call 'decomposition"--froro the more familiar

"decreation." The latter process reduces an object or concept to nothingness, or non-existence. Decomposition, however, is not a subversive, or negative, activity. The composer does not wish to undermine--in the pejorative sense--what has already been affirmed. Rather, like a scientist, he enacts a procedure of conversion, interchanging or exchanging the elements of an "original," and bringing to life a new 'version." The act of decomposition, moreover, is always a performance; it is full of tendency and implication~-the motion of change.

Given Stevens’ preference for musical figures, and his frequent usage of the composer’s lexicon, my preference for "decomposition," as a more descriptive and aesthetically correct term than some of the others presently in vogue, is a reasonable one. And the formal strategy of "Idea of Order"--an abstraction of the poet’s 108

voice into an impersonal idiom, or music, of the intense

activity of the mind reading itself--as with several of

Stevens' longer poems, further substantiates my choice.

"Idea of Order," as I have said, comprises more than

one point-of-view. Three performances take place; indeed,

it is as if three different singers sing against the

background of plunging water and wind. First is the

speaker’s version of the girl’s song, as overheard by

himself and one other; then the speaker’s summary response

to that song; and finally the speaker’s interpretation of

his response to the song. Each performance belongs to the

speaker, although the focus through four and one-half

stanzas directs the listener to another voice. It is the

girl we hear, even as the speaker limits what we know about her. I have called her "decomposer," "formidable heir" to Emerson’s bard, Merlin. She is Stevens' new voice, the muse become maker in motions as dextrous and provocative as the diminutive Infanta’s simple turn of the wrist.

Just as Emersonian Hoon turns his celestial hymns into the seatide buzzing and blowing of his own circulatory system’s compass, recognizing himself the measure of "the world in which [he] walked," so the artist in "Idea of Order" turns the sea’s unformed "genius" into

"the self/That was her song." Emerson had made clear the source of those "mystic springs" that would make the "wild 109

blood" of Merlin render back the "Artful thunder" and

"Sparks of the supersolar blaze" ("Merlin," 120). Long

after he had put out the call for a poet who would "not

his brain encumber/With the coil of rhythm and number,"

nor shrink from "the pulse of manly hearts" and the "din

of city arts," Emerson had persisted in locating the

source of the poet’s music in the cloudland of the

transcendental oversoul. In "Music," although his theme

has been modernized to include the "mud and scum of

things," Emerson’s reality is other than self-created:

Let me go where'er I will, I hear a sky-born music still: It sounds from all things old, It sounds from all things young, From all that’s fair, from all that’s foul, Peals out a cheerful song. ( 365)

To sing beyond the genius of the sky, as he does in

"Tea at the Palaz of Hoon," is for Stevens to defy the poetics of Emerson, whose muse resided in a transcendent otherworld. To sing "beyond the genius of the sea,"

Harold Bloom theorizes, "is to defy the poetics of

Whitman," who found the muse in mother ocean. Although

Stevens clearly acknowledges a debt to Whitman in "Like

Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery"--a long set of improvisations on Whitman's idea of death and transfiguration--those forty-nine versions of an old trope achieve what amounts to a re-formation of the figure. 110

Indeed, the Walt Whitman who walks "along a ruddy shore'

in the "far South" like the “sun of autumn passing,"

singing and chanting the first stanza of the poem, has

become, by stanza fifty, none other than Wallace Stevens,

the "wise man" who avenges by "building his city in snow'

(CP 150-56). Written in 1935, only one year after "Idea

of Order," "Like Decorations" completes the thematic

modulation Stevens had begun in the earlier transitional

poem.

In "Idea of Order" the singing artist is neither

Whitman, nor even Stevens entirely, but rather the voice

that is "herself"--an abstraction. Her song is an index,

or expression, of self, a self not only indifferent to

Whitman’s potent sea of death, but one that would take

that "inhuman" and "veritable ocean" for its own use. The

sea, to her neither metaphor of mind or voice, nor symbol

of her style, is "merely a place by which she [walks] to

sing.” The grind and gasp of the water and wind may find

their way into her artsong, but hers is not a romantic

blend--a divine medley--of human music with natural sound,

nor equivalent to Coleridge’s "mingled measure/From the

fountain and the caves." Nor does the girl's song mimic

Whitman’s vocal ensemble of human, animal, and sea voices

in something approximating an operatic emotional exchange.

Whitman’s "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" is High

Romantic lyricism at its most eloquent, his text an Ill

exquisite testimony to the aesthete’s longing for union

with other. Like Coleridge’s, Whitman’s mingled measure

is yet another version of the pathetic fallacy echoing

Emerson’s doctrine of correspondence between literal and

figurative, human and inhuman sound:

The aria sinking, All else continuing, the stars shining, The winds blowing, the notes of the bird continuous echoing, With angry moans the fierce old mother incessantly moaning, On the sands of Paumanok’s shore. . .

The boy ecstatic, with his bare feet the waves, with his hair the atmosphere dallying, The love in the heart long pent, now loose, now at last tumultuously bursting, The aria’s meaning, the ears, the soul, swiftly depositing, The strange tears down the cheeks coursing, The colloquy there, the trio, each uttering, The undertone, the savage old mother incessantly crying,

To the boy’s soul’s questions sullenly timing, some drown'd secret hissing, To the outsetting bard. . .

0 solitary me listening, never more shall I cease perpetuating you, Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations. . .

. . .I do not forget But fuse the song of my dusky demon and brother. . . With the thousand responsive songs at random, My own songs awaked from that hour And with them the key, the word up from the waves. . (Whitman, 392-94)

To Whitman, the supreme poetic sound is, as John Hollander puts it, "the layered blendings of natural symphony and human singing and playing" (237). In "To a Locomotive in

Winter," a poem responding directly to Emerson’s "Merlin," 112

Whitman orchestrates a symphony scored for nature, man,

and man's toy, the ubiquitous machine. He grants them

equal ensemble status in what has come to be the dominant

American romantic musical image. The poet addresses the

engine in the usual expressive language of hyperbole:

For once come serve the Muse and merge in verse, even as here I see thee, With storm and buffeting gusts of wind and falling snow, By day thy warning ringing bell to sound its notes, By night thy silent signal lamps to swing.

Fierce-throated beauty! Roll through my chant with all thy lawless music, they swinging lamps at night, Thy madly-whistled laughter, echoing, rumbling like an earth­ quake, rousing all, Law of thyself complete, thine own track firmly holding, (No sweetness debonair of tearful harp or glib piano thine,) Thy trills of shrieks by rocks and hills return’d, Launch'd o'er the praries wide, across the lakes, To the free skies unpent and glad and strong. (563)

Whitman's is the song of the self possessed by "all sounds running together, combined, fused or following" ("Song of

Myself," 214); Stevens’ the song of the self taking possession of "bronze shadows heaped/On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres/Of sky and sea" (129). In "Song of Myself," Whitman is content to relax and "do nothing but listen," to "accrue" what is heard into his song and

"let sounds contribute toward it" (214). In "Idea of

Order," the singer takes charge; indeed, her energetic verbal performance to the accompaniment of her own rhythmic stride, her own melody and key is contrary to 113 Whitman's passive integration of so-called musical

elements into his "song." The "ever-hooded, tragic-

gestured sea" may have an impressive literary history in

myth and legend, but its various "selves," as well as

those of any other figure, simply do not constitute the

texture of the girl’s song. Moreover, her actual words go unreported.

Unlike Yeats, who uses a crazed girl's "0 sea-

starved, hungry sea" as theoretical context for a

listener's inquiry, Stevens conducts a poetic

interrogation based solely on the absence of semantic and

thematic content. This absence, of course, allows

Stevens’ artifact--like any noteworthy piece of vocal

music--to exceed its linguistic boundaries. By not

focusing on the words of the song, while at the same time

acknowledging their presence, Stevens supports the claim

for the ineffable power of poetry and music conjoined.

His artsong, probably inspired in part by Santayana’s

essay on music in The Life of Reason, thus becomes, at

least for the occasion of this performance, an ideal form

(as the Theme and Variation and Improvisation will later

become), through which to modernize structural and

thematic tropes. Santayana's words in "Music" adhere

closely to the critical perspective of "Idea of Order," in that they connect sense to form, and form to mind almost

as if Stevens had worked them into his poem. I quote at 114

random from Santayana's essay, choosing those passages

which seem to have inspired Stevens:

Music is accordingly, like mathematics, very nearly a world by itself; it contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies, , .the abstract energy of it takes on so much body, that in progression or declension it seems quite as impassioned as any animal triumph or any moral drama. . .(315).

Beneath its hypnotic power music, for the musician, has an intellectual essence. Out of simple chords and melodies. . .that by their form appeal also to the mind. This side of music resembles a richer versification; it may be compared also to math- matics or to arabesques. A moving arabesque that has a vital dimension, an audible mathematics, adding sense to form, and a versification that, since it has no subject matter, cannot do violence to it by its complex artifices. . .The musician, like an architect or goldsmith working in sound, but freer than they from material trammels, can expand for ever his yielding labyrinth; every step opens up new vistas. . .and widens the horizen before him. .Such excursions into ultra-mundane regions, where order is free, refine the mind. , .(317-18).

There is often in what moves us a certain ruthless persistence, together with a certain poverty of form. , . .At such a moment music is a blessed resource. (320)

Indeed, Stevens’ singer, like the art she performs, has become Santayana’s world by itself: for she "was the single artificer of the world/In which she sang," and

"there never was a world for her/Except the one she sang and, singing, made" (129-30). Stevens' sensuous musical excursion into Santayana’s oxymoronic region of ordered freedom, or free order, paradoxically widens his horizon by narrowing his perspective: making the sky "acutest at 115

its vanishing" while measuring "to the hour its solitude";

"mastering the night,” arranging "enchanting night" while fixing "emblazoned zones and fiery poles" (129-30). The aforementioned references are taken from those stanzas in

“Idea of Order" that deal primarily with the speaker’s analysis and interpretation of the singer’s uninhibited and apparently impromptu performance. These latter stanzas manifest the poet’s explorations of his own themes, and although hardly equal in thematic and linguistic complexity to the wandering interrogations of the later and much longer poems, they most certainly stress the poet’s speculative, tentative stance.

As I noted earlier, beginning in the middle of stanza four of "Idea of Order," and continuing through the remaining stanzas, the observer has become critic. But he is no ordinary critic, merely reciting or sustaining old claims. His is the uneasy experience of performed commentary, his "reading" an instance of his own transformative act. His idiom as richly expressive as the singer's, Stevens as critic comes to terms with his own trope--his figure and the song she composed. In an essay explaining that at its best "criticism can be adequate to a genuine poem," Merle 0. Brown claims that the "criticism needed for Stevens, now and always, is analogous to the performing arts." "This criticism," he continues, is

"like a performance of a play." The critic, in Brown’s 116

scenario, would perform his work as a concert pianist--

turning object into "beautiful movement," fact into act,

"mere mind or mere body into its irregular, sensual

metaphysics" (121). Stevens, in the remaining stanzas of

"Idea of Order," has become such a critic. Zn later

poems, however, he will not so clearly distinguish

performative acts, preferring rather to combine subject

and method in more synthetic strategies. Davidson links

Stevens to John Ashbery in relation to this process of

flux, or as I have defined it, decomposition:

. . .while Stevens’ tone is not that of Ashbery, he offers an analogously problematic perspective in which no one voice in the poem Is constitutive, in which the speaking subject becomes one of the many fictions on the way to what he calls the "monster Myself" (149).

Obviously, "Idea of Order" is a poem "on the way"; it

sets the groundwork for Stevens’ developing exploratory

and interpretive style. Readers, unfortunately, have expected too much from the poem, thinking that it should,

as its title implies, articulate an order discovered in a voice (the song), or a place (Key West), or a natural form

(the sea). Rather, Stevens’ poem has begun to sound an

"absence in reality" which, according to Davidson, is like

Ashbery’s "fundamental absences" in "The Skaters," who struggle "to/get up and be off themselves" (Davidson,

148). Stevens’ is the seemingly contradictory "order" of 117 constant change, of decomposition, as the triple perspective in Idea of Order” indicates.

The speaker’s interrogations and propositions are as much a part of Key West* as the song that never formed to mind or voice. They too are songs, or occasions, and as such extend the "idea” of fixed form into Hhat Brown recognizes as its irregular metaphysics, Ashbery its fundamental absence, Santayana its expanded labyrinth,

Joseph Riddel its process of realizing itself, achieving duration of self through evolving forms” fThe Clairvoyant Eye, 36).

Stevens recognizes these extentions as a ’sense of being that changes as we talk,” that talk shifting the cycle of the scenes (OP 109). In "Idea of Order," even before the speaker has begun to analyze the song he has heard, he has begun to "shift," to doubt his previous claims. Within the space of two lines, the reported fact has been qualified by the hypothetical "It may be," which is then further modified by "But it was." A few lines later “Whose spirit is this?" undergoes a series of analytical tests--"If it was only”--which, instead of concluding in the comfortable logic of syllogism, suspend meaning with yet another restrictive phrase. This time the conjunction is free of its usual limiting function, for the speaker attempts to define in a vague rhetoric of comparison a mysterious blend of sound that is not to be 118 confused with the medleyed sound of an old trope: "But It was more than that,/More even than her voice, and ours, araong/The meaningless plungings of water and wind" (129).

Indeed, but what?

The fifth stanza answers the question in the language of resolution. The song establishes a conceptual pattern which is recapitulated in the physical pattern of the next stanza: "The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,/As the night descended, tilting in the air,/Mastered the night and portioned out the sea" (130).

No sooner, however, are these conceptual and physical boundaries acknowledged, than they are extended, and in what amounts to an "afterword" or "coda" to the interpretation in stanzas five and six, the poet performs his last "idea."

Like the musical coda which functions as a conclusion, but which may also take on considerable thematic dimension curiously improportionate to its length, the last five lines of "Idea of Order" decompose or break up the established sense of order into the elements of its composition. The stanza’s inconclusive stance further inhibits a sense of full closure as it asks new questions and provides no answers. For instance, the

"maker" becomes a strange blend of singer and speaker: the singer was called "the maker" in stanza five, but there is no evidence here, in the final lines, to indicate that it 119

is she who orders "words of the sea" (130). Although she

sang what she heard, the sea, after all, was "merely a

place." So perhaps the maker in stanza seven is none

other than the speaker, and it is his imagination that is

driven by a rage to order the words of the sea, words

which are, after all, "her words" as he has referred to

them. Or, the words may never have been hers, or his, or

even "pale Ramon’s," but only the literal, inhuman

utterance spoken in the cry of our mysterious source,

place of "our origins"--the sea.

Why is the maker's "rage for order" blessed, no

matter who that maker may be? And why, finally, are the

so-called "words of the sea," if indeed they are the

fundamental sounds of our "dimly starred" origins, "keener

sounds" than, for example, the sounds that issued from the

singer's artsong that opened the poem? Again, the speaker

has changed perspectives, purposefully defeating any sense

of equipoise he may have established between his previous

analysis and interpretation of the girl's song and the

song itself. Indeed, in this last stanza Stevens has performed another, crucial act of decomposition, in this

Instance leaving his piece wide open by suggesting any number of possibilities (or ideas) for subsequent

"performances." The only "idea of order" in "The Idea of

Order at Key West" is what Stevens would later call "a 120 recent imagining of reality ’--the sum of each occasion for

poetry.

For all of its expressive power in "Idea of Order,"

the singing voice never quite achieves in subsequent poems

the same high level of spontaniety and eloquence.

Although what Hollander calls the protean meta-form of the

sea reappears (as do other forms of motion and fluidity)

in ever more experimental guises, the human voice grows

consistently thinner in later poems. The poems gathered

in The Rock, for instance, are marked by their minimalist

strategies. They are quietly repetitive as they focus on various methods of keeping alive the poetic mind in a "new

knowledge of reality" (CP 534). Here there is no human music--playing or singing--amid the soft piping of the

sweet dove, the babble of the cricket, the scrawny cry of the chorister bird, and the singing, "smaller and still

smaller sound" of absence in metaphorical space. The only rhapsode in this last book of Stevens’ old age is the essential "rock," its night hymn mimicking the music of the planets, "starting point of the human and the end"

(520).

Apparently the polyvocal "Idea of Order" is Stevens’ last performance of its kind, although six years later

(1940), in "Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine

Ideas," a new persona would step briefly forward to articulate a much reduced albeit "recent imagining of 121

reality” similar to the former. In the fifth canto of

“Extracts," the lone voice of an "assassin" symbolizes the violently recomposed "mass of meaning" drawn out of the

confusion among competing ideas. The musician, as in

"Idea of Order," represents the decompositional ordering principle, but the tumultuous social and philosophical climate of the scenario recalls the social unrest of the

forties which was so far removed from the felicities of the remote Florida keys. (In fact, in 1936 Stevens had bid farewell to Florida in his poem of the same name.)

The couplets in “Extracts" v measure, for a time, the ironically consoling "right sound” of the assassin who sings out of ideological chaos the triumphant (heroic) and singular song of "high imagination":

The law of chaos is the law of ideas, Of improvisations and seasons of belief.

Ideas are men. The mass of meaning and The mass of men are one. Chaos is not

The mass of meaning. It is three or four Ideas or, say, five men or, possibly six.

In the end, these philosophic assassins pull Revolvers and shoot each other. One remains.

The mass of meaning becomes composed again. He that remains plays on an instrument

A good agreement between himself and night, A chord between the mass of men and himself,

Far, far beyond the putative canzones Of love and summer. The assasin sings

In chaos and his song is a consolation. It is the music of the mass of meaning. 122

And yet it is a singular romance, This warmth in the blood-world for the pure idea.

This inability to find a sound, That clings to the mind like that right sound, that song

Of the assasin that remains and sings In the high imagination, triumphantly. (CP 255-56)

Compared to the earlier poem’s vigorous music, the

instrumental and vocal program in ’Extracts'’ v--

reminiscent of the blue guitar’s repetitive drone--hardly

lives up to its potential as summarized in the final canto’s variation:

. . .to pierce the heart’s residuum And there to find music for a single line, Equal to memory, one line in which The vital music formulates the words. (CP 259)

Nonetheless, the musician is the system-maker or -breaker, his vocal improvisations to the accompaniment of his

instrument structurally analogous to the degree of harmonic resonance between himself and the masses. He is the "single thought" of canto iii, the intercessor whom a

"multitude of thoughts" would, but for his momentary redemptive, or visionary status, destroy.

A later poem (1942), "Certain Phenomena of Sound," not often discussed by commentators, but nonetheless 123

/ chosen by Stevens as the second in his volume Transport to

Summer. is the next instance after "Extracts" of the

voice’s persuasive power. This time word and tone--

literary art and musical art--coexist as interdependent

metaphors of communication; juxtaposed, each mode provides

the necessary stimulus to sustain the life of the other.

