"The Sense Against Calamity": Ideas of a Self in Three Poems by Wallace Stevens Author(s): Sharon Cameron Source: ELH , Winter, 1976, Vol. 43, No. 4 (Winter, 1976), pp. 584-603 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2872739
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to ELH
This content downloaded from 184.171.112.49 on Sun, 20 Sep 2020 21:49:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms "THE SENSE AGAINST CALAMITY": IDEAS OF A SELF IN THREE POEMS BY WALLACE STEVENS
BY SHARON CAMERON
It is strange that the man who insisted in "Esthetique Du Mal" that "The greatest poverty is not to live in a physical world", should also have insisted on divesting that world of palpable qualities:
There may always be a time of innocence. There is never a place. Or, if there is no time, If it is not a thing of time nor of place, Existing in the idea of it, alone, In the sense against calamity, it is not Less real. ("The Auroras of Autumn," CP 418)
Perhaps Stevens is suggesting that what is "real" is something other than what we ordinarily think. We are told here that "the idea of it alone" is sufficient protection against being alone; for loneli- ness is part of what Stevens means by "'calamity," at least the lone- liness of being separated from the experiencing of oneself. "The Snow Man," "'The World As Meditation" and "Final So- liloquy Of The Interior Paramour" are three poems that group them- selves together because they tell something about what it means to be separated from one's own experience and therefore diminished. The poems record three steps in the difficult task of self- acknowledgment. Each poem appears to be more solipsistic than the last, embracing less of the external world. The speakers in the three poems seem, in fact, progressively more conscious of them- selves because of the exclusion of the external world. In brief, "'re- ality" looks as if it has been sacrificed to "'the idea of it." Yet it is precisely the movement toward an ideational self which yields an awareness of otherness. Unlike most of Stevens' poems, ""The Snow Man" has a title that directly and plainly identifies the essential tone of its speaker's voice. That voice remains dignified by keeping us at a distance. The speaker attempts to convince us that the snow man is a paradigm for what we should all be: a brave hypothesis. The fact is,
584 Ideas of a Self in Three Poems by Wallace Stevens
ELH 43 584-603 (1976) Copyright ? 1976 by The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
This content downloaded from 184.171.112.49 on Sun, 20 Sep 2020 21:49:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms the hypothesis is a naive one. This naivete is betrayed by the title because, as becomes clear, there is no such thing as a man purged of misery and empty of illusion; there is no such thing as a man of snow. The very phrase "snow man" collapses the internal and ex- ternal worlds the speaker tries to keep separate and converts the inhuman into the human terms he assumes he can exorcise. The irony is that while he continues to believe the world is purged of his feelings for it, the reader discovers at the end of the poem that the speaker has confused the two. For while he scorns the an- thropomorphic, his first image for the listener who is and beholds reality conjures up that personified mass of snow we construct as children, and the rest of the poem moves us not away from that childish image but right toward it:
One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter Of the January sun; and not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind, In the sound of a few leaves, Which is the sound of the land Full of the same wind That is blowing in the same bare place For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. (CP 9)
The speaker longs for a kind of exalted detachment, the position of a person not guilty of committing the pathetic fallacy. At the outset he declares that "one must have a mind of winter" "not to think / Of any misery in the sound of the wind," and acknowledges the difficulty of this. He knows that the only way to keep the neces- sary dichotomy between the world and the self is to abolish the self, empty it of its feelings of misery so that those feelings will not color his image of the world. Could he rid himself of all human charac- teristics, become transparent, he might see the world as it is, mirror it. Instead, he makes the world transparent, a creation in his own image. The syntax of the poem punctuates the speaker's desire to avoid
Sharon Cameron 585