Although each of the poem’s three stanzas adduces the

acoustical properties of a common type of auditory

experience, the second canto stands out for its more

specifically local sound as well as its focus, as in "Idea

of Order," on the interdependence of the artful mind with

the world, of the linguistic structure with the musical one:

So you're home again, Redwood Roamer, and ready To feast. . .Slice the mango, Naaman, and dress it

With white wine, sugar and lime juice. Then bring it After w e ’ve drunk the Moselle, to the thickest shade

Of the garden. We must prepare to hear the Roamer’s Story. .The sound of that slick sonata,

Finding its way from the house, makes music seem To be a nature, a place in which itself

Is that which produces everything else, in which The Roamer is a voice taller than the redwoods,

Engaged in the most prolific narrative, A sound producing the things that are spoken. (CP 286-87)

Redwood Roamer, like the assassin in "Extracts," and the "savage," thundering hero/musician in "Thunder by the 124

Musician," is simply an alternate persona 'to intone the

supreme fiction of the times. In each poem, a speaker's

"narrative" (or lyric, as the case may be) is a new version of present experience, an "idea" recomposed, like the slick sound of a piece of music, the "everything else" not itself. But these "fictions" are not only indices and symbols of the "syllable" the poet had sought much earlier in "To the Roaring Wind." Rather, in each instance, modal alignments and combinations have produced startling acoustical variations--such as the one at Key West--which exceed themselves by arresting the ear. And it is as if

"everything [were] bulging and blazing and big in itself"

(CP 205). Clearly, as Stevens had wishfully prophesied in

"The Man with the Blue Guitar" only a few years after he had written "The Idea of Order at Key West," such rare forms as these have become the makers of things "yet to be made." 2. Excuse My Guitar

"Language is a perpetual orphic song, Which rules with Daedal harmony a throng Of thought and forms, which else senseless and shapeless were." IV, i, 415)

Shelley's tribute to the orphic power capable of

giving voice and intelligence to unconscious natural forms

is only one of several sources for Stevens’ most familiar

long poem, "The Man With the Blue Guitar." Orphean

figures and references appear throughout Shelley's works,

but “With a Guitar To Jane" and “To Jane" provide a direct

analogue for Stevens’ appropriation of a form to work

under the decomposing imagination’s dominion. Both poem3

feature an artist figure whose consummate vocal and

instrumental skills teach the "slave of music“--the

guitar--"all the harmony" to make “the delighted spirit

grow" (“With a Guitar," 449), the artist's “voice most

tender/To the strings without soul" having "given/its

own," whereupon the voice reveals "A tone/Of some world

far from ours" ("To Jane," 451). For Stevens, Shelley’s

transcendent analogue linking creative strength to musical

dexterity, and both to the essence of life, would prove

itself an ever-renewable source as he wrote poem after

poem in extensive exploration of the shaping skill of the

imagination. Rarely, however, has a Shellean trope escaped the specific "reshaping” skills of a Stevensian

125 126 bard like "the guitar player, who would not only dare to

turn the music of the gods into sacrilegious shrieks, but would also lament his bardic calling often enough to test the patience of his listeners. In "The Man With the Blue

Guitar" Stevens turns trope after orphic trope into the sound of his own clash with a tradition demanding a "tune beyond us, yet ourselves."

The figure of the mythic bard Orpheus is not, of course, unique to Shelley and Stevens. Son of Apollo--sun god and virtuoso kithara player, whose stance, according to Ovid, was that of an artist--Orpheus inherited his father’s musical talent but not his disturbing multiple aspects of character. Apollo, unlike his compassionate and gentle son, was both healer and destroyer, capable of acting out heroically the multiple contradictions that characterize human behavior. The son, ultimately refigured as Christ and finally as an archetypal guiding spirit in Romantic poetry, is remembered for the transforming power of his song that could persuade the deities of Hades to release his beloved wife, Eurydice:

"As he made this plea and sang his words to the tune of his lyre, the bloodless spirits wept" (Metamorphoses 10).

Important for Stevens, this figure shows up too often in ✓ Romantic poetry to be ignored. Wordsworth’s "Power of Music," like Shelley’s "Jane" poems, stresses the musician’s persuasive skill with an audience. The first 127

two stanzas connect him with his ancient source:

An Orpheus! an Orpheus! yes, Faith may grow bold, And take to herself all the wonders of old;--

Near the stately Pantheon you'll meet with the same In the street that from Oxford hath borrowed its name.

His station is there; and he works on the crowd. He sways them with harmony merry and loud; He fills with his power all their hearts to the brim-- Was aught ever heard like his fiddle and him?

The lyre has been replaced by the violin, or fiddle, but the quality of sound and the manner of producing it

identify the instrument as a later and somewhat colloquial version of the one favored by Apollo and Orpheus.

Ancient Greek myth and culture favored the euphonious timbres of the kithara (similar to the lyre) over the reedy "colors" of the rustic pan pipes and the aulos

(oboe), recognizing a special value in the fact that the performer could sing and play at once on the stringed instrument. This prototype of an array of plucked and bowed instruments also challenged the exotic imported sounds of various other wind instruments, drums, and cymbals associated with the cult of Dionysus.

Antithetical to the clashing din of Dionysian instruments, the agreeable sounds of the Apollonian kithera and Orphean lyre represented harmonious moderation as contrasted with chaotic passion. The literary usage of these strikingly disjunct musical histories is well known. Indeed, few 128 poets have failed to draw upon some aspect of the antithesis of Apollonian soul in combat with Dionysian body, of spirit or mind estranged from matter or sense, or to work with some fragment of Orphean theory and practice.

Stevens is obviously no exception. His "blue" guitar player and several other of his poet/composer personae are figured and refigured tropes meant to "glisten again with

[the] motion" and sound of the music "full of shadows" (CP

121), the same quality of sound that lifted the poet’s bardic precursors to amazing levels of dramatic expression.

Like the oral poet, pictured with lyre on vases and in the Homeric epics, and the later version of the bard, the rhapsode, whose role was to deliver a performance of a memorized text, Stevens’ guitarist intones a cultural artifact. His version, however, of the "hero's head, large eye/And bearded bronze" (CP 165), "pagan in a varnished car," as well as other recognizable mythic figures, redefines the poet’s place in society. In what amounts to a defense of modern poetry and his role as poet of that hybrid, Stevens twangs the interminable strings of the ordinary guitar in accompaniment to his "song," one not unlike some of Stevens’ other late poems as J. Hill is

Miller describes them:

They keep close to life as it flows and proceed in a series of momentary crystallizations or 129

globulations of thought, followed by dissolution, and then reconglomeration in another form. (Poets of Reality. 261)

Stevens chose the guitar to accompany his song of

himself not, as some commentators have imagined, through

any attempt to comment on Picasso’s blue guitarist.

Rather, several other factors indicate that the guitar was

the perfect instrument for the poem that "marks his

turning to the new style" (Miller, 260). Stevens was

probably more familiar with the guitar than with any other

musical instrument. An early letter to Elsie (March 10,

1907) describes the as-yet-unmarried poet lying on his bed

lazily playing his guitar; a later correspondence (1906)

indicates, however, that though he could play the

instrument, he was by no means a virtuoso. Having dug up

the guitar from the bottom of his closet (it had evidently

been buried in the activity of New York), the young

Stevens "dusted it, strummed a half-dozen chords, and then

felt bored by it" (L 110). The next reference in that

letter is strangely prophetic of Stevens' occasional

parodic stance in relation to the instrument: "Some day I may be like one of the old ladies with whom I lived in

Cambridge, who played a hymn on her guitar. The hymn had thousands of verses, all alike. She played about two hundred every night--until the house-dog whined for mercy

and liberty" (L 110). Seemingly remote from the situation of an old lady in a Massachusetts college town, "The Man 130 With the Blue Guitar” boasts exactly two-hundred and one

stanzas ‘all alike” !

Two years before he died, Stevens would atill be

thinking of the guitar as he had used it symbolically

throughout his works. A January 13, 1953, letter to Jose

Rodriguez Feo still links the stringed instrument to the

poet’s voice:

Are you visiting some new scene? A young man in a new scene, a new man in a young scene, a young man in a young scene--excuse my guitar. Up here the guitars are stacked along the attic walls for a while. (L 767)

In 1950 that voice had been connected with the sounds of the guitar, which "Were not and are not," in "The Rock,"

Stevens’ final comment on the progress of his poetic career. The reference recalls those sounds heard almost a generation earlier in "The Man With the Blue Guitar" and various other poems appearing in each segment of Stevens’ development as a poet. It would be useful at this Juncture to look at some of the poems containing references to the guitar and similar instruments, beginning with an early poem,

"Ordinary Women" (CP 10). Here, as in the larger percentage of other examples, the guitar is associated with physicality. A metaphor for the unreceptive female body, the "dry guitar" specifically sings of thwarted desire. In "O Florida, Venereal Soil" (CP 47), the 131 guitar is again linked to the physical self, for "[ajfter the guitar is asleep" the Floridian, dark, Donna comes

"tormenting,/Insatiable" into the helpless lover's dream.

"A Dish of Peaches in Russia" {CP 224) contains the metonymically juxtaposed images of "the whole body tasting peaches," the young lover seeing "first buds of spring," and the "black Spaniard [playing] his guitar." Each sensuous version--there are others--is equal to the lover’s emotional disturbance of mind that “could tear/One self from another."

In “Jumbo" (CP 269) a bifurcation of music and language is brought about through the physical synthesis of mind and nature. Emphasizing the disturbing physicality of the word or linguistic structure, the poem features trees that are violently "plucked like iron bars" by the powerful "imager" Jumbo, "musician, fatly soft/And wildly free, whose thumb claws "on the ear these consonants." The trees, whose forms resemble ours, are assaulted by the will of a sensuous, obligatory power, the

"loud general-large" sing-songer, wildly free. This image is similar dynamically to the one in "Jouga" (CP 337), where "There is Ha-ee-me, who sits/And plays his guitar."

He is a beast, or "perhaps his guitar is a beast" or perhaps they are two conjugal beasts. One is male, the other female, “[b)eneath his tip-tap-tap," and it is "she that responds" in this erotic exchange, like the wind and 132

sea that afternoon, in a meaningless, physical world.

Both poems recall “Blue Guitar" xix (CP 175) where

Stevens aligns the poet with bestial or "monster"

strength, and poetry with the sound of the now monstrous

lute, transformed descendent of the sweet-sounding lyre,

instrument of the gods. In all three instances, making

music, i.e. creating poems, is a vital physical act, of

"two together as one." In canto xvii (174) of "Blue

Guitar," the "soul, the mind" is confused with the blue

guitar, in that both instrument and mind are ambiguously

referred to as animals with fangs and claws that

"propound":

Speak of the soul, the mind. It is An animal. The blue guitar--

On that its claws propound, its fangs Articulate.

In canto xxiv, a poetical phrase is a "hawk of life." To

know it is to “meet the hawk's eye and to flinch/not at

the eye but at the joy of It" (178). Hawk of life,

another epithet for the poet, is like the "lion in the

lute," or, as in Jouga’s world, "a great jaguar running,"

for each image, in context, equates the imaginative or

poetic act--the making of music--with the real facts of

living in a physical world. In the living "instrument" which is the poem or the song, the so-called separate

forces called imagination and reality are conjoined, as 133 after

. . .long strumming on certain nights Gives the touch of the senses, not of the hand,

But the very senses as they touch The wind-gloss. Or as daylight comes,

Like light in a mirroring of cliffs, Rising upward from a sea of ex. (174-75)

The incorporation of mundane or earthly elements into

the texture of the composer/poet’s song is an instance of

Stevens’ "abstraction blooded," an audible fusion of

Apollonian/Orphean and Dionysian musical systems. Indeed,

a conspicuous feature of "Blue Guitar" is its stress on

the inclusion of so-called deviant or mutant harmonies,

rhythms, instrumental timbres, and melodies into the

usually harmonious, or traditional, "song" of the Romantic bard. "Peter Quince at the Clavier" (1915) and "The

Comedian as the Letter C” (1922) also demonstrate in part the concord/discord antithesis which constitutes the base of so many of Stevens' poems from Harmonium to The Rock.

The fusion I speak of should not be confused— and I stress this point--with the Romantic synthesis, or medley, like Coleridge’s "mingled measure," in which inhospitable or incongruous elements meet and harmonize, thus somehow destroying "in a chord," as Stevens’ musical metaphor puts 134 It, all sense of independence. Sounds that interact, or

interrelate, unlike those contained within the '■block,, of

a chord, says Stevens, are free to contradict the very

shape or system that created them. And poetry, at least

as Stevens* "new-Romantic" aesthetic defines it, should be

just as exempt from arbitrary restraint. Stevens is, 1

believe, making the analogy between the linear freedom of

melodic elements that develop contrapuntally as if they

were released from the constraints of a tonal system, and

the independent movement of something analogous to the

shaping spirit of the imagination," which, in a Stevens

poem moves according to it3 own laws. This digression

into the subject of concord--in its narrowest sense--as

opposed to discord--in its broadest sense--has been

necessary to illustrate that Stevens’ interest in

revitalizing old tropes required a broad commitment to

making distinctions between the "lucid souvenir of the

past,/The divertimento" and "the great wind howling" in

the present. Past and present coexist in the oxymoronic

piercing chords of the pianist/poet in "Mozart, 1935," as

he works into his "unclouded concerto" of the old Classic

master the cries, the "envious cachinnation" of a new

music (CP 131). In "Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz" that new

sound, replacing the mannered, outmoded, and heavily metered dance form, would come from some "harmonious

skeptic. . .in a skeptical music" (CP 122), while in "Blue 135

Guitar" the shearsman's tune of "things exactly as they are" would comprise a composition of infinitely variable, at times disagreeable, figures or voices "in the tune as if in space" (167). The musical effects in "Peter Quince at the Clavier," like those in the above examples, are both an index to theme and part of the theme itself. Edward Kessler’s perceptive analysis of the poem investigates, along with other matters, "the disparity between true musical form and the collection of noises that is often mistaken for art" (92). The aesthetic conflict, if we are to believe

Kessler, is between Susanna’s music and that of her elders--hers being more valuable for its "ever-youthful, ever-vital beauty" (OP 233). The two vie for dominance, as in a musical contest, or as if together they comprise a little orchestra playing their parts in the colorful assortment of strings, percussions, and winds. The little parable of Susanna and her elders re-enacts, in a setting not far-removed historically from the original, the musical contest between Apollo and Pan, in which Pan was forced to concede that his pipes were inferior to the sweet-sounding lyre. In his version, Stevens replaces the throaty sounds of the rustic pipe with the irrational

"throbs," "witching chords," and bruising "piszicati" of the bawdy bass strings; the crash of cymbals; the roar of horns; and the noise of tambourines. Susanna’s melodious 136 music--her choral, or sacred tune--accompanied on the

clear viol of her memory replaces the superior mythic

lyre. The point of the encounter between the maiden and her adversaries, however, is not simply to illustrate in the clash of two sonorities the superiority of one over the other, but rather to dramatise Stevens’ further point, in his essay "The Whole Man," that although form alone is ever-youthful and ever-vital, it must be perpetuated

"through generations of form." Its vigor, concludes

Stevens, "comes from those in whom the principle is active, so that generations of form come from generations of men" (OP 233).

In "Peter Quince" the active principle is embodied ironicallly in the clash between "Susanna, whose innocent imagination enables her to hear the music that marries her to her world, and the elders, whose sensuality and imaginative poverty limit them to physical sounds"

(Kessler, 92). Were it not, however, for the noisy, worldly intrusion of actual experience into Susanna’s

Blakean world of "[c]oncealed imaginings" and "old devotions," she, like Blake’s Thel, might have "fled back unhindered" (Blake, 6) into the safe, yet ignorant bliss of Platonic idealism, where

The winds were like her maids, On timid feet, Fetching her woven scarves, Yet wavering. (CP 9) 137

Susanna's beauty, her imaginative music, the "ever-vital"

form, the poem--all are nourished and recharged by the

inclusion of the physical world into the abstract poverty

of pure spirit. Susanna's music needs to be tested

against the "bawdy strings/Of those white elders" so that,

incarnate, it can exist in its immortal or "blooded" form.

Symbolized by the consortium of melody and ingenuous

emotion, Susanna’s lyrical music is apparently overpowered

by the unstructured noise of elemental chaos, symbolized

in the crash and roar, throb and scrape of Stevens’

orchestration. Her death, however, assures a

resurrection of her imaginative spirit; the memory of her

innocent song remains pure, like a "wave, interminably

flowing" (92). Only in the ritual of living could the

world of Susanna, the momentary and provisional one that

she sang and made, have become an ever-renewable source

of, as Quince puts it, "the selfsame sounds" that “On my

spirit make a music, too" (CP 89).

Stevens’ poem enacts, finally, the "fortunate fall"

in which the "monster rouses up, and unrolls its demented

existence--an existence that is merely the turmoil and the

undulation of a single, simple form" (Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art. 6). "The body dies; the body's beauty

lives": the dead form is quickened by the "cry of its occasion" (CP 473), and it is "like/A new knowledge of 138 reality” (CP 534). Similarly, the "dead shepherd" in

"Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" ("It Must Give Pleasure,"

398) and the "black shepherd" in "An Ordinary Evening in

New Haven, xxi"(CP 473)--both references to Orpheus-- function as audible resurrective figures in contrast to a form in decline. In "Notes" the dead shepherd's

"tremendous chords from hell" which "bade the sheep carouse" (400) are the counterforce to the mute tedium of a "face of stone in an unending red." In "Ordinary

Evening" xxi two musics--a romanza and an "alternate romanza"--comprise the single voice of combined wills.

The relationship of the two musics is equivalent to the give and take of conscious and unconscious will, and similar to the exchange of energy between Coleridge’s primary and secondary imaginations. The latter principle, according to both Stevens and Coleridge, "like the constant sound of the water and of the sea" (CP 480) is essentially vital, for it "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate" (Coleridge, "Biographia

Literaria," xiii). In the "hearing of the shepherd and his black forms" this non-objective imperative of pure sense identifies itself within "the centre, the object of the will, this place,/The things around" and "Out of the surfaces, the windows, the walls,/The bricks grown brittle in time's poverty,/The clear" (CP 480). Thus, to the two lyrical songs without words, the romanzas "distant and 139 near," Stevens has assigned equally significant

epistemological functions meant to obscure the

distinctions between the two1- imagination is an "interior

made exterior" and the "poet's search for the same

exterior made/interior" (CP 481). Its vital music can be

heard in "the boo-ha of the wind" (481).

Canto xxi of "Ordinary Evening" is, of course, only

one of thirty-one "meanings of sound" heard in Stevens’ not very ordinary set of improvisations that compose

"recent" imaginings of reality--version after version

"without regard to time or where we are" (466). In this

long poem Stevens is likely to shift modes as often as reality changes in the mind of the speaker or perceiver.

And, as in "Blue Guitar," each recent imagining should be considered a separate occasion for poetry, each occasion a performance, thus each performance a recomposition. My next chapter will address this matter of the proper form to contain the "and yet, and yet, and yet," and "Blue

Guitar" will be a necessary part of that discussion. My remaining comments will, therefore, take into account only those details that link the poem’s musical figures to my present focus.

The guitar player in "Blue Guitar" is probably the most well-known in a long line of Stevens' bardic personae. Before him, only Crispin attempts to tell the story so unique to Stevens-~the one about the poet’s 140 relation to what he consistently termed "reality" or things as they are. Crispin is a musician too, at least part of the time, but his status with his audience, or that part of the world not himself, is provisional at best. As I suggested elsewhere, Stevens--with the help of

Paul Rosenfeld’s critical essay on composer Eric Satie, of

R. L Stevenson’s "Providence and the Guitar," and perhaps even one or more of Satie’s pieces parodying the titles and musical directions common to Debussy's piano scores-- created in Crispin a musician who if nothing else performed with brio the "torments of confusion" (CP 27) that separate the novice from the virtuoso. Unlike the argumentative and persuasive guitar player in the later poem, or the mindful Hoon in the earlier one, Crispin is incapable, as the poem commences, of knowing "the whole of life" that still remains in him, the sound that dwindled to "one sound strumming in his ear." As Stevens’ musical epithets indicate, even as Crispin assumes the stance of conductor in the podium, peering over his ship and beholding himself in the "sea-glass," he is confined within the subscribed boundaries of aesthetic homophony,

"Polyphony beyond his baton’s thrust" (CP 28). This

"musician of pears," "lutanist of fleas," eventually, however, after recognizing himself in a gaggle of musics

(and other appositive figurations) ranging from "parrot- squaks" and "gigantic quavers" of thunder to the profoundeat brass of fugal requiems and "portentous

accents, syllables" of "music coming to accord," voyages

back and forth in dialectical confusion, as "between two

elements" (CP 35). Athough no longer limited by the

single-voiced distortions of romance, Crispin is by no

means, within the space of his odyssey, able to entertain

the polyvocal procedures that begin to announce Stevens1 more mature works. "Blue Guitar" is the first long poem composed in the manner of Stevens' meditative variations and improvisations that is able to reconcile the one voice in the multitude, with the many voices in the one. And

its persona--the indefatigable guitarist--earns the title of bard, although his audience apparently disappears soon after his performance begins, and hi3 technique belies a tradition of tuneful lyrics and orderly harmonies.

The poem is superficially an architechtonic wonder, its couplets, all 402 of them, only seeming to regulate the unruly substructure that I believe is the "true" shape of the whole piece. My next chapter, on variation and improvisation, will explore, among other matters, Stevens' method and rationale for the mutant design of "Blue

Guitar"--a form roughly equivalent to musical Theme and

Variation combined with Improvisation. The "mutation," however, is not defined wholly by variation in structural elements pertaining to word, phrase, line and stanza. One need only listen to what Stevens has done with the Orphean 142

instrument to appreciate how effectively instrumental

timbre both expresses and alters perceptions. Coleridge’s

"The Eolian Harp"— as well as Shelley's "Jane" poems--must

have been important to the guitarist whose intonations

would displace the ineffective romance of the lyric.

Coleridge’s musical trope identifies an external source

for the unifying power of imagination:

And that simplest Lute, Placed length-ways in the clasping casement, hark! How by the desolutory breeze caress'd, Like some coy maid half yielding to her lover, It pours such sweet upbraiding, as must needs Tempt to repeat the wrong! And now, its strings Boldlier swept, the long sequacious notes Over delicious surges sink and rise, Such a soft floating witchery of sound. . . Methinks, it should have been impossible Not to love all things in a world so fill'd; Where the breeze warbles, and the mute still air Is Music slumbering on her instrument. . . .

And what if all of animated nature Be but organic Harps diversely fram'd That tremble into thought, as o ’er them sweeps

Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of all? (400)

Just as he decomposes Keats’s evasive trope of the singing nightingale into a tragi-comedy performed by a motley crew of blackbirds, grackles, crows, and other local songsters,

Stevens turns Coleridge’s and Shelley's respectable strings into versions better suited to the occasion. His music, after all, must traverse the entire range of 143 thought and emotion heard and felt in the rhythms and gestures of the present moment.

The composer begins to speak his mind to his audience in canto ii of “Blue Guitar" when he quickly points out that the "serenade"--the romantic fiction--should not be confused with reality. In canto iii, the poet’s ambivalent though realistic attitude toward reaching the center of man is audible in the savage jangle of metal strings. Next, his aversion to non-variable, limiting systems turns the many-stringed guitar into the one- stringed, single minded buzz of a million people, like

“flies in autumn air." In canto v, the guitar chatters the rhetoric of ‘ ourselves’' protesting the romance of

"empty heaven and its hymns." By canto vii the poet’s candid horror of alienation renders his guitar strings cold--silent. In the next canto the poet’s "cold chords" translate to a "lazy, leaden twang" of reason, the ordering agent in the storm of abstraction. A drum-roll from the blue guitar confronts the slick trombone's "hoo- ing" in canto x, as the poet laments the collective misery of a people disenchanted with the politics of heroism.

For the most part, "Blue Guitar" proceeds according to this pattern of antithesis without synthesis, the guitar’s strings fashioning just about every combination of timbres and positions available to the player’s ever- assertive imagination. Occasionally, as in xii, the blue 144

guitar and the composer are one; at other times they are

at odds with each other, and the poet feels no need of the

artform in the life of love and one’s ideas: "Poor pale,

poor pale guitar." And sometimes for several cantos the

guitar player seems to have forgotten his instrument, for

he slips into a mode of communication devoid of auditory

sensation, as if testing alternatives "between issue and

return" (xxii).

Other music makers begin to inhabit space in the

"Blue Guitar" after canto xxvii, when the poet realises himself in the world; by the end of the canto his performance has gained him sufficient status to announce,

Here I inhale profounder strength And as I am, 1 speak and move

And things are as I think they are And say they are on the blue guitar.

Finally, in the next three cantos the poet is both visibly and audibly dispersed within the reality of religious, social, and economic circumstance: in the "bells' that are the "bellowing of bulls" (xxix), in the "supporting heavy cables, slung" (like mute guitar strings) through "Oxidia, banal suburb" (xxx), and in the shriek of the cock-bird overlooking the "droll" affair, "no place. . .for the lark fixed in the mind,/In the museum of the sky" (xxxi).

Having first reaffirmed the self, and then having confronted, as Riddel notes, "the reality, the violent, 145 toxic 'Oxidia,’ which is what we have today instead of the mythological 'Olympia,'" and "man as he is" (146) in the old fantoche "Hanging his shawl upon the wind,/Like something on the stage, puffed out" (CP 181), the guitarist/poet is heard again in "nuances" (xxxi). The poet’s discovery, that "Horning is not sun," but "this posture of the nerves" that may or may not be lived in the imagination, inspires his last note on the guitar, his

"rhapsody of things as they are" (CP 183). The qualified lyricism of this final sound— the free-spirited musical form of the rhapsody measured by "a generation’s dream, aviled/In the mud. . .Time in its final block" or a

"wrangling of two dreams"--is, however, the only choice for the poet who would think of the poetic self "as the only creator of order in this turmoil of a world" (Riddel,

147). We, our poems, ourselves, Stevens concludes, must exist in the rhythms of change, in the reality of modern industrial Oxidia; we must listen to the whirling noise of the multitude, and we must struggle in doubt through emotional and spiritual wastelands. But in the poem, the instrument in which "You are yourself," nothing must stand between "you and the shapes you take/When the crust of shape has been destroyed" (CP 183). After all, there are

"moments when we [may] choose to play/The imagined pine, the imagined jay" (CP 184). And with each choice, "a perspective that begins again" (CP 528), CHAPTER IV;

A NEW RESEMBLANCE

"Now the idea of the artist is form. . . .his special privilege is to imagine, to recollect, to think, and to feel in forms. This conception must be extended to its uttermost limit, and it must be extended in two directions. 1 do not say that form is the allegory or the symbol of feeling, but, rather, its innermost activity. Form activates feeling. Let us say, if you like, that art not only clothes sensibility with a form, but that art also awakens form in sensibility. . .Between nature and man form intervenes. The Life of Forms in Art Henri Focillon

This chapter on variation and improvisation--the dominant modes chosen by Wallace Stevens to communicate his philosophy of art--opens with Focillon’s quotation in order that I may reconcile several misconceptions which unfortunately have led some readers to separate expression of mind (thought, emotion) from perpetuation of form in

Stevens’ poetry. Consistently, however, Stevens acknowledges the premise implicit in Focillon's remark, that the exchange between form and feeling is both reciprocal and generative. From the very first poem published in The Collected Poems ("Earthy Anecdote") to the last ("Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing

Itself") Stevens, with almost annoying insistence, reflects upon the activity of "the human mind creating the

146 147

forms of the world in which it lives," as Joseph Riddel so

aptly theorizes. In The Clairvoyant Eye. Riddel's

perceptive analysis of Stevens' ‘book" that "coheres to

the unifying self from which all forms issue" explains the

contention that in Stevens

[tjhe minor exercises, the casual asides, along with the stately, elaborating, enlarging meditations-- this collage of perceptions and thoughts, images and metaphors--finally compose their separate occasions into the continuous and developing life of the mind. (8)

Although in his study Riddel approaches the poems

individually and chronologically, his interest is with the

consortium, or "continuous life of the whole." Like

Focillon, Riddel seems to regard manner, style, technique

as fundamental elements of knowledge that reiterate a

creative process, and not as mere instruments of the

"garment and vehicle of the subject-matter," mistakenly

defined as form ( Focillon, 36). Thus, both philosopher

and critic, along with Stevens, define form as process,

making no clear distinction between being and becoming,

or, as Stevens habitually described it, reality and

imagination. To summarize, "form" then, as I understand

Stevens’ usage of the term based on Focillon, is simply

"the variation between the sound of words in one age and the sound of words in another" (NA 13). The poetic world of forms is living, each poem creating a "fresh universe out of nothingness by adding itself" (CP 517). Like the word "time," "form" is a descriptive

analogue for a concept, a metaphor, attached symbolically

to the cumulative effects of motion. Both terms are

simple measuring devices, which, like Eliot's "objective

correlative," exist only (at least for the duration of

this discussion) as linquistic phenomena, like the poet’s

words that are, says Stevens, "of things that do not exist

without the words" (NA 32). Another analogy, a musical

one, comes to mind. For example, in music no such thing

or object as "a measure" exists apart from the arbitrary

placement of a vertical "bar-line," used first sometime

near the end of the sixteenth century for the convenience

of reading difficult vocal and instrumentally scored

contrapuntal arrangements. Stevens' "The Pure Good of

Theory” also comes to mind, portions of which give

credence, for the moment, to that ultimate abstraction, time:

It is time that beats in the breast and it is time That batters against the mind, silent and proud, The mind that knows it is destroyed by time.

Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse Without a rider on a road at night. The mind sits listening and hears it pass.

It is someone walking rapidly in the street. The reader by the window has finished his book And tells the hour by the lateness of the sounds.

Even the breathing is the beating of time, in kind: A retardation of its battering, A horse grotesquely taut, a walker like

A shadow in mid-earth. . .If we propose 149

A large-sculptured, Platonic person, free from time, And imagine for him the speech he cannot speak,

A form, then, protected from the battering, may Mature: A capable being may replace Dark horse and walker walking rapidly.

Felicity,ah! Time is the hooded enemy, The inimical music, the enchantered space In which the enchanted preludes have their place. (CP 330)

So it is no more than a bit of magic--and I believe the irony is clear--"this descant of a self,/This barbarous chanting of what is strong, this blare" (CP 191).

Stevens' fundamental belief in "this and that in the enclosures of hypothesis"--the "in-bar/Exquisite in poverty against the suns/Of ex-bar"--shares, in a paradoxical sense, the modern musician's resentment against the tyranny of the bar-line that he himself invented. Like the modern musician, whose art is regulated by rhythmic, as opposed to mensural, stress and relaxation (I think of Charles Ives), the poet speculates within an ostensible boundary. His so-called form, moreover, can never be defined, for "if it is defined," says Stevens, "it will be fixed and it must not be fixed."

Like "nobility," the topic of Stevens’ "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,“ form "resolves itself into an enormous number of vibrations, movements, changes," and to fix it (to objectify it) would be "to put an end to it" 150 (NA 34) . '“Let me show it to you unfixed," iterates

Stevens, and to my mind, this request is at the base of

what X would prefer to call Stevens’ principle of

developing variation. I borrow the phrase from Arnold

Schoenberg’s searching analysis of Brahms’s music in

"Brahms the Progressive"; my subsequent discussion of

developing variation in Stevens will return to Schoenberg

and Brahms relative to the poet’s apparent reliance on

musical variation techniques. For now, a brief look at

"Owl’s Clover" should help elucidate my own theoretical

base.

"The Old Woman and the Statue" and "Mr. Burnshaw and

the Statue" are companion poems from the lengthy five-part poem "Owl’s Clover" published in O p u s Posthumous. Although

"Owl’s Clover" is habitually repudiated by critics because of its haphazard (and unsuccessful) aim to discredit

Marxist aesthetics, the first two poems in the collection are the best examples I can find in Stevens of a non­ musical formula resolving into its "enormous number of vibrations, movements, changes." The statue (the figure appears in each of the five poems) was to Stevens the centerpoint of "Owl’s Clover"; and although it was a symbol, it was, as Stevens writes to Ronald Latimer in May of 1936, a "variable symbol." The statue, continues

Stevens, "is not always society, but it always has a social aspect, so to speak" (L 311). In the first two 151 poems of "Owl's Clover" that variable symbol is quickened by the resonance of a collision between the "harridan self" of the former poem and the "infantine" self of the latter.

The second poem, the chromatically sumptuous (almost rococo) "Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue" (1935) is one of

Stevens’ more conspicuous shows of music’s power

(specifically its physical component) to "unfix" the shape regulated first by the woman in "The Old Woman and the

Statue":

So much the sculptor had foreseen- autumn The sky above the plaza widening Before the horses, clouds of bronze imposed On clouds of gold, and green engulfing bronze, The marble leaping in the storms of light So much he had devised. . . . (OP 43) and subsequently by

The rotten leaves [that] Swirled round them in immense autumnal sounds.

Again,

. . .her he had not foreseen: the bitter mind In a flapping cloak. . . .

For the "golden clouds that turned to bronze, the sounds/Descending, did not touch the woman’s eye and left/Her ear unmoved" (OP 43-44). In her poverty of imagination, the "mass of stone collapsed to marble hulk,/Stood stiffly, as if the black of what she 152

thought/Conflicting with the moving colors there/Changed

them" (44). Only she could have let fly the group of

marble horses on wings that in perspective "flatness [had]

disappeared." But the old woman’s mood

. .had become so fixed it was A manner of the mind, a mind in a night That was whatever the mind might make of it, A night that was that mind so magnified It lost the common shape of night and came To be the sovereign shape in a world of shapes. A woman walking in the autumn leaves, Thinking of heaven and earth and of herself And looking at the place in which she walked, As a place in which each thing was motionless Except the thing she felt but did not know.

v .

Without her, evening like a budding yew Would soon be brilliant, as it was, before The harridan self and ever-maladive fate

Went crying their desolate syllables, before Their voice and the voice of the tortured wind were one. . .

[and] . . .the horses would rise again, Yet hardly to be seen and again the legs Would flash in air, and the muscular bodies thrust Hoofs grinding against the stubborn earth. . . (OP 45-46)

But, of course, no such vibration or movement of thought

occurs, no "dark-belted sorcerers" untrouble that which

"fate assigns/To the moment," and the well-intentioned

sculptor’s work is consigned to the "atmosphere in which the horses rose,/This atmosphere in which [the old 153

woman’s] musty mind/Lay black and full of black misshapen"

(OP 44).

The next poem in the series exploits music's power to

awaken the mute shapes, "unfixing," as Stevens would say,

the old woman’s locally valid, albeit motionless poverty of mind and emotion. In "Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue," young female dancers--unadorned, infantine--called variously by celestial paramours, maidens, mesdames, damsels, are commanded to perform for the "horses as they were in the sculptor’s mind" the appropriate dances and songs that would seize the "possible blue" of "now" (OP

51). The dancing, singing children--"ballet infantine"-- exist to negate the powerful old woman of the "flapping cloak" in the former poem. These young dancers can potentially transform the archaic and useless form (the statue, the woman) with gestures suitably mocking the

"meaningless sound" (44) and "desolate syllables" (45) of the park’s autumnal immensity.

Stevens' damsels (usually referred to as muses),

"weaving ring in radiant ring" (OP 51), recall another group of restorative female figures--musicians all, youthful, adroit: the Graces who dance in a ring on top of

Mount Acidale in Book vi of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.

Stevens knew and appreciated Elizabethan poetry and music, and Spenser was a favorite. But Stevens’ dancers bear an ironic relation to Spenser’s Graces. Their step is 154 awkward, disorderly, uncomposed, and they are real, "of the breathing earth." Unlike the maidens of Sir

Calidore's pastoral vision, Stevens’ dancers decompose, with mortal lullabies, the crumbling, "gawky plaster" of antique artifice, while their childish bodies conceive the reconstituted dance and song that will restore the "heads

[that] are severed, topple, tumble, tip/In the soil and rest" (OP 51-52). Their speech finally shall manifest the reality of the form transformed from porcelain cry and alto clank to "speech of the spirit"--"feelings changed to sound" (52).

That sound, incidentally, reaches, as both Roger

Sessions (see my Chapter 1) and Stevens have said, to a reservoir containing the musical archetype, human in origin, and not always recognisable beneath the accretions of artifice. Indeed, it is only the emotionally charged speech--what Helen Vendler calls the "ballooning music"

(On Extended Wings. 80)--that will revive the wind-beaten vestiges of form. "It is only enough/To live incessantly in change," and so the old woman’s "ear unmoved” is figuratively opened to the transforming bravado of youth-- the chant, the lullaby, the cry, the awkward step and strut of the "variable symbol."

Thus the form is not a static object. The statue in the park is consistently "molested" by the interpreting spectator, and, as Focillon says so assuredly, that 155

process is “merely the turmoil and the undulation of a

single, simple form." In "Auroras of Autumn" that

single, simple form is the serpent, "the bodiless" whose head is air, that other "wriggling out of the egg,/Another

image at the end of the cave." The serpent is the perfect symbol to enact the incessant cycle of formula giving way to process:

This is form gulping after formlessness, Skin flashing to wished-for disappearances And the serpent body flashing without the skin. . .

This is his poison: that we should disbelieve Even that. His meditations in the ferns, When he moved so slightly to make sure of sun,

Made us no less as sure. We saw in his head, Black beaded on the rock, the flecked animal, The moving grass, the Indian in his glade. (CP 412)

"Auroras of Autumn" is Stevens* grand and somber prelude to decomposition, throughout which a Mahlerian echo,

“Farewell to an idea," perpetuates those "velocities of change" that have been, like the auroras of the poem's title, “enlarging the change,/With its frigid brilliances, its blue-red sweeps/And gusts of great enkindlings."

In even the least significant of Stevens* poems these embellishments of visual/auditory motion defy the unvarying composition, the poem that seems to develop strictly according to constructive principles to the detriment of the expressive component. For example, 156 "Earthy Anecdote" (CP 3), admittedly a poem with "a good

deal of theory about it" (L 204), is an exact replica in

metaphor of the seeming continuity of conscious thought.

What we think of as a great uninterrupted flow of inner

experience is really an illusion. Thought, taking place

within the mundane boundaries of our existence here on

earth, is being consistently (and covertly) modified, just

as "Every time the bucks went clattering/Over Oklahoma/A

firecat bristled in the way."

Stevens’ little anecdote has no shape other than the

rhythmic "swerve" of buck meeting firecat, ab libitum.

Its five stanzas, each containing a different number of

lines in the eccentric pattern of 3-6-4-5-2; its lines,

nine with masculine, the remainder with feminine endings,

and all but two enjambed; its erratic measure (fluctuating

monometer, dimeter, trimeter, tetrameter) create a syntax

approximating the actual dramatic and discontinuous

experience of thought. Only when "the firecat closets]

his bright eyes" does the formula change, but Stevens has

purposefully ended his poem right on the brink of this

other topic. Closure, the only full stop in the poem,

occurs at that point of differentiation between consciousness and the state of mind associated with sleep,

or perhaps, death:

Later, the firecat closed his bright eyes And slept. 157

As "Earthy Anecdote" and some other early poems

indicate, Stevens leaned toward a style that would afford

him the opportunity to develop a theme or motive (or

smaller element) episodically or incrementally, in the

manner of musical variations or improvisations. "Earthy

Anecdote's" incremental variations of descriptive terms

indicating movement of a certain quality (clatter,

bristle, swerve, leap) is one example of linguistic and

rhythmic modification. Another is "Waving Adieu" (CP

127), a tedious set of variations on the word "farewell."

But Stevens wished for more than the simple shifting about

of vowels, consonants, words, and phrases. His interest

was the prodigious demonstration of "developing variation"

as a universal paradigm, a model, moveover, which by

definition defied the regulative principles of Platonic

idealism (or any other ideology for that matter). Nothing

withstood the decomposer’s imagination: not language,

thought, emotion, psychology, art, religion, politics, philosophy. And, musician/poet that he was, the so-called

forms of music became not only metaphors of process, but also process itself: the musical idea assimilated into the poetic, the poetic into the musical.

Musical forms are found everywhere in Stevens. Some are non-vocal: the march, ballet, waltz, and the general

"dance." The larger group, the vocalists, intone chorals, 15B

dithyrambs, descants, cantatas, canzones, choruses,

carols, chants, chansons, hymns, madrigals, rounds,

refrains, duets, operas, and other non-specific "songs"

and cries. For the most part, instrumental forms include

the canon, ground, fugue, divertimento, sonata, serenade,

prelude, cadenza, rhapsody, variation, improvisation. Occasionally, forms overlap: a serenade can be sung, a fugue "hummed," a refrain "strummed." And now and then the musical form is implied, but not named. "Ploughing on

Sunday" (CP 20), for instance, is a little piece of folk music, a ballad, except for its lack of narrative development:

The white cock’s tail Tosses in the wind The turkey-cock’s tail Glitters in the sun

Water in the fields. The wind pours down. The feathers flare And bluster in the wind.

Remus, blow your horn! I ’m ploughing on Sunday, Ploughing North America. Blow your horn! Tum-ti-turn, Ti-tum-tum-tum! The turkey-cock’s tail Spreads to the sun.

The white cock’s tail Streams to the moon. Water in the fields. The wind pours down. A folk ballad Is usually meant to be suns; thus, it

is mostly written in common meter (4-3-4-3), its stanzas

following the pattern of alternating tetrameter with

trimeter lines, and usually four to a unit. Stevens

varies the traditional form to 3-2-3-2 (trimeter,

dimeter); moreover, rhythmic rather than metrical stress

produces the A,B stanzaic consonance. And, unlike the

traditional balladeer's, Stevens' mnemonic devices

challenge rather than assist the memory. There are

several instances of exact line repetition, but they occur haphazardly, as do rhymes and other associational

increments. Only the middle stanza is simple enough to

stay in the ear, but one is tempted nonetheless to tack on the first two lines of the next stanza ("Tum-ti-tum,/Ti- tum-tum-tum!"), which logically belong to the former as

instances of the horn’s sound. With such a revision the last stanza would begin with "The turkey-cock’s tail," and so forth, becoming the last of four and commencing in a reversal of the first. My point in further varying

Stevens’ own variation on the ballad is to stress the fact that no matter what form Stevens chooses, he manages to undo its symmetry (such as denying the aforementioned poem a predictable refrain, as I have done).

"The Jack-Rabbit" (CP 50) is another short folk piece in which "caracoles," or half-turns, function meta­ phorically to describe a peculiar variant of folk wisdom. 160

The parodic voice is a jack-rabbit’s, caroling the simple-

minded, ornamental version of the shortened musical trill,

a diction wholly inappropriate to the "Arkansaw" situation

of death and winding sheets. Stevens wrote many of these

little folkish, dramatic poems--often called anecdotes--

which, like so many others, usually focus on some aspect

of change, such as the artful mind's assimilation of the

‘slovenly wilderness" (CP 76), or the "normal" poetic mind’s stay against the madness of the dream vision1-

"Berserk,/In the moonlight/On the bushy plain" (CP 57).

No matter the form, however, like the divertimento in

"Mozart, 1935," the outlines of figures, large and small, thematic and constructive, submit to the decomposer’s

special aptitude for multiformity.

This special aptitude has been noted by an

interesting assortment of Stevens scholars and critics— and even by Stevens himself--all of whom comment on

Stevens' appropriation of musical forms. I prefer to introduce their comments chronologically according to publication date, as well as to withhold my own remarks until each voice is heard. First, a few remembrances from

Stevens’ letters. Writing in 1922 to Harriet Monroe about the difficulty of composing the long poem (he was thinking of "Comedian"), Stevens worried over the rudimentary:

"Only if requires a skill in the varying of the serenade that occasionally makes one feel like a Guatemalan when 161 one particularly wants to feel like an Italian" (L 230).

In a 1935 letter to Ronald Latimer Stevens said, "I don’t have ideas that are permanently fixed. My conception of what I think a poet should be and do changes, and I hope, constantly grows" (L 269). "You know better than I do how much improvisation there is in any phase of aesthetics, or, rather, in anything that has an aesthetic phase,"

Stevens writes to Hi Simons in 1941; again, in 1943, the poet says it another way: "In this monotony the desire for change creates change. . . .This dead shepherd was an improvisation. What preceded it in the poem made it necessary, like music that evolves for internal reasons and not with reference to an external program" (438).

Joseph Riddel remarks frequently on Stevens' preference for variations upon romantic forms, images, and attitudes. Even in the poet’s essays, argues Riddel, his most effective strategy

. . .is to begin with the illustration (like a sensation) and proceed inductively and indirectly with startling shifts and returns that distill the sentiment. The procedure is deliberately repetitious, wrapping a thought in qualifications and exempla, until, as in meditation, one arrives at the epigrams or capsule ideas that are a kind of order. . . .(The Clairvoyant Eve. 24)

And finally, Stevens relates himself to his world “by ingesting its flow of appearances and transforming sensation into the rhythms and forms of his own sensibility. He seeks identity. . .in conjunction with a 162 vital, not a static, world" (27). Riddel's book conveys

much more concerning Stevens’ idiom, but always the

critic's remarks settle on exploration and revision and

the periodic renewal of ideas that merge in all of the

poet's works, prose or poetry.

J. Hillis Miller's helpful, and by now definitive,

chapter on Stevens from his Poets of Reality is so full of

commentary on Stevens’ "endlessly variable perspectives"

(225)--one of which I have already mentioned--that it

becomes appropriate at this point to include only those

remarks that distinguish modes of variability. Miller

speaks not only of variation, but of improvisation.

Referring to "Sea Surface Full of Clouds," Miller is

defining the method of the writer of the variation proper,

or the traditional musical variant attached to a theme or motive:

The scene changes and the imagination changes and this double change creates each moment a new aspect of the thing. Every novel conjunction may be crystallized in a poem, but in order to keep up with the fluctuations of reality the poet must make poem after poem. That there are five versions is just an accident. There might have been fifteen or twenty-five or five hundred and five. The combinations of imagination and reality can never be exhausted, and the final lines of the poem affirm the power of sea and sky to go on producing "fresh transfigurings" of the scene. (240)

The premise here is that if “reality" is a matter of

exploring the "permutations of an infinitely variable 163 equation,” one could go on indefinitely, endlessly

elaborating, until the imagination tires. Later, however,

Miller includes "improvisation" in his analysis and

interpretation of Stevens' works, apparently preferring

not to distinguish improvisation from variation, as he has

defined both terms. The subject is Stevens' late poems:

The music of Stevens’ later work is certainly that of a voice intoning. The completely finished unity of the early poems, which makes many of them seem like elaborately wrought pieces of jewelry, is gradually replaced by poems which are open-ended improvisations, created from moment to moment by the poet’s breath. They begin in the middle of a thought, and their ending is arbitrary. (260)

The group of poems entitled "Sea Surface Full of Clouds" was written in 1924, relatively early in Stevens’ career, yet Miller seems unaware of the fact that the set of variations, like any of several of Stevens' late poems, is

just as open-ended as the improvisations he describes. Is variation, then, improvisation? Are there incremental differences between these confusing musical terms as the critic uses them to describe Stevens* methodology?

Helen Vendler recognizes Stevens' themes as familiar ones, but adds that "his poetry produces them in a new form, chiefly in an elaborately mannered movement of thought, which changes very little in the course of the

Collected Poems" (On Extended Wings. 13). Sounding even more unlike Miller, Vendler adds that Stevens tends to be 164 notoriously "narrow" in subject, "as he realized in having

frequent recourse to a form that approximates the musical theme with variations" (14). "How close," says Stevens in

"Thinking of a Relation Between the Images of Metaphors"

(CP 356-67), "To the unstated theme each variation comes. . ./In that one ear it might strike perfectly:/State the disclosure." Has Stevens chosen a form approximating the musical theme with variations because of a failure of imagination, as Vendler implies, or has his search for the thing not yet found or even known necessitated his appropriation of the form?

Vendler chooses to go no further toward clarifying her usage of musical theme with variations terminology.

Nor does Northrop Frye in "Wallace Stevens and the

Variation Form" really do much more than state the obvious, although he does understand more deeply the musician’s sense of "progressive" form and the fact of

Stevens* having lived with that same sense. Frye seems to be heading toward a musical/poetical analysis of variation forms as he begins his essay on Stevens:

We cannot read far in Wallace Stevens’s poetry without finding examples of a form that reminds us of the variation form in music, in which a theme is presented in a sequence of analogous but differing settings. (269)

Speaking in the same paragraph of "Thirteen Ways of

Looking at a Blackbird," Frye pursues the musical analogy a bit further by suggesting that perhaps the common theme

of the blackbird "gives more the effect of a chaconne or

passacaglia" (How? 1 would ask). And, more interesting,

Frye finally makes the unique assertion that in Stevens

sometimes "the explicit theme is missing and only the

variations appear, as in 'Like Decorations in a Nigger

Cemetery.1" And he notes, as does Miller, that in some of

Stevens' longer works there is a "curious formal symmetry,

which cannot be an accident, [and which] also reminds us

of the classical variation form in which each variation

has the same periodic structure and harmonic sequence."

Even the numbers, says Frye--and Miller is just as

observant--"that often turn up remind us of the thirty

Goldberg variations, the thirty-three Diabelli waltz

variations, and so on" (276). And finally, after an

informative analysis of Stevens’s outline of variation

form in "Someone Puts a Pineapple Together" (NA 86) and of

Stevens’ remarks on his own "Variations on a Summer Day,"

Frye commences to drop the musical analogy altogether.

John Hollander's ear, as "restless" as Stevens’ and

as discriminating as well, and ever keen to the musical program, assesses the poet (all poets) with the prosodist’s musico-rhetorical interest. At one point in

"The Sound of Music" Hollander examines what he considers a weakness in Stevens, a tautological failure: 166

The danger of changing and changing only to achieve this ungenerous and ungenerating situation is inherent in the unending process of variation in Stevens* "music." Whether this concerns figurations of sound, or what they are synecdochic for (the figurative life that has become more than merely figuration), or the rhetorical music that seems to embody the figurations--Stevens' restless ear is always able to agitate what it is hearing, and his tunes, of whatever sort, never rise to tautological purity. There is a hint of this problem in the questioning of the pianism of B. in "Esth^tique du Mai"-’ . . .

There are monotonies of variation as well, and Stevens is constantly revising his own mode of variation, backtracking when necessary, denying significance of the wrong or easy sort, emptying a sound of sense in order to refill it. (250-251)

Marjorie Perloff recognizes Stevens’ "unending

process of variation" as a "predilection for qualifiers,"

but hardly a failure. In her discussion of Ashbery,

Perloff suggests that the Stevens modifier, what I call

the "and yet," what Hollander would call "backtracking,"

is agitated, saved from indeterminacy, by its referential quality:

Yet even in this early "Stevensian" poem, Ashbery turns the Stevens mode on its head by cutting off the referential dimension. "Two Scenes" is not like, say, "Credences of Summer," the reverie of a particular speaker who "meditates/With the gold bugs, in blue meadows, late at night," the time being midsummer when "the mind lays by its trouble and considers," it being "a long way/To the first autumnal inhalations."

Ashbery’s poem rejects any such continuities. "Two Scenes" presents us with "clear visual images". . .but Ashbery’s. . .have no discernible referents. (266-67) 167

Like Perloff, Dinah Pladott acknowledges &

"Stevensian signature"--the "continuities"--in the manner

of the poet’s avoiding the redundancies so common to the

writer of variations, motifs either slightly altered or in

elaborated forms. She writes of the musical organization

of "Esthetique du Mai":

The basic constituent of "Esthetique du Mai" is not the fragmented aphorism or epigram, nor the insular image; it is a unit which recalls the musical "motif." Stevens spins the series of fifteen poems, or cantos, from a group of basic motifs, or thematic threads, which are rooted in the topic of the poem. As we read each individual stanza or canto, our attention is captured by the manner in which these motifs are interwoven, following the musical operation of repetition, modulation and variations on a single note. . .

Motifs undergo modulation and reformulation while they link the cantos and advance the argument, so that they simultaneously establish a referential and poetic kinship. . .in the poems. Moreover, the recurrence of the motifs in other poems serves to establish a typical Stevensian signature which, like the Mozartian sound, immediately strikes the ear. Needless to say, such a musical arrangement places a heavy burden on the artist’s imaginative ability. Mere mechanical repetition of motifs, without sufficient variation, would result in a monotonous, boring work. Stevens’ mastery enables him to modulate his motifs often, so that each variation seems novel and fresh. (67-68)

Joining Pladott, and the others, Alden Turner (in

"Wallace Stevens: 'The Man with the Blues Guitar’") comments on Stevens’ appropriation of the musical form: 168 The tension between confinement and liberation, form and freedom, in "The Man with the Blue Guitar" suggests classical theme and variations techniques of composition, but the improvisatory quality of Stevens’ poetry is more characteristic of the folk performer who does not so much create as give order and meaning to material learned in a particular way and expressed in relation to conventions that attend a specific style or piece. (48)

In summary, Riddel, Miller, Vendler, Frye, Hollander, Perloff, Pladott, and Turner all acknowledge not only

Stevens’ preference for writing "variations," but they

also form a consensus attesting to Stevens’ mastery of a

quasi-musical form historically concerned with

exploration, revision, and qualification, or, as Miller

says, with "the fluctuations of reality." But, with the

possible exception of Frye, no one inquires into the

musical basis for Stevens’ deliberately repetitious

strategies, nor does anyone, including Frye, distinguish

between variation and improvisation. Miller uses both

terms, but my reading of Miller can find no satisfactory

explanation of a difference between the two. In light of what may be an oversight, I suggest taking a closer look

at the musical sources for Stevens' usage of the so-called

"theme with variations" and also examining in detail what have been perhaps incautiously labeled "improvisations" in the Stevens canon. My own sense of musical terminology is the musicologist’s, who recognizes crucial differences between variation forms, e.g. "classical" and "free." I contend that Stevens was fully aware of such distinctions, 169 and I further contend that he had something else in mind than simply variation when he wrote that the

"improvisation” which was the "dead shepherd" was the result of an intratextual "desire for change."

On the most rudimentary level, "the variation" is recognized by musicologists as the "theme with variations." The form presents a musical idea (or theme)

"in an arbitrary number of modifications (from 4 to 30 or more), each of these being a 'variation’" (Apel, 782).

Variations can be independent compositions, whole works such as Bach’s Goldberg Variations or Brahms's Variations on a Theme by Handel. or Beethoven’s Dlabelli Variations: or segments of larger works, such as the Passacaglia fourth movement from Brahms’s Fourth Symphony and the andante con moto second movement of Beethoven’s Sonata No.

20, entitled "Appassionata." There also exist those variations "whose theme is not a complete tune but is only a four- or eight-measure scheme of harmonies or a bass line of the same length" (702). The fundamental difference between what Apel defines as the "two classes of variations" he expresses by the terms sectional variations and continuous variations. One need not be a professional to recognize the principle of variation at work in musical compositions of either class. But the 170

larger pieces labeled "theme and variations," whose original melody and harmonic scheme is often preserved from beginning to end and whose distinctive variational feature is frequently rhythmic, are the ones laypersons frequently call "classical theme and variations."

There is, however, another category of variation whose elements do not necessarily observe melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic stability (all elements of theme).

Some of the entirely free variations of modern composers fit this category, modifications in form such as

"variations in the reverse," in which a theme appears at the end of a work rather than the beginning (Vincent d * Indy* s Istar Variations). Cesar Franck’s Symphonic

Variations for piano and orchestra (1885) are an earlier instance of the free variation’s "continuous" program, which in this case makes no obvious distinction between component variations. In the Franck work there are no interruptions between variations, and few easily recognized indications of where one version ends and the other begins. Robert Nelson's analysis of the Symphonic

Variations distinguishes it3 type clearly from the

"sectional" variations familiar to the classicists:

. . .the plan of sections and phrases contained in the given thematic material has been abandoned, for the most part; and the ensuing elaboration is, to use H. C. Colles’s words, "rhapsodic" and "generally in the nature of a free development." (The Technique of Variation, 112) 171

Other less drastic but innovative modifications began

to appear even earlier in the works of Brahms, changes

that have accorded him the name of "progressive" by

Schoenberg and various music critics, changes that I

suggest "tickled" the discerning ear of Stevens as he sat

listening most evenings in the presence of his cherished

gramophone and the vast collection of recordings used to

supplement his infrequent visits from Hartford to the New

York concert halls. In 1935 Beethoven and Brahms were two

of Stevens' favorites:

I sit down every evening after dinner and, after a little music, put my forefinger in the middle of my forehead and struggle with my imagination. The results have been quite shocking. . . .

Writing poetry is a conscious activity. While poems may very well occur, they had very much better be caused. If all this is true, then it may be that in a few weeks time my imagination will be such a furnace that 1 can stroll home from the office and fill the house with the most iridescent notes while 1 am brushing my hair, say, or changing to the slippers that are so appropriate to the proper enjoyment of Beethoven and Brahms on the gramophone. (L 274)

Stevens’ reference to his method for composing poems

suggests that he was, as I have said, certainly aware of the difference between an activity extemporised, done quickly with little effort, and one crafted to appear as

if it were so. Thus, the term "improvisation" is 172 apparently as Important to Stevens as it is to my present

discussion of the variation form. Stevens would not have

used variation and improvisation interchangeably, for as

my earlier remark about the dead shepherd in "Notes"

indicates, the terms, as modes of change, were distinct

from although not exclusive of each other. The

improvisation, as a musical form, is not necessarily a

variant of anything--theme, motive, harmonic sequence,

rhythmic formula. Nor is the theme and variations necessarily an improvisation, although the form in the era of Mozart and Haydn lent itself to prodigious exhibitions of improvisatory skill on the part of the performer.

Improvisation has several meanings according to Apel

(The Harvard Dictionary of Music. 351-52). First, it is the art of performing music in a way that the music becomes "an immediate reproduction of simultaneous mental processes, that is, without the aid of manuscript, sketches, or memory." One thinks, again, of Mozart's or

Bach's legendary skill at this lost art. Improvised details may also be artfully introduced into a written composition; this second type of improvisation is the one more likely to be heard in this century, and it is especially crucial to the performance of certain types of contemporary jazz. The usage of extemporization in jazz jam sessions has no doubt helped to confuse the boundaries between variation and improvisation, for more often than not the jazz musician is improvising on an "ostinato bass

figure" or some other thematic element (a melody or

motive) which is retained throughout the improvised part ,

of the composition. Naturally, too, as improviser the

jazz musician's role as creative performer is emphasized

(Apel, "Jazz,” 374-78). Freedom from restraint characterizes improvisatory forms, whether they be found

in the idioms of American jazz, in the cantua firmus accompaniments of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, or in the challenging cadenzas of the classical concerto.

These last two examples are, according to Apel, yet another type of improvisation, and to these should be added the harmonic improvisation of "thorough-bass" practice of the Baroque era (a method of harmonic accompaniment indicated by bass notes only). In this last case, the performer is, of course, inhibited somewhat by the contours of a pre-existing bass line.

There are many occasions in music for the employment of improvisatory techniques; I have listed only a few. My point has been, however, to illustrate that improvisation always conveys a feeling of spontaneity, not necessarily variety, whereas variations (from any period, and of any type) can be very carefully carved--worked over--without failing in intent. Stevens’ variations often utilize techniques of improvisation so that one is tempted to label them as such, but a "true" improvisation is a one­ 174 time occasion, and a poet can only approximate such

quickly conceived and fleeting changes. "Like Decorations

in a Nigger Cemetery," as I suggested in my second

chapter, is a set of "improvisations" based on Whitman's attitude toward death. They could, however, be called variations, for they always treat the same subject and in slightly altered variants from verse to verse. But

Stevens chose his title from a friend’s remark about walking through a "nigger" cemetery in Georgia while noting the "litter" decorating each grave. To my mind, the variations seem improvised, as if composed during the walk among tombstones "ornamented"--as it were--with

"broken pieces of glass, old pots, broken pieces of furniture, dolls heads, and what not." The poem, added

Judge Powell, who noted the custom of the negroes, "is itself an olio, and the title is fitting."l A "hodgepodge" of embellishments on the theme of death, "Like

Decorations" exhibits the spontaneous, almost careless, bravado of the improviser.

Several of Stevens’ musically inspired variations on a theme deserve comment for their highly structured, programmatic formats, which place them in the category of variation closest to the classical. "Six Significant

Landscapes" (1916) and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a

Blackbird" (1917) are clearly delineated, highly polished sets of variations on one theme, although one could argue for a sort of contrapuntal development of smaller units--

motives or other interrelated elements. In the first

poem, the six stanzas, or versions, are united by the

common theme of physical movement within the flow of a wildly fluctuating imagination. Almost like Haiku, each

of the variations is a demonstration of the imagination's

ability to shape. Each "impression," however, enjoys the

autonomy of the variation joined to a theme but not dependent upon it for meaning. Here, as in "Thirteen

Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," structural unity is episodic rather than developmental; a sense of closure or full cadence occurs at the end of each variation. The only important structural difference between the former and latter poems occurs on the level of theme. In

"Blackbird" the subject is, curiously, an object (the blackbird) that serves as a stimulus for the imagination, which in the former poem was itself the agent eliciting the response from stanza to stanza.

The above examples (and there are others too numerous to catalogue) of impressionistic variations could have been crafted with the works of Claude Debussy in mind.

Debussy’s mature piano works, many of which Stevens owned as recordings, create new modes of musical expression to match a fresh appraisal of feeling largely devoid of heady nineteenth-century German intellectualism. The directness of Debussy’s sensuous impressions and his remarkable 176

diversity of subject would have appealed to Stevens, who,

shortly after the introduction of the first book of

Preludes into concert halls (c. 1910), was composing not

only "Six Significant Landscapes," but two of his more

successful early poems to date: "Sunday Morning" and

"Peter Quince at the Clavier."

But what has Debussy to do with Stevens the writer of poetic variations? An interesting alignment of musical and poetic techniques occurs in Stevens' "Sea Surface Full of Clouds," a poem whose setting is a boat of some sort docked on a summer morning off "Tehuantepec" (CP 98-102).

Written in the early twenties, the poem is similar in structure to the two aforementioned ones from Harmonium, and is, indeed, a set of variations on the visual transformations of morning sea from the deck of the boat.

There are six variations of a number of motives, including mood, color, light, motion, in addition to the always changing question and answer (in French) appropriate to thematic emphasis in a particular variation.

Each stanza begins similarly, with first lines always

"In that November off Tehuantepec," and subsequent second and third lines of the triplet changing sometimes ever so slightly to indicate subtle shifts of light and motion. In variations I-III the second line, "The slopping of the sea grew still one night," is repeated, the modifications appearing in punctuation. In I and III the second and 177

third lines are enjambed, while in II the second line is

end-stopped. In IV and V the variation is more radical,

the syntactical changes involving more than punctuation.

In IV "The night-long slopping of the sea grew still" comprises the second line, but in V the second line completes the thought of the first with a caesura seemingly out of balance with the other versions: "In that

November off Tehuantepec/Night stilled the slopping of the sea. The day" (CP 101). This type of misalignment occurs throughout the poem, or set of poems, so that it becomes obvious that Stevens is interested in structural as well as thematic variations.

The overall effect of "fresh transfigurings" (102) in

"Sea Surface" is similar to that in one of Debussy’s preludes from Book I, “Voiles." In fact, I am inclined to speculate as to the degree of influence the prelude may have had on the composition of Stevens’ group of sensuous impressions whose shapes vary so slightly, at times almost imperceptibly, in theme, language, rhythm, and structure.

Each of Debussy’s preludes embodies a distinct mood and feeling, with atmosphere created quickly by melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic means. And most are miniature sets of variations based usually on a small, simple musical idea. The development of "Voiles" (sailboats) derives from the systematic use of a whole-tone scale g#, f#, e, d, and c which is transformed into five contrasting 178

harmonic, rhythmic, and dynamic moods. Although the tiny

variations are continuous, that is, not obviously

separated with full cadences and notational breaks other

than a "cedes" (ritard), it is easy to follow the five-

note motive as it is put through its series of colorful

and unmeasured changes. Like a sailing boat at anchor,

and like the one standing still in the Stevens poem while

"reality" shifts around it, Debussy’s prelude embodies the

physical impossibility of stasis. The overall effect in

"Voiles“--because of its irregular metrical, rhythmical, harmonic, and dynamic program, and because of its lack of

closure until the end (even the title appears at the end)--is asymmetrical and improvisational. Thus Debussy's prelude leans toward Apel’s definition of free variation, being inhibited only by its diminutive motive of five whole tones and the fact of its being a "prelude" rather than, for example, a sonata or concerto.

Although Stevens' poem does not illustrate the improvisational techniques of "Voiles," correspondences in setting, theme, and mood indicate to me that Stevens was influenced, at least during the early years of his development as a poet, by Debussy and probably by the other "impressionists" as well. Their manner of varying a theme or some other aspect of a musical idea shows in the work of the poet too often to be ignored. Other composers, too, made their mark on Stevens but to a lesser 179

extent than either the impressionists or the

romantic/progressive Brahms. Briefly, two poems, each

composed in 1935, indicate the mark of Mozart, Beethoven,

and Reger on the poet. The first poem, "Mozart, 1935," is

an unlikely mix of Mozart the classicist with Reger the modernist.

In Stevens* record collection, in addition to numerous selections by Beethoven and Brahms, the

impressionists, and early moderns, was a less well-known composition by Max Reger: Variations on a Theme by

Mozart. (c. 1911). Full of abrupt harmonies and progressive harmonic relationships (or non-relationships as some have indicated), Reger’s set of eight variations is on the theme from Mozart’s Piano Sonata In A Ma.ior. K.

331. As this later work of Reger's shows, it was a product of the final period of his life, when he hadbegun to lean toward clarification while still holding claim to the aims of a "conscious progressivist." Although the set follows the classic form of segmented versions separated by cadence and tempo and key change, often the theme is remote from its source and rhythmic alterations further

"modernize" Mozart’s original eighteen-bar theme.

Although the musical form has been changed from sonata to divertimento, Stevens’ "Mozart, 1935" (CP 131-32) seems to alter Mozart’s "original ‘--or at least call for a change from the "lucid souvenir of the past"--in tones and 180 rhythms as unstable as Reger's. Speaking In a letter to

Ronald Latimer In 1935, Stevens called the poem a

■'variation" on the theme of disorder as a result of social

upheaval. "We may return to Mozart," begins Stevens' last

stanza, but like Reger's variations for orchestra (the

poet is a pianist in Stevens’ version), Stevens' piercing

"hoo-hoo-hoo" of the present very likely will drown out

the "airy dream,” the "unclouded concerto."

Written the same year as the Mozart poem, "Sad

Strains of a Gay Waltz" may also have a musical source.

Stevens, as I have noted, listened often to Beethoven and

owned an impressive collection of the composer's works.

Among these Stegman lists the thirty-three Diabelli

Variations in C Major (Opus 120) composed on a thirty-two

bar waltz theme of Anton Diabelli (82). I include

fragments of William Drabkin's analysis of the variations,

for according to his reading of Beethoven, my own thoughts

concerning a correspondence between the Stevens and the

Beethoven are confirmed, at least in relation to their

similar responses to a "waltz tune":

. . .it is perhaps wrong to look for a unity of creative intent in the Beethoven set, and more profitable instead to concentrate on the diversity of expression in the individual variations. . . .

A crucial role in the individualization of the Diabelli Variations is played by tempo and metre. Hardly ever do they remain fixed from one variation to the next; more often they are starkly contrasted. An extreme point of this 181

development is reached in Variation 21, where each repeated half is divided symmetrically into four bars Allegro con brio in common time plus eight bars Meno Allegro in 3/4; thus tempo and metre here actually change seven times in the course of a single variation.

Beethoven is also constantly improvising new chord patterns to fit the basic bipartite structure of the original tune. (Even in the first variation, the chord sequence of the theme is significantly modified.) 1

Stevens’ poem, written "appropriately" in triplets to parody the no longer viable "music" that attempts to live in the motionless sounds of an effete dance, decomposes its tripartite structure as the Beethoven variations revise Diabelli's waits tune to suit a mood, or temper of an occasion. Although triplet stanzas remain, Stevens superimposes a four-beat meter on the line, and further qualifies the apparent symmetry with thematic references to the new music which must replace the habitual echo of the failure of humans to adjust to time and change:

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. 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. (CP 121-22)

Stevens may have had Beethoven’s transformative variations in mind when he refers in the last stanza to the music that will "glisten again with motion," the music that will

be motion.

Like the composer of the Diabelli Variations, the

poet "significantly modifies" while adhering to what

appear to be established patterns of composition. Stevens

would, however, continue to experiment with variational

and improvisational formulae, and the later poems,

beginning with "Blue Guitar" demonstrate a degree of

technical success along this line. By 1937, the year

"Blue Guitar" was composed, Stevens had just about given

up the "traditional" theme and variations form for

another--one that would more honestly articulate his

growing dissatisfaction with the things that "go round and

again go round" and that have a "rather classical sound"

{CP 150).

"Blue Guitar" is a structurally (as well as

thematically) transitional piece anticipating the long and

elaborate works of the poet’s late period. Except for

"Variations on a Summer Day" (1939), a group of twenty

diminutive impressionistic poems in which the sea figures

prominently in a series of extremely diverse

transformations that at times seem to ignore theme

altogether, Stevens’ variations written after 1937 attempt to depart from the discontinuous or "classical" form of

theme and variations. With "Blue Guitar" Stevens' variations display a fresh tendency toward thematic and 183 structural asymmetry, fluidity, inconsistency, and

independence--all indicating a style that purports to be

improvisational. "Blue Guitar" may seem to be, as some

commentators have claimed along with Vendler, "the

monotonous continuo of a strumming guitar" appearing in

the repetitive downbeat of "things as they are" and the

"blue guitar"-~a technique of the minimalist's vocabulary

(On Extended Wings. 124). But one must listen to more

than the guitar’s drone and its myriad repetitions in

couplets to appreciate Stevens’ experimenting imagination.

I have already commented on Stevens’ decomposing skills

with musical figures in "Blue Guitar" (Chapter III); now a

word about his manipulation of what appears to be a

balanced, highly-patterned--therefore symmetrical--

superstructure.

My remarks concern the lopsided pattern of narration

in "Blue Guitar," which, superimposed upon the logical

structure of couplets neatly arranged in thirty-three units (of unequal length), grants the piece an unfixed or

improvisational dimension. Such a texture also undoes the

linear purity of the performance, for opposed structural rhythms set up an almost subliminal counterpoint which has the effect of offsetting what by some would be perceived as vocal monody. I suggest that no such vocal line exists, but that several points-of-view seem to be haphazardly integrated into the text. 184

The narrative voices are several (there could be

more): the guitarist/poet "singing" to his audience, the

audience responding to him, the guitarist meditating, the

audience meditating, and so forth. None of these ‘voices"

speaks consistently within a set number of stanzas, nor do

we always know just who is speaking (or thinking). For

example, the poem opens with yet another voice (an

omniscient one) commenting on the poem's setting and then

quoting both the audience and the "shearsman of sorts."

Three voices in just one stanza, and thirty-two more to

go.

The remaining stanzas exchange voices in the

following pattern, if one can call it that: 2-4 poet; 5-6

audience; 7-9 poet; 10 poet and audience; 11-32 poet; 33

poet and audience. As my outline indicates, the audience

apparently has little space in the poem. But the format

is misleading, for within the stretch of stanzas 11-32 the

voice of the narrator is often absorbed by echoes of his

previous thoughts or by meditations on future thoughts,

and by not only public voices or events generated by his

audience, but private ones as well. Taken altogether, as

a narrative unit, the poet's voice, sometimes lyrical, at

times declamatory or discursive, becomes a totally

whimsical instrument, improvising at will within segments or variations, or sometimes, with little preparation,

leaping from one version to the next as in a set of 185

‘continuous/’ free musical variations (see xx and xxi,

xxiii and xxiv, xxv-xxvii, for examples of stanzaic

fusion). "Blue Guitar" is a hybrid form, a cross between

theme and variations and the on-the-spot performed piece, the improvisation. Although no written-down poem can with candor be called extemporaneous, Stevens would have us believe otherwise as we read his first set of variations containing the ambiguities that enrich his late works. I have focused, necessarily, on the structural noncomformities in "Blue Guitar," but there are other equally important variations in language, character, setting, theme, and tone that as well point to the asymmetrical features of the poem.

To conclude, I would like to analyze the relations between the composer to whom Stevens was most indebted--

Johannes Brahms--and the poet who, like the composer, was notorious for proceeding according to the belief that, as

Schoenberg says of Brahms, "whatever happens in a piece of music is nothing but the endless reshaping of a basic shape" (Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation.

Frisch, 2). But before continuing with Brahms, Stevens, and "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," the most expressive demonstration of the poet working out his own progressive techniques of variation and improvisation, it would be useful to look at a figure out of the Stevens oeuvre who best embodies, in a few stanzas from "Notes 186

Toward a Supreme Fiction," Stevens’ investigations into his own limitations and potentialities. That figure is appropriately a musical one and obviously a persona (among others) for the poet. Canon Aspirin appears in "It Must

Give Pleasure" v of "Notes" and sets the tempo and mood for the final stanzas of the whole poem.

Now as any good dictionary will say, the word '‘canon” has several meanings, including a musical one. Critics usually associate Stevans' engaging Canon with anything from ecclesiastical lawmaker to the laws themselves. I prefer the musical definition that defines canon as the strictest species of imitative counterpoint in which all the parts have the same melody throughout, although starting at different points. Several different types of canon are commonly distinguished, but all operate according to the law of imitation. Stevens'"Canon," like the musical version, is the figured form of the unimaginative poet, initially "humming an outline of a fugue/Of praise" (a canonic one I assume), and restricted or even trapped by his own laws:

He imposes orders as he thinks of them, As the fox and snake do. It is a braveaffair. Next he builds capitols and in their corridors,

Whiter than wax, sonorous, frame as it is. He establishes statues of reasonable men, Who surpassed the most literate owl, the most erudite 107 Of elephants. But to impose is not To discover. (CP 403)

The beleaguered canon is unable to "discover winter and

know it well, to find,/Not to impose" (404). But we

assume that the speaker is not without imaginative

resources when he conceives of the idea of the "fiction of

the absolute," the "luminous melody of proper sound":

It is possible, possible, possible. It must Be possible. It must be that in time The real will from its crude compoundings come. .(404)

This "1," the one critical of the Canon's limited

consciousness, desperately longs for the pleasure that he

may enjoy from imaginings. "Am I that imagine this angel

less satisfied?" he asks of himself, the one who must

devise a program to unfix the "Mere repetitions. These things [that] at least comprise/An occupation, an

exercise, a work" (405). It is the irrational distortion,

the "more than rational distortion,/The fiction that

results from feeling" that distinguishes the Canon’s fugal outlines from "the things/That in each other are included, the whole,/The complicate, the amassing harmony" (403).

Clearly, the poet who forgets to experiment, who "grows warm," like the angel, "in the motionless motion of his flight," is not the decomposer who would take apart a whole town as "part of the never-ending meditation," and 188

recompose it "like a new resemblance of the sun." Canon

Aspirin, hummer of fugues, could not write the "larger poem for a larger audience"An Ordinary Evening in New

Haven" (CP 465).

Just as in "It Must Give Pleasure" vi Canon

Aspirin’s night flight, temporary as it may be, releases him from the tightly controlled framework of "normal things," Stevens* nighttime activity of listening to

Brahms (among others) may have helped him break through to the realm of the possible, where the prevailing mode is the conditional. It is a place where the poet’s "petty syllabi, the sounds that stick,/Inevitably [modulate] in the blood" (CP 407), where the composer develops or varies his material almost without will, at once, organically

"dispensing with small-scale rhythmic or metrical symmetry. . .and thereby creating genuine musical prose"

(Frisch, 9).

Stevens had acknowledged his debt to Brahms in an early poem featuring the autumnal-sounding composer as the poet’s "dark familiar," a "dark companion" whose colors left the poet at times restless, unconsoled. "Anglais

Mort a Florence" (1935) is the only poem linking Stevens’

"spirit" with that of a composer. Not even Beethoven, m another favorite, is specifically referred to in Stevens' poetry. Moreover, certain aspects of Brahms's compositional techniques and style lead me further to the 189

conclusion that Stevens* "Turning in time to Brahms as

alternate/In speech" as if he "was that music and himself," was not simply the rhetoric of a convenient and forced analogy to distinguish between the lyrical "music" that "began to fail" the poet and another kind that "with

God’s help and the police" threatened his poetic life (CP

148-49). Stevens of the later years and Brahms were, indeed, true brothers under the skin, for both created works of art "highly crafted on the surface, and deeply convoluted underneath" (Youngren, 92).

About Brahms today there is little dispute among professionals as to the "modern" sound of his music; but to the layman, Brahms is usually perceived as "The

Romantic" spirit of an age, author of an array of darkly lyrical, forbiddingly difficult piano pieces. But according to Schoenberg, one of Brahms’s first champions in this century, and other modern critics and seasoned listeners, myself included, Brahms (like the Wallace

Stevens of Harmonium) is a genuine precursor of modernism. The following general analysis of the Brahms style is based upon Schoenberg’s, Youngren*s, Nelson’s,

Frisch’s, and my own observations of Brahms's compositions. The length of my discussion precludes in- depth analyses of individual works, but to my mind, my remarks apply to each of Brahms’s compositions listed 190

below as they appear in Stegman’s discography of Stevens’

recordings:

Opus 15, Piano Concerto in D Minor Opus 16, Serenade in A Opus 18, Sextet. No. 1, B-flat Opus 51, C Minor String Quartet. No. 1 Opus 56b, Variations on a Theme by Haydn (for two pianos) Opus 68, Symphony N o . 1 (C Minor) Opus 73, Symphony N o . 2 (in D) Opus 83, Plano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat Major Opus 90, Symphony N o . 3 (in F) Opus 98, Symphony N o . 4 (E Minor)

All of Brahms’s music (especially the later works) was written, as were Stevens' variations and

improvisational hybrids, out of an impulse to re-invent his voice, to take apart and remake, or recompose, small units of expression. The composer was especially formidable and brilliant in his writing of variations, and some commentators have speculated upon the implications of his habit of backtracking. His sound was "autumnal," like the late sound of Stevens, that "pensive" intonation that

Vendler, speaking of Stevens, attributes to thwarted or frustrated desire, and which has in Brahms been attributed to an overwhelming sense of personal regret. Always looking back, both artists, for whatever reasons, preferred to alter the "original" by way of far-reaching variations.

According to Schoenberg, Brahms is supposed to have brought the principle of developing variation to its most 191 advanced state in the nineteenth century. Frisch notes

Schoenberg's keen observations of Brahms's technique not only for writing theme and variations, but for using that same principle in other forms. In Style and Idea

Schoenberg distinguishes Brahms’s technique from Wagner's excrutiatingly repetitive one of sequential transposition:

While. .Johannes Brahms. .repeated phrases, motives and other structural ingredients of themes only in varied forms, of possible in the form of what I call developing variation. . . Wagner. . .had to use sequences and semi- sequences, that is, unvaried or slightly varied repetitions differing in nothing essential from first appearances. . . ("Criteria for the Evaluation of Music," 125)

Several elements of Brahms’s style make him kin to

Stevens and mark him as one of the poet’s "new romantic" reformers. Brahms, according to Frisch's understanding of

Schoenberg, "builds a theme by means of a very free, but recognizable, reinterpretation of the intervals and rhythms of a brief motive. . . .the process can result in considerable metrical ambiguity" (5). Brahms is also fond of asymmetrical phrase structures, "combinations of phrases of differing lengths, numbers of measures not divisible by eight, four, or even two," says Schoenberg in

"Brahms the Progressive" (Style and Idea. 416).

Schoenberg cites the example of the main theme of nine measures from Brahms’s first Sextet in B-flat, Opus 18.

Robert Nelson offers another example of deviation from the 192 symmetrical phrase structure--the five-measure theme in the finale of Brahms’s Haydn Variations (The Technique of

Variation. 108-109).

These are only two instances of many such assymetrical structures ranging through the composer’s works. An assymetrical design, of course, "wreaks havoc with the written bar line" (7). Brahms's developing motives and themes consistently, because they evolve so freely, override the notated meter and are perfect demonstrations of the composer’s preference for the improvisational method--of letting the theme evolve more flexibly.

Another technique of Brahms’s, suggesting an affinity with Stevens, is the one of varying his motives (small thematic units) almost at once, "dispensing with small- scale rhythmic or metrical symmetry" (9). It is a technique by which a new idea evolves so spontaneously from the preceding one (as if improvised), that the juncture between old and new creates a moment (or many moments) of ambiguity. For example, in Brahms there is a good bit of uncertainty concerning phrase endings and beginnings. And, finally--and this point is crucial to any comparison between Brahms and Stevens--by use of consistently varying development in theme and variations or in other forms, Brahms is able "to avoid the closure that rounded themes imply” (Frisch, 26). Indeed, Brahms’s 193 concise thematic material is continuously reinterpreted as the composer draws implications from an original musical idea. In Brahms's best music, says Frisch, "music form becomes a luminous expression of the flexible, powerful procedures of developing variation" (33-34). For Brahms, and for Stevens as well, development is transformation, transformation development.

Although one could find examples of Brahms's influence in several of Stevens’ late poems (e.g.

"Esthetique du Mai" and "The Auroras of Autumn"), the poem that best demonstrates that especially full-bodied sound attributable to the artist for whom the aspect of preservation becomes a high art is Stevens' last long set of variations, "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" (CP

465). Here is the poet at his mature best, deliberately intervening, as Brahms would do in his late works

(probably unknown by Stevens), with his every word or impulse--decomposing to the extent that Vendler has described the work as "almost unremittingly minimal," threatening to "die of its own starvation." But when it does not die (and I doubt that it does), "on the other hand," Vendler adds, "it composes itself, all by itself it seems and without human intervention, into that great and remote poetry of Stevens’ old age, so unlike any other poetry in English" (On Extended Wings. 270). Vendler's remarks notwithstanding, that poem so unlike any other 194

poem is Stevens at his often unintelligible best, like

Brahms in some of his middle to late chamber works, such

as Opus 51, The C Minor String Quartet. No. 1 which breaks

down "almost immediately into short, rhythmically

ambiguous fragments, bringing us to a dead stop and a

contrasting episode before we are more than a few bars

into the work" (Youngren, 92).

My remarks on "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" will

not constitute a completely "new reading" of the poem.

That project would require a full chapter of its own.

Rather, I choose to draw structural comparisons by looking

at certain portions of Stevens' "new-Romantic" text as they confirm Brahms’s aesthetic. Thus, my focus necessarily avoids certain aspects of thematic analysis usually included with a critical appraisal of "Ordinary

Evening."2 My concerns are with Stevens’ sound, or tone; his manner of varying small (and larger) motives, or units; his methods of producing ambiguity.

"Ordinary Evening" is a splendid testimony to

Stevens' gift for developing variation, a gift that grew to virtuoso proportions because of the poet’s dogged pursuit of ways to express his belief in inter­ relationships, or, more simply, the dependency of one thing on another. His canon demonstrates this principle at work on many levels, but the musical embodiment of this idea is especially vivid in Stevens' poems. Indeed, the 195 "endless reshaping of a basic shape" is, as Schoenberg

said of Brahms's music, for Stevens "the most logical way

of writing the "endlessly elaborating poem" (CP 486)

Like the Brahms sound, the Stevens sound of the late

poems, especially after Parts of a World, has been labeled

"autumnal.” In "Ordinary Evening" that not-quite-dark tone is connected with setting and motion. In Mew Haven

it is evening, twilight, that time of day neither light nor dark, day nor night; and in the meditating mind of the poet there is neither movement nor stasis, joy nor sorrow.

In Stevens' luminous setting no thought or fact can escape the qualified assertions of the mind stationed in the ambiguous limbo of the conditional. No thing is for sure in Stevens* dimly perceived city, except for the "and yet"

(CP 465).

Contributing to Stevens’ tone are several other features linking him to the composer and having generally do with procedures of producing ambiguity. Stevens, like

Brahms, shied away from repetition except in varied forms, and one can see his principle operating in both small and larger units. He was also likely to vary the smaller units almost at once, as in canto i when the "giant” that is himself, and a question, becomes a "second giant" which kills the first, or a "recent imagining of reality," like a "new resemblance of the sun," which is a "larger poem for a larger audience," a "mythological form." In most of 196

the thirty-one cantos Stevens immediately decomposes or varies the small unit (or motive) and sometimes, just as quickly, as in this first canto, recomposes the material.

The same technique applies to the word "houses," which in one triplet takes on eight different meanings finally to be subsumed into Stevens* aspect of "a double," which is, after all, the second giant. The house, however, is not fully recomposed in canto i, for it appears again and again, in variation after variation throughout the poem.

The larger unit also undergoes significant modification, and I have chosen to list at least one variation from each of the thirty-one cantos on the idea of nothing becoming something (or something becoming nothing) to illustrate this Brahmsian technique. There are, of course, many more examples within each canto, sometimes within the same stanza; indeed, it is a matter of "times thirty-one" rather than merely the selections included below:

"the eye's plain version," "transparencies of sound," “emptiness that would be filled," " plainness of plain things," "the last illusion," "Omega refreshed," "things exteriorized," "a question not "wholly spoken," "nothing beyond reality," "hallucinations in surfaces," "brilliancy at the central of the earth," "a difficulty that we predicate," "essence not yet perceived," "ponderable source of each imponderable," "total leaflessness," "the dominant blank," ”irridescences of petals never realized," "an image that begot its infantines," "nameless flitting characters," "an isolation at the centre," "breathless things broodingly abreath," "forms of farewell," "consolations of space," "a hatching that stared," 197

"poverty of being close," "the fore-meaning in music," "intricate evasions of as," "the difference that clouds make over a town," "the barrenness that appears," "less legible meanings of sound.“

Another point concerns the motion of continuous variation: sometimes that motion is retrograde, as in cantos i through iv when the idea of transformation is reached through a series of backward-moving and sequential concepts that disintegrate, as Vendler would put it, into

"nothing." Vision becomes desire, which turns to misery, then night, which becomes a human heart, then nothing, which is denial.

My final remarks concern the assymetrical features in

"Ordinary Evening" that like Brahms's themes of abnormal length or duration contribute to Stevens’ improvisational and ambiguous style. Superficially, "Ordinary Evening" is the most "classic" of all Stevens' variations. It has thirty-one cantos containing six triplet stanzas in each, and neither the baffling introduction nor reconstructive coda, as in "Notes." But typical of Stevens’ so-called classically constructed pieces, "Ordinary Evening" ignores the apparent metrical program visible in the unity of thirty-one neatly carved cantos for the rhythmic one which derives for the most part from lack of closure or cadence.

"Wreaking havoc with the bar line," so to speak, Stevens, like Brahms, relies on stretto-like effects to destroy the transitions imposed by breaks between cantos. Like 198

Eliot’s "The Waste Land" after Pound's relentless editing,

"Ordinary Evening" is a poem that could have survived without the "bar-lines." For the overall effect is of one poem, endlessly elaborating, like Eliot’s, supple and free of those devices that threaten the "perpetual meditation"

(466).

Lack of closure occurs throughout the poem; two examples illustrate my point. In canto iv the last stanza flows without break in thought (Stevens' punctuation notwithstanding) into the first stanza of the next canto:

But soothingly, with pleasant instruments, So that this cold, a children’s tale of ice, Seems like a sheen of heat romanticized.

V

Inescapable romance, inescapable choice Of dreams, disillusion as the last illusion, Reality as a thing seen by the mind. . . (CP 468)

These two stanzas could be joined, without confusion, into one, for the cold’s transformation into, finally, reality as a process of mind, is the rhythmic unit--not the line, not the stanza. Between cantos vii and viii the same type of stretto effect occurs by way of a further explanation of form:

The tips of cock-cry pinked out pastily, As that which was incredible becomes, In misted contours, credible day again. 199

VIII

We fling ourselves, constantly longing, on t>his form. We descend to the street and inhale a health of air To our sepulchral hollows. . . (CP 470)

If, as musicians are likely to say, the gift of improvisation is a matter of immediately reproducing what is in the mind (or in the case of the instrumentalist, the fingers), then Stevens' ‘Ordinary Evening" is, to the extent that a poem can ever be, a demonstration of that gift. It is, without doubt, consistently pensive, but at the same time it activates or, as Focillon put it,

"awakens form in sensibility" so that between nature and man "form intervenes." Stevens’ fertile technique of thematic, motivic, and metrical transformation--so eloquently expressed in "Ordinary Evening"--identifies the decomposer at work, reflecting upon the activity of "the human mind creating the forms of the world in which it lives" (Riddel). It is, as Schoenberg remarked of

Brahms’s Rhapsody. Opus 79, No. 2, a work "which almost avoids establishing a tonality" (Style and Idea. 405), for

Brahms’s contributions, "to an unrestricted musical language" are the mark of "the one who pronounces the words in order to make the action understandable," the one who "will be a singing instrument of the performance" (441). Indeed, he is like the "composer” of the

"endlessly elaborating poem" that

Displays the theory of poetry, As the life of poetry. A more severe,

More harassing master would extemporize Subtler, more urgent proof that the theory Of poetry is the theory of life,

As it is, in the intricate evasions of as, In things seen and unseen, created from nothingness, The heavens, the hells, the worlds, the longed-for lands. (CP 486) ENDNOTES

1 William Drabkin, "Notes" to Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. Deutsche Grammophon 2532 048, 1982.

2 See Anthony Libby's chapter on Stevens (46-72) in the recent Mythologies of Nothing; Mystical Death in American Poetry 1940-70 (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1984) for a provocative reading of "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’s" concern with an "abstractsort of negation [that] shapes Stevens's most explicit evocations of earthly revelation" (48).

201 CHAPTER V:

REFLECTIONS AND RECONFIGURATIONS

This final chapter of "The Decomposer's Art" has for its format an alternative prospectus for reading Wallace

Stevens as the musician’s poet. Heretofore, I have confined my discussions to the ways Stevens responded to specific composers--even specific musical compositions-- and to other poets for whom music became important, either as analogue or as expressive structural idiom. Always my perspective has been the poet’s, my argument an attempt to define Stevens’ aesthetic of the variation and provide a rhetoric for reading Stevens through a complex of separate though interdependent elements shared by musicians and poets alike. My method has been to begin with Stevens, look back, and reach conclusions through new readings.

But a study of Stevens the musician would not be complete without considering the body of musical literature devoted to settings of his poems. Musicians, for example, not only appear in Stevens1 poems, but they have responded to them as well. In settings as diverse as the poems that inspired them, composers have "interpreted" the motives, themes, images, and rhythms in Stevens’ poetry. They have produced orchestral variations, instrumental ensembles, and songs ranging in attitudes from Romantic expressionism 202 203 and post-Romantic impressionism to the so-called

"expressionless” or even indeterminate or minimal works of the post-Modernists.

In 1973 a bibliographical checklist of settings of

Stevens' poems listed eleven entries composed between 1951 and 1970, all by little known composers, except for those of Vincent Persichetti and Roger Reynolds.1 Since the publication of the checklist, Stevens has continued to enjoy popularity with composers, so I would assume that a new catalogue would be forthcoming and at least twice as long. According to the checklist, composers favored

"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" and other short pieces from Harmonium. Exceptions included an orchestral version of Ideas of Order by Arthur Berger and a nondescript arrangement of "The Pleasures of Merely

Circulating" by Starling A. Cumberworth. Stevens’ late poems have been largely ignored by composers, with the exception of Ned Rorem’s Last Poems of Wallace Stevens, for soprano, cello, and piano, which received its premiere in 1971. Rorem’s piece does not appear on the checklist of settings.

For my discussion of composers "reading" Stevens, I have selected Roger Reynolds' setting of “The Emperor of

Ice-Cream" for eight voices, piano, percussion, and double bass and Stephen Paulus’ Reflections: Four Movements on a

Theme of Wallace Stevens, for chamber orchestra, and based 204

on "Sunday Morning." Emperor was recorded in 1963, and

the as yet unrecorded Reflections received its world

premiere in March of 1985. My selection of these two

works was guided for the most part by the widely differing

styles of the two composers, their mediums, and the fact

of significant tonal and textural variety in the two poems

they chose, "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" and "Sunday

Morning." And finally I believe that each setting--

Reynolds' theater piece, or quasi-opera, and Paulus1

orchestral variations--constitutes what I have called a

reading of a poem, and as such should be appraised with

others of its kind, other readings.

With such a method, the composer is, like Stevens

"reading" the striding, imaginative vocalist in "The Idea of Order at Key West," a decomposer, who revitalizes a text by discovering another, one that has been there all along. Edward Cone, in The Composer's Voice, extends my thought further by saying that for the composer setting a poem, the poet's work is only "raw material" for composition. Cone's remarks are directed toward the medium of song, which he suggests must ultimately "attempt to increase our understanding of the poem" ("Words Into

Music," 15):

A song is not primarily the melodic recitation or the musical interpretation or the criticism of a poem. Although it may be any or all of these things it is first of all a new creation of which the poem is only one component. . . .The composer is not primarily 205

engaged in "setting" a poem. As I have pointed out elsewhere, a composer cannot set a poem directly, for in this sense there is no such thing as "the poem"; what he uses is one reading of the poem-- that is to say, a specific performance, for even a silent reading is a kind of performance. He must consider all aspects of the poem that are not realizable in this performance as irrelevant. And to say that he "sets" even this reading is less accurate than to say that he appropriates it; he makes it his own by turning it into music. (The Composer's Voice. 19)

Several of Cones's contentions require amendment and

clarification for my discussion. First, although song is

not primarily, according to Cone, ‘^musical interpretation

or the criticism of a poem," it can be. Second, song is

not necessarily the only musical medium to which Cones's

remarks may apply. Indeed, various media representations

(e.g., orchestral works such as Paulus’ and multi-media

dramatizations such as Reynolds') constitute new creations

"of which the poem is only one component." Third, unless

Cone is able to come up with a better term to describe

what a composer does with a poem or part of a poem, either

in song or otherwise, why not preserve the term "setting"?

Whether or not the process is "directly" linked to

something called "the poem," let us assume that any

setting, vocal or instrumental, is an appropriation of the

poem. Thus I see no need to distinguish between setting

and appropriation. Some settings, however, become more valuable interpretations, criticisms, and so forth, based

upon what the composer considers to be all of the "aspects 206 of the poem that are not realizable in [the] performance"

and therefore irrelevant. Moreover, such "readings" manage to achieve a creative synthesis between poet and

composer, a synthesis manifest in the aforementioned collaborations, but by no means present in any setting.

What the composer chooses as relevant to his understanding of a poem is, obviously, realized in his own musical idiom. In this sense, he is potentially Stevens’

"new-romantic" piano player; he may or may not render that

"hybrid" version of an original form. If he does manage to enlarge our perspectives, perhaps even change our minds about a poem so that only through the musical idiom do we appreciate the "original," then he will have helped produce a collaboration that we recognize as unique, wonderful--an argument, in a sense, against the lifeless obsolesence that Stevens abhorred, and about which he was so vocal.

Stevens would have approved, I think, of Reynolds’ and Paulus’ new readings of "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" and

"Sunday Morning." He might even have championed Reynolds’ avant-garde setting, hailed by musicologist/critic Gilbert

Chase as one of the more original and effective compositions of our time. Published first in 1962 and revised in 1974, Reynolds' score for Stevens’ "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" indicates, notes Chase, "not only the sounds but also the movements and configurations of the singers 207

and instrumentalists on stage."2 And Reynolds’ score,

Chase adds, is a fascinating work of graphic art as well.

The compositional format of Emperor has been described by

Chase as "a chamber work in which the singers occasionally

play percussion instruments and the performers continually

cue one another.“® Written for eight voices--two soprano,

two alto, two tenor, two bass--piano, percussion, and

double bass, Reynolds’ Emperor was conceived with both of

its extra-musical sources--the poem, the stage--in mind.2

The work is, in fact, a composition that should be seen as

well as heard to be fully appreciated; but as Gregg Smith,

choral director of The Gregg Smith Singers, says of his

recording, there is such an intensity of dramatic

expression in Reynolds' work, that "even without being

staged Emperor has great impact."4 Still, the music alone

is not Reynolds’ message. Indeed, in all of Reynolds’ multi-media new works, as the composer puts it, the visual

and human dimensions are always present with the aural.

Such a technique is especially appropriate for a

setting of Stevens’ "Emperor," for it exploits the inherent gestural features {both linguistic and thematic) of what Reynolds called a plotless scenario.5 Plotless, but not without direction, for the "boisterous beginning" of the poem is moderated and modulated to what Reynolds interprets as a "severe close": 208

Call "the roller of big cigars, The muscular one, and bid him whip In kitchen cups concupiscent curds. Let the wenches dawdle in such dress As they are used to wear, and let the boys Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers. Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal. Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet On which she embroidered fantails once And spread it so as to cover her face. If her horny feet protrude, they come To show how cold she is, and dumb. Let the lamp affix its beam. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. (CP 64)

There was no obvious motivation in the text, says

Reynolds, "thus I was free to devise patterns," thematic and structural.8 Reynolds’ method is based on a taste for the movement and reconfiguration of sounds. Emperor is thus indeterminate, except in its overall requirement that the entire performance take approximately fourteen minutes to complete. There is, says Smith, a "multiplicity of elements to the work, not only in the abundance of textures demanded from singer and instrumentalist alike, but in the use of performance spaces which constantly move and change. . . .each individual word is a source for a wealth of color and texture."7 In brief, what follows is an explanation of just how Reynolds* score of multiple elements works to convert Stevens’ "Emperor" to a locale brilliantly descriptive of the concept that generates the 209

action (such as it is) in the poem: "Let be be finale of

seem.

The performance begins on stage, preferably though

not necessarily in a small hall. The prologue comprises a

reading of "Emperor" by the director, whose final comment

is, "This is a poem about death." The lights in the

theater, dimmed during the reading of the poem, come on

after a sweeping but silent gesture by the director, and

the performers respond by taking their places and awaiting

his cue to begin.

The lighting is produced primarily by footlights,

allowing large shadows to be cast during performance. The

need for special lighting occurs in five places in the

score: during the reading of the prologue; during halves

of the work; during "and let the lamp affix its beam"

(when a flashlight provides the lamplight), "and let the

boys bring flowers"; and at the end, when after the stage

lights have been dimmed to total darkness, the singers are

given cues for their final words by flashes of light

directed onto the appropriate singers.

As for costuming, the instrumentalists wear dark and close-fitting clothes. The singers dress informally and

in basically plain garments accented with what Reynolds describes as "unreasonably bright accessories," and referring no doubt to the gaudy attire of "wenches" who would "dawdle in such dress/As they are used to wear," and 210

to the "flowers" the boys bring in the "last month's

newspapers". The singers discard these accessories,

however, by the end of the first half of the performance

so that the old effect is carefully modulated to one of

drabness. Reynolds’ setting uses the same binary form as

the poem (A,B), and between halves of the performance, all

of the singers don robes, capes, or similar garments, made

of rough, black material. The robes may or may not be

hooded, and should shroud, but not completely obscure, the

outlines of the singers’ bodies. The donning of the robes

should be ritualistic, in gestures appropriate to a wake

or funeral. Although the ceremony is not complex, it

could take a considerable amount of time.

Reynolds' unusual score indicates not only sounds but

the location of each performer at all times during the

performance. Says Reynolds, "The density of individual

movements--stage left to stage right, or the converse--was

dictated by the number of text syllables presented in each

section. The larger their number, the more positional

exchanges on stage."® Each page of the score represents twenty seconds of abstract time from left to right, each

unit being marked by five numbers at the top of each page.

The vertical dimension of the page is proportional to the

stage width; stage left, facing the audience, corresponds to the top of the page, stage right to the bottom.

Time, or something approximating measure, as in a 211

conventional score, proceeds from left to right, and thus

a diagonal dotted line in Reynolds’ score indicates both

the direction and the duration for the repositioning of a

particular singer. The movements result sometimes in

"itinerant vocalization, '* but often their purpose is to

"reconfigure" the performers on the stage for fresh ensemble opportunities.

Reynolds' complex notation provides 1) the words of the text; 2 ) the relative dynamics--crescendo and diminuendo--by means of the thickness of the letters

(empty black letters indicate vocal whispers); 3) pitch;

4) the placement and relative proportions of syllables and phonemes. Pitch may be located on a conventional staff, or it may be indicated relative to high or low on a staff without a clef; if there is no staff, singers intone in natural speaking voices.

Vocalization can be richly expressive* dependent on the talents of individual singers who have occasion to produce words, syllables, or phonemes in an array of shades and textures, as follows:

shout with cupped hands, clicking of tongue, crooned moan, whistle, scream, whisper, Sprechstiraroe (spoken words), vowels sung while gradually opening and closing mouth, sounds passed from one performer to the next, falsetto and non­ vibrato pitches, monotone, irregular inflected swells (pitched or monotone), trills, melisma (one is extended over three words). 212

Instrumental groups are located according to their notated positions on the page. For example, the piano i3 to the far right on the stage diagram and appears low on the page (and it remains stationary). The two percussion groups appear in middle and left stage, their instruments including, in addition to the familiar drum, triangle, cymbal, vibraphone, and so forth, a collection of

"instruments" uncommon to traditional percussion groups: for example, a large glass bottle half-filled with water, whose pitch changes according to the angle of tilt; two black rubber combs, whose teeth occasionally scrape across the edge of a cymbal; five police whistles; a group of bottles made by the percussionist--untuned, but arranged from high to low; knitting needles used as mallets. To this instrumental potpourri should be added the inflated paper sack that bursts, at an especially dramatic moment, between the hands of one of the singers; the balloon inflated on stage until it bursts; the fire-cracker or cap-gun set off in a small oil drum.

Virtually all of the instruments and singers behave

"irregularly," like the poem. For instance, the pianist produces special effects by laying paper on the strings, playing "clusters" of notes with the forearm; lightly touching, plucking, and playing glissandi on the strings; stopping strings with the hand near the bridge to produce double-octave harmonics; sliding a mallet on strings; 213

rasping wound strings with a plastic ruler; and hitting

the piano frame with a soft mallet.

The combination of physical distance (top to bottom)

and temporal distance, or duration (left to right) in the

score enables one to form an accurate picture of the

character of activity--such as outlined in the

aforementioned partial summary of vocal and instrumental

special effects--on the stage at any moment. The location

of staves and other notational markings on the page (top

to bottom) indicates the position of the performer (left

to right) when a sound is realized, but movement and

positioning with respect to the front and rear of the

stage are unspecified. Thus an unpracticed performance

could approximate something like a log jam!

Ironically discordant with the random physicality of

this performance in transit are the segments of abstract

time notated with extreme precision. For example, the

times given at the vertical lines which mark small

structural divisions (thicker lines mark larger divisions)

could be determined by the performer if he or she desired.

Indeed, the composer asks for a "relatively free

treatment" of time. And because, in conjunction with the

director, the performer judges the placement of entries

and the speed of activities, an action can take far longer than indicated in the score. In spite of the numerous

opportunities for improvisation, indeed guesswork, the 214 general guideline, however, remains the proportions within

sections delimited by heavy vertical lines.

In performance, the flow of activity (visual and

aural) should be liberal, says Reynolds, controlled by the

exchange of cues between the performers, as indicated in

the score. And although generally time should be constant

within each section, the basic tempo may vary widely from

one section to the next. Thus the setting of "Emperor'

evolves out of the particular circumstances of each

performance. Each occasion is shaped by the

eccentricities of the performers in the process of

interpreting the unconventional notation and scoring.

Perverse as this avant-garde scenario may appear, however,

the overall haphazard program succeeds perhaps as no

traditional demonstration could by enhancing certain

moveable aspects of Stevens' poem.

Now as I read Reynolds reading Stevens, I discover

not an unmanageable polyvocal, polyrhythmic texture

wrought by an experimental practitioner obsessed with the

complexity of motion, but rather, a relatively

straightforward assessment of the structurally unifying

features of Stevens' poem. For example, linguistically

"Emperor*' is "full of long motions" (CP 62), motions which

Reynolds recognizes as the positioning and repositioning of thought. This odd "music" occurs in the Reynolds score

in the form of word transformation and vocal inclination. 215

Hollander describes such activity in Stevens' poetry as

“the sounds of language deconstructed into vocables,"

"music claimed for language as well as language claimed

for music; music abstract and concrete" ("The Sound of

Music," 235). Stevens’ "Emperor" is not one of those poems, like "Snow and Stars" or "Metamorphosis," whose language is taken apart as it is conceived; rather, the decomposing and subsequent recomposing potential implicit in its "music" is discovered and brought to the level of full consciousness by the composer.

As indicated on page two of the score, "concupiscent"

(a word full of semantic and thematic energy) goes through various vocal metamorphoses, including emphasis of

"scent," and a simple alteration which extracts the word

"peasant" (think of Stevens’ laborer "roller of big cigar") from the last two syllables of the original word.

Prior to this repositioning, on page one, one of the singers has spoken (not sung) the word "musk" as accompaniment to the sung MUSCULAR. The effect of such linguistic play is to make visibly and aurally immediate the synthesis of thematic and formal elements. Musk is a scent, a scent that Reynolds distills from the virile body of the cigar roller, whose status as a laborer, or peasant, qualifies him for his "godlike" role in the company of street wenches and the boys who adorn them.

The result? The word concupiscent moves about on the page 216

and the stage with the same vitality as the muscular

figure in the first stanza of Stevens’ poem. As one would

expect, there are numerous verbal shifts and embeddings

intoned in unusual vocalizations throughout the score as

required by the action in the poem, for example the word­

play on "horny” and "protrude" and "dress," and the

addition of words fantasy, dirt, sham, lackey, eerie,

sobs. These latter words are spoken softly and precisely

and at various speeds for textural richness, and when the

words are spoken singly, instruments cover the voices to

obscure somewhat their negative meanings. The words are

worked into Stevens' text sotto voce, thus enhancing the ambiguous features of the work.

Reynolds' emphasis on movement is probably the most remarkable feature of Emperor. At almost any moment,

someone on the stage is in motion. Just as the poem's action shifts from the kitchen to another room containing a dresser and a corpse, and just as knowledge of death in the bedroom of the old woman becomes an activity of recognition, so the music requires its participants to shift positions, exchange instruments, alter vocal pitch and instrumental timbre, improvise rhythmic and metrical values, and cue each other, at times with the help of the director, in gestures appropriate to the occasion. This musical director who gives the signal to begin the performance is equivalent to the one who directs us in 217

Stevens' scenario, the one who says, "Call the roller of

big cigars/. . .and bid him whip." And it is this

director who commands that we, the readers "whip" with him

"the noise of motion,/The renewal of noise/And manifold

continuations" (CP 6 0 ). For, as Stevens says in "The

Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician," there must be

no cessation "of the motion of thought/And its restless

iteration" (62).

While "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" is, according to

Reynolds, about death, death is not finally partitioned

off from the disturbing aspects of physical life, as it is among the street folk in the poem. All of Reynolds’

indeterminate shuffling about, like the invasion of the bedroom become funeral parlor by the emperor and his crew,

is the finale to what seems to be a little manifesto against stasis. Reality--vital, muscular— is variably present in what appears to be. The final utterance of the

Reynolds score, a glissando on "I scream," reaching to E above high C, and falling immediately in pitch and dynamic level, is the last instance of the inclusion of motion into the possibility of death. And it is this vital scream, born, ironically, of the dumb coldness of what was, and isolated from other sounds (except for a barely audible piano run, ending in a blur), that echoes through the final darkened seconds of this performance of Emperor and of performances to come. For with each new reading, 218

indeed, with each new performance and its unique set of

cues and reconfigurations, the screamed finale sounds

seeming into being: "The only emperor is the emperor of

ice cream." Reynolds found no obvious motivation in Stevens'

text, so he divised patterns of his own, patterns derived

thematically and structurally from the central issue of

movement. In Reynolds' dramatic world, the word becomes

Stevens' insatiable actor "containing the mind"; the word

to Reynolds is Stevens' dimly-starred idea of order at Key

West, an idea as subject to change as the fluctuating mind

of the perceiver; an idea ever eluding our understanding

as it challenges the imagination. Steven Paulus, however, directed his attention in Reflections: Four

Movements on a Theme of Wallace Stevens to only four phrases among numerous musical possiblities for an orchestral setting of "Sunday Morning." The work for chamber orchestra, commissioned and given its world premiere by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra in 1985, is wholly, and appropriately, unlike Reynolds’ theatrical

setting of "Emperor." Whereas Reynolds worked from a complex of movements crystalised in key words and gestures from the poem, Paulus was inspired by a literary theme # rather than a musical one. That theme, however, as he describes it, required that he, like Cone’s composer of 219

songs, be highly selective concerning the relevant

features in Stevens' poem.

During an interview with Paulus, I directed my questions toward an account of how he made his choice of textual fragments describing the four movements of

Reflections; "The Holy Hush," "Unsubdued Elations," “Isle

Melodious," and "Where Triumph Rang Its Brassy Phrase."®

His answers helped confirm my suspicion that Paulus not only hoped to capture a mood or feeling generated by several portions of text, but that he also wished to express, as succinctly as Stevens, the questioning and testing format contained in the question "What is divinity if it can come/only in silent shadows and in dreams?" and the various answers that become tangible evidence for or against belief in that so-called divinity. Paulus makes no attempt with his selection of phrases to provide a complete program for Stevens' poem; rather those phrases turned into descriptive titles for movements, or segments, represent simply one reading based upon the discovery of symmetrical or balanced structural features immediately translatable into musical idioms. Thus, Reflections. unlike Reynolds’ Emperor. does not require an understanding of the musical phrases within the context of the poem in order to be understood by listeners.

Nonetheless, to have heard the poem, and then to have heard Paulus’ "reflective" meditation on his own 220 experience of listening to Stevens listening to his own mind in the process of reflecting, is to have taken part,

if only for twenty minutes or so, in a thrilling dialogue as pregnant with possibility as the rhetorical one in

Stevens’ poem.

Paulus' musical background and style are outlined briefly by K. Robert Schwarz in a recent article

f documenting reactionary responses against the ‘single- minded, elitist view that prevailed only two decades ago'1 in the narrow-minded ultra-rationality of serialism.

Paulus is one of a group of "new composers" whose expressive idiom is regarded as a "healthy cross­ fertilization" of different varieties of music in recent years. According to Schwarz, Paulus has earned his place among these reactionaries for his ability to revive opera and the art song in a time when fewer and fewer of these genre reach the professional stage, and for his direct and straight-forward approach to his art. That approach, or style, makes Paulus an important voice in the new American school:

. . .his innate musical tendencies--favoring a conservative, tonal idiom and a graceful, unabashedly romantic style--are perfectly suited to vocal music. Paulus always knew that tonality was the manner in which he "felt comfortable." But his tonal sense is of a peculiarly American, modal variety that recalls. . .Aaron Copland and Roy Harris. . . .

. . .he is adept at characterization, conveying personality by purely musical means. He knows how to 221

match dramatic and musical climaxes, and he is so obsessed with vocal declamation that every word cuts through the orchestral fabric. Paulus’s fluid compositional technique matches every dramatic requirement, turning rapidly from folklike modality to jazz to dissonant chromaticism. ("Mavericks of Music,"'34-35)

What better voice to deal with the complicated

texture of a seemingly unbalanced poem? "My music is never couched in puzzles or obscurities," says Paulus.

"It can be bold and upright, it can be introspective, but

it always clearly expresses my emotions" ("Mavericks,"

35). His clarity of purpose distinguishes Paulus’ approach to "Sunday Morning" from a line-by-line exposition such as Reynolds' setting of "Emperor," which is purposefully additive, creating for instance a dense texture from a simple statement. "Sunday Morning," as readers testify, is a complicated poero--an eight-part meditation on death, a meditation so provocative as to inspire a dialogue between disparate aspects of the poet's consciousness. In spite of "Sunday Morning's" emphasis on debate--Paulus’ "questioning and testing"--some commentators nonetheless tend to subscribe to a reading which focuses on the failure of the questioning mind to recognize or discover a form to contain the unresolved

"sweet questionings" that are the "measure" of "that wide water, inescapable" (CP 70). Stephen Paulus, I suggest, supplies such a form by choosing the four musical phrases that direct his Reflections. Reflections: Four Movements on a Theme of Wallace

Stevens was written for a chamber orchestra of

approximately twenty strings, six winds, three brasses,

and percussion.*0 The chamber orchestra, a large ensemble

but still intimate, is the perfect medium to express the

limiting theme of Stevens’ "Sunday Morning." Paulus

admits that his work is not meant tc achieve the scope a

full orchestral setting might undertake, or a work, such

as the one he first imagined for chorus and orchestra, which would have followed the full text of eight stanzas or poems. Still, even with his subject narrowed, Paulus

found it difficult to choose four portions of text from a work, like so many of Stevens’ poems, full of musical potential. "Sunday Morning," according to Paulus, is rich with musical language and musical images conjured by words and phrases. It also contains many provocative rhythmic passages as well as the verbal music produced through juxtapositions of various units of sound. For example,

Paulus referred to stanza vii as a good instance of a poem containing all of these stimuli. Indeed, one can hardly miss, in just the first five lines of the stanza, the proliferation of sibilants, rhythmic and alliterative variation, and an appropriately descriptive image oi unrestrained motion.

Supple and turbulent, a ring of men Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn Their boisterous devotion to the sun, 223

Not as a god, but as a god might be, Naked among them, like a savage source. (CP 70-71)

Paulus is correct to note that stanza vii of "Sunday

Morning" is nearly "already music."

So the choice is difficult for the composer, who finally settles on four phrases with structural associative potential distinct from others that might achieve a more memorable effect. It is a hidden agenda finally that inspires the little "abstract piece for orchestra," as Paulus describes it. For like Reynolds reading "Emperor," Paulus reading "Sunday Morning" recognizes death as his literary subject. Unlike

Reynolds, however, Paulus debates the issue of immortality, just as Stevens' two personae in "Sunday

Morning" stay locked, as I suggest in my third chapter, in the constant antiphonal motion of poetic argument.

For my analysis of Paulus reading Stevens, I shall stress what Paulus calls associative potential as I see it operating both within and between movements of Reflections and within and between certain stanzas of "Sunday

Morning." First, on the stanzaic level, the relation between Paulus’ first two movements, "The Holy Hush" and

"Unsubdued Elations," approximates the antiphonal pattern

(antithesis without synthesis) of Stevens’ stanzas one and two in juxtaposition: 224

I

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice. She dreams a little, and she feels the dark Encroachment of that old catastrophe, As a calm darkens among water-lights. The pungent oranges and bright, green wings Seem things in some procession of the dead, Winding across wide water, without sound. The day is like wide water, without sound, Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet Over the seas, to silent Palestine, Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

II

Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams? Shall she not find in comforts of the sun, In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else In any balm or beauty of the earth, Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven? Divinity must live within herself: Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow; Grieving in loneliness, or unsubdued Elations when the forest blooms; gusty Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights; All pleasures and all pains, remembering The bough of summer and the winter branch These are the measures destined for her soul. (CP 66-67)

There is an antiphonal relation as well between Paulus’ third and fourth movements, "Isle Melodious (Remembrance of Awakened Birds)" and "Where Triumph Rang Its Brassy

Phrase,” and Stevens’ fourth and fifth stanzas, in which these phrases occur: 225 IV

She says, "I am content when awakened birds, Before they fly, test the reality Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings; But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields Return no more, where, then, is paradise?" There is not any haunt of prophecy, Nor any old chimera of the grave, Neither the golden underground, nor isle Melodious, where spirits gat them home, Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured As April’s green endures; or will endure Like her remembrance of awakened birds, Or her desire for June and evening, tipped By the consummation of the swallow’s wings. V

She says, "But in contentment I still feel The need of some imperishable bliss.*’ Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams And our desires. Although she strews the leaves Of sure obliteration on our paths, The path sick sorrow took, the many paths Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love Whispered a little out of tenderness, She makes the willow shiver in the sun For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet. She causes boys to pile new plums and pears On disregarded plate. The maidens taste And stray impassioned in the littering leaves. (CP 68-69)

Two antitheses govern the exchange of voices in

Stevens’ first and second, as well as subsequent stanzas.

One concerns narration. I contend that there is only one speaker in "Sunday Morning" (male or female) who is assigned the duplicate roles of questioner and tester (see my Chapter III). The voice that later occasionally remarks, "She says," also conducts an inquiry (e.g. in 226 stanza vi) that complements and enlarges the issues the

other posits. This other is the voice of qualification,

the one that says ’but." Neither voice dominates,

however, nor is there a consensus on any subject. The

mind behind the voice introducing "Sunday Morning," the

one that later remarks “she says," falls silent after

feeling'the "dark/Encroachment of that old catastrophe. "

This bleak perspective is questioned in the second stanza.

Three questions and two spontaneous answers quickly negate

the calm, compliant tone of the dreamer. The effect,

however, is not one of progression, for the second voice,

for all of its declamatory bravado, does not sound very

convinced by its own reply, "Divinity must live within

herself." Anticipating, it seems, Stevens* later "it must

be possible" in "Notes," the words that declare a solution

to the speaker's dilemma intone the forced rhetoric of

hopefulness--it has to be. And just as in "Sunday

Morning" each decision on the part of the meditating,

questioning mind is negated by yet another question, in

"Notes" the "It must/Be possible" is quickly undermined by

"What am I to believe?" (CP 404)

Likewise, in Reflections the relation between the first and second movements is antiphonal, the second a

response to the first. Paulus describes his "The Holy

Hush" as opening the work by establishing "a feeling of mystery and reverence." A "moaning, nostalgic melodic 227

fragment from the oboe” and a sequence of leisurely paced

thirds, which begin in the strings and appear, fragmented,

throughout the movement, help account for an overall calm

effect. The second movement, by contrast, is "charged

with high energy emanating most often from the woodwind

section." It contains a "jocular little melody,” played

first by the oboe, and repeated throughout and in every

section of the orchestra Nonetheless, it is "constantly being fragmented or interrupted by a rather cavalier

little theme propelled from the piano" (Paulus, Prelude.

14). This constant threat from the piano subverts a full development of the first theme, just as in Stevens’ poem the tests (by way of example) and subsequent declarations of results happ in almost too quickly to be convincing.

Within movements of Reflections and stanzas of

"Sunday Morning” the correspondences between the music and the poem are even more vivid. Indeed, the intratextual patterns governing Paulus’ Reflections are almost identical to Stevens’ and can be best described as generally fluctuating--shaped by interrogation and subsequent modification. As Stevens’ "and yet" weaves its way, at times in subtly neutral threads, at others in boldly colored rhythmic and melodic strands, throughout the texture of Paulus’ setting of "Sunday Morning," the composer becomes decomposer, defending for a short time his appropriation of "relevant" text. 226

All four movements of Reflections are without key signature; instead, they develop around tonal centers, unrestrained by the so-called laws of the familiar diatonic and chromatic scales. Incidentally, this technique is not unusual with modern and contemporary composers, who characteristically search for ways to reconstruct or even defy outmoded forms and systems.

Nonetheless, while Paulus' non-radical approach to tonality is not unique to him, it is a crucial element in the perfect expression of Stevens’ theme in "Sunday

Morning." Frequent, indeed sometimes incessant, shift in tonal emphasis can be a forceful device to illustrate binary or antiphonal symmetry.

Just as in "Sunday Morning," the original uncomplicated mood of the complacent voice in the first stanza is threatened by a tragic day-dream of Christ's sacrifice and death--indicated by the darkening calm among water-lights, and the ever-darkening tone of the meditation that follows--the mood evoked by Paulus' "Holy

Hush" modulates through passages of dark and increasingly agitated wind and strings orchestration, which reach partial resolution or climax in the horns, and begin again in the relaxed nostalgia of strings and oboe. This pattern of climax and repose is frequent, producing a generally disturbed, but not chaotic, rhythmic texture.

The tempo of the first movement, at first a slow to 229

moderate walk, becomes increasingly faster as the metrical

units shift, but only enough to create the subtle effect

of indecision or mood change. For example, a rhythm will

seem to have been established, then it will turn, without

preparation, as in the first seven bars when five

different rhythmic variations occur. Never are the shifts

harsh, for Paulus means only to suggest the unresolved

effects of the mind in the process of debate.

In contrast, Paulus' second movement is marked by its

clarity and a complete lack of mystery, as indicated by

its title, ‘Unsubdued Elations." I have already mentioned

the equivocal mood of the piece as exemplified by the

piano’s insistent interruption of the oboe’s theme. More

interesting are the metrical and rhythmical formulae

indicating tension between opposing voices or ideas. As

one would expect in a work with such a descriptive title,

Paulus’ second movement contains a good bit of rhythmic

variation. Even though its tone is superficially the

joyful, playful counter to the meditative one in the first movement, there are moments when jazzy "cat and mouse" texture is modified by brief spells of less propelling

rhythms. The piece begins in 2/4 time, and in a fast tempo, which continues unrestrained all the way through measure 102, when it is suddenly stopped by a measure of

5/8 time wedged in between two of 2/4. This quick shift of two beats to five and back to two provides a much- 230

needed breath, and works incidentally as an inhibitor, a

reminder to slow down. Three bars of declamatory 2/4

meter follow the 5/8 "pause," only to be superseded by

sixteen bars in 4/4 time. Once again the little 2/4

rhythmic unit is halted by another. This type of rhythmic

pattern, mimicking the thematic, continues throughout the movement, with the addition of 3/4 time into the rhythmic

complex. At one point this mixture of rhythms produces the effect of accumulation--roughly equivalent to the almost hyperbolic claims of the speaker in Stevens’ poem-- when in the space of several measures 2/4, 3/4, and 4/4 meters push forward almost to the point of exhaustion, only to be once again moderated by a measure of 5/8 time.

The relationship between "Isle Melodious" and "Where

Triumph Rang its Brassy Phrase" is similar to that between the first two movements of Reflections. As with the poem’s two stanzas, these two movements complement and at times enlarge each other. For example, in Stevens' fourth stanza the speaker says, "I am content when wakened birds,/Before they fly, test the reality/Of misty fields," and so forth, yet by the next stanza her "remembrance of awakened birds/Or her desire for June and evening"-- memories of the real earth--are nullified by her opening statement: "But in contentment I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss." "Isle Melodious" is an exquisitely lyrical piece

composed, it seems, upon the principle of repose. Its main theme, "an extended theme for solo violin is presented over a series of low, oscillating strings"

(Paulus, Prelude. 14); it is a pensive voice, saddened with the knowledge of memory awakened. Here is the expressive musical language of loss, the flute's elegantly contoured melodic passages mimicking the bird’s song, which seems to have faded, as in Stevens’ poem, into the ethereal past or "isle Melodious,/where spirits gat them home." The muted effects of memory revived are quickened occasionally, as if the meditating mind were fully awakened by the experience, by the short rhythmic interludes played more than twice as fast as the opening violin solo and distributed among all members of the orchestra. These passages, however, fall back to the slow, expressively satisfying tempos and haunting sonorities of the strings and obligato flute, and the movement ends as it began--quietly, thoughtfully.

The final movement of Reflections at once completes the set and responds to "Isle Melodious." "Where Triumph

Rang Its Brassy Phrase," says Paulus,

. . .closes the work in a fashion that is meant to retain some of the dark qualities of the earlier movements, and yet be strong and confident. . . .As might be expected, the trumpet plays a significant role in this movement with each section of the ensemble being highlighted at one point or another. 232

Various themes or fragments of themes from other portions of the work are presented in altered guises. (Paulus, Prelude, 15)

The fourth movement's odd beginning clearly

contributes to Paulus’ description, but its opening bars

also support my suggestion that it responds to the third movement in approximately the same way Stevens’ fifth

stanza answers the fourth. This final movement, obviously antithetical in tone and mood, commences with fifteen bars

of seemingly held-over material from "Isle Melodious."

The stretto effect derives from several factors: the tonal center remains the same, the dynamics indicate only slight variation, the tempo is picked up only slightly, and the strings continue with a melodic sequence begun in the preceding movement. The only significant change concerns a shift in the metrical unit from 3/4 to 4/4 time. Just as Stevens’ "but in contentment I still feel/The need of some imperishable bliss" qualifies his "I am content when wakened birds/. . .test the reality," so Paulus’ fourth movement completes the questioning and testing sequence begun in his third.

And this final movement, like the other three, also works intratextually with the poem. In stanza v of

"Sunday Morning," the idea of contentment is quickened, paradoxically, by what seems to be a sudden and acceptable understanding of death--of its real and imagined, physical 233 and mental operation within a religious/aesthetic context.

Likewise, "Where Triumph Rang Its Brassy Phrase’s" overall mood is assertively confident. Although the movement begins quietly, almost as if hesitating to proclaim itself, it finally gets going in a fairly speedy tempo.

And for the most part, the brassy timbres and steady, fast pulse manage to overpower any fragment of doubt left over from the preceding movement, as well as from the first two. The quickened pace, however, is interrupted by an effectively lyrical interlude that seems to say, "and yet" or "perhaps," and for an instant we are reminded of the work’s somber theme, and the poem’s--death. But the interlude is short, and as a kind of stay against the darkness of hesitation, Paulus’ Reflections proceeds resplendently, ending finally in a crashing, exultant, fully-orchestrated close.

Paulus and Reynolds have achieved, I think, with their innovative approaches to these two early poems of

Stevens, what the poet would have recognized and acclaimed as "new readings" of old pieces. To him, the poet, these two composers would have been "new romantics," movers and shapers, like himself, expressing always an up-to-date version of reality. And their works would have been labeled collaborations by Stevens, for clearly the poet is always present in their music. But Paulus and Reynolds do not simply recite in appropriatly matched musical idioms 234 the superficial matter of the poem. Rather, theirs is the work of the decomposer, whose job it is to recognize, as

Stevens has at the end of "Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself," the scrawny cry that is like “A new knowledge of reality."

He knew that he heard it, A bird’s cry, at daylight or before, In the early March wind.

It was part of the colossal sun. (CP 534) ENDNOTES

1 J. M. Edelstein, ed., "Bibliography Checklist, Section F" in Wallace Stevens: A Descriptive Bibliography (Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1973) 266-66.

2 Gilbert Chase, "Introduction," Roger Reynolds: Profile of a Composer (New York: C. F. Peters Corp., 1982) 1 .

3 Chase, 1. 4 Gregg Smith, "Notes" to The Emperor of Ice Cream. Roger Reynolds in America Sing3. The Gregg Smith Singers, Turnabout, TV 34759, 1980.

5 Roger Reynolds, The Emperor of Ice Cream (New York: C. F. Peters Corp., 1963) full score.

6 Roger Reynolds, "Modes, Not Media, Matter" in Roger Reynolds: Profile of a Composer (New York: C. F. Peters Corp., 1982) 9.

1 Smith

« Reynolds, Emperor

3 Interview with Stephen Paulus, Composer in Residence with the Minnesota Orchestra. I talked with Paulus in his home in St. Paul on October 19, 1985. Prior to our meeting, Paulus generously provided me with a cassette tape of Reflections.

i o Stephen Paulus, Reflections: Four Movements ..on a Theme of Wallace Stevens (Valley Forge: European American Music Corp., 1986) full score.

235 CONCLUSION

"He knew that he heard it," and it was both part of what always had been and of what could be. It was a "new knowledge of reality," and like the scrawny cry of the bird, it seemed "like a sound in his mind." In "Not

Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself," the last poem in The Collected Poems. Wallace Stevens summarizes a life of commitment to the idea that each act of perception is an imaginative one "heard" as a metaphor, or new version, of an original, or reality. Thus the poet’s aesthetic of interrelatedness is logically connected to what seems to be a preference for auditory stimuli. Even the sun

"rising at six" is heard in the bird's cry:

That scrawny cry--it was A chorister whose c preceded the choir. It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings, Still far away. (CP 534)

A gifted listener, Stevens drew upon musical sources often enough to have been labeled a "musician's poet."

Not only are his poems full of musical imagery, but they are also frequently structured upon principles of musical form. Rarely does a poem by Stevens overlook a reference to the relationship between the "disturbances" of sound

236 237 and the "perspective that begins again" (CP 528). "Like a new account of everything old" (CP 531), each poem fuses the uniqueness of its sound with "old romantic" forms.

The hybrid, or "new romantic" product is Stevens' modern poem, performed by the poet who would "discover summer and know it" rather than impose an order "as he thinks of

[it]" (CP 403).

Stevens' voice undergoes frequent change throughout

The Collected Poems. One of his more remarkable vocal personae is the female singer in "The Idea of Order at Key

West," It is she, the seaside singer, who first intones, in spellbinding musical phrases, the mature poet’s break from the "old romantic" lyrical rhetoric of Keats and

Shelley and Whitman. After "Idea of Order," the singer who accompanies himself on a "blue" guitar produces the ever-bolder music of a poet willing to "argue" with an audience. His instrument becomes the aggressive voice of the "new sound,” the guitar grating and scraping through apparently inharmonious modulations from things as they used to be to "things as they are." Like the "song" of the skreaking and skrittering grackle in "Autumn Refrain" opposed to the euphonious but outdated warblings of the

Keatsian nightingale, the "new" and discordant music of the blue guitarist's locally relevant performance "grates" against the romantic chords of the sweet~sounding lyre or lute of his bardic predecessors. This is the art of the decomposer. It is the "music1’ of the blue guitarist, the woman singer, the "mind" walking the evening streets of "New Haven"; and its success or failure depends ultimately upon the poet's skill with the recomposition of elements. To decompose, after all, is only the first step in the process of modernization. A "new knowledge of reality," like a variation on a theme, must begin with an imaginative appraisal of an original. It must not merely repeat.

Indeed, the original, or theme, like the self-propulsive subject of a fugue, generates "recomposed" version after version of itself in poems, just as it may in music.

Stevens* late and long poems, commonly referred to as variations on a theme, are brilliant achievements in the manner of decomposing and recomposing the structural and thematic elements of language to fit an audience’s requirement for a "tune beyond us, yet ourselves." Like

Brahms’ great variations before him, Stevens' "tunes" depict in words those changes "of nature" that are

"more/Than the difference that clouds make over a town"

(CP 487). The poet’s rhythms also modify--like the "wind

[that] has blown the silence of summer away"— the old tune, the "sad hanging on for remembrances" (CP 487).

Brahms was not the only composer to help Stevens develop his technique. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Debussy,

Satie, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, among others, all 239 contributed to the Stevens sound. Comments on several of these composers are sprinkled throughout Stevens' essays, letters, and poems, and all but Satie appear in Stevens’ record collection. Clearly, the musical composer was an important figure to Stevens. He was the poet’s closest ally, his musical idioms often expressively and structurally analogous to the poet’s linguistic ones. Yet

Steven3 never failed to distinguish the two artforms, although in his late poems he labored to achieve the effect of musical improvisation. "An Ordinary Evening in

New Haven" is Stevens’ most successful poem in the extemporaneous style of "never-ending meditation" (CP 465) .

Stevens’ interdisciplinary preference distinguishes him somewhat from his contemporaries, except for Auden and

Pound; today, however, poets such as John Ashbery begin from the perspective it took Stevens a lifetime to reach.

Ashbery’s indeterminate poetics embrace such a "recent imagining of reality" (CP 465), that, like avant-garde composer Roger Reynolds’s "intermodal" reconfigurations in time and space, they reconstitute even Stevens’ "larger poem for a larger audience" (CP 465). Their experiments, and those of other composers and poets interested in correspondences between musical and poetic idioms, have taken the Stevens method another step in the inevitable process of decomposition, in which "Reality is the 240 beginning not the end" and "Alpha continues to begin" while "Omega is refreshed at every end" (CP 469).

Although, as Stevens said, "We keep coming back and coming back/To the real" (CP 471), that reality is not merely the visable, the audible, the movable. Rather, like the poem that is "the cry of its occasion,/Part of the res itself and not about it," what is real is the unreal.

As the fore-meaning in music. . .

New Haven Before and after one arrives. . . BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CITED

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