This content downloaded from 184.171.112.49 on Sun, 20 Sep 2020 21:49:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms the aggression of the pathetic fallacy. First, the verbs in all but the last stanza are in the passive or infinitive form and only tenuously connected to the subject "One." Their passivity is reinforced by the run-on syntax which, packed as it is with dull-toned repetitions ("To regard... To behold ... Of the pine-trees . . . Of any misery") suggests that the speaker hasn't the energy to separate his ideas. Because the poem is one long sentence, the reader is forced to undergo the experience of waiting before he can understand the opening stanza. When the poem's initial thought is completed, we find that what the listener "beholds" is "nothing," and the en- jambment emphasizes the poverty of this response. Finally, there is something fornal and stilted about the diction-"seeing" would be more direct than "regards" and "beholds," if less exalted. The snow man "listens" but instead of hearing, he "beholds," just as the speaker "thinks" of misery in the sound of the wind rather than hearing it. This fusion of modes of perception or failure to distinguish between them implies other fusions: it is impossible to tell where the mind of winter ends and the January world begins. Both exist in "the same bare place." The speaker's mind frames the landscape described in the interior stanzas such that it generates that landscape. The sense of echo is, in fact insisted upon in the concluding stanzas where even the phrases repeat each other ("sound of the wind ... sound of a few leaves . .. sound of the land ...") and where the distinctions between interior and exterior landscapes become meaningless. The repetition of "same" is more complicated still, for with it the speaker is reduced to his ideal projection, the listener. Once he acknowledges that they share the same space, the difference between himself and the snow man is negligible. The reader is hypnotized by the personification in the final stanza and, like the speaker, loses utterly his sense of the distance and difference between the two. Thus, the primal humani- zation of the snow man in the title becomes fixed. The subsequent reduction is both severe and shocking: the self and the world are conflated; there is no entity separate from the speaker, no longer an external snow man, indeed not even a world. The speaker's voice is an ironic one, world-weary; the voice of experience turning its back on itself. The speaker sees himself as a realist living in a world where "nothing" is asserted as a value; that he is capable of embracing it is in fact the only good thing he has to say about himself But, lest we are in doubt, the last stanza insists that the negation is not passive, is caused and has an origin. There
586 Ideas of a Self in Three Poems by Wallace Stevens
This content downloaded from 184.171.112.49 on Sun, 20 Sep 2020 21:49:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms are three assertions of "nothing" in this stanza, two of which reflect each other. The speaker/listener is "nothing himself' (meaning- less) and as a consequence he "beholds nothing" (no thing that is not there). Hence the world is also "nothing" (meaningless). Thus the outside world is simply a mirror of the speaker's sense of him- self. The irony here is that, while he affects inertia, passivity, empti- ness, what he does is to project the negation he desires onto the landscape. Such a projection is inevitable (though the speaker can- not forgive himself for it and therefore cannot acknowledge it) for "The air is not a mirror, the world takes shape because "Of the sweeping meanings that we add . . ." ("Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction," CP 384). The speaker's assurances to the contrary, we know that the world cannot be identical to our picture of it, and that in fact this picture is "The difference that we make in what we see / And our memorials of that difference. . ." ("Description With- out Place," CP 344). To be a snow man-to be cold, colorless, blank-is not possible and, if it were, would not be desirable. We have all longed to be rid of the burden of the self; not to be, or at any rate not to be separate from the world that surrounds us. But separateness is an initial fact of our existence. It is the first intolerable knowledge a child has of the world, and growing up means learning to come to terms with it. Does the speaker think he can repudiate such knowledge? If so, his desire is too difficult to tell from his despair. It is, of course, true in Stevens' poetry that praise is extended to the man "Who, to find what will suffice, / Destroys romantic tene- ments / Of rose and ice . . ." ("Man And Bottle," CP 238). Then "Bare night is best. Bare earth is best" but only because then ". .. the voice that is great within us makes a true response . . ." ("Eve- ning Without Angels," CP 137). Given the fact that the listener in "The Snow Man" has no voice, he also has no greatness and there- fore nothing to celebrate. The "nothing" perceived by the listener may be a beginning, a foundation upon which the imagination builds, but the speaker is too little conscious of its requirement. What he spurns is precisely what he ought to crave: "The fiction that results from feeling" ("Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction," CP 406).
II
The mind which generates "The World As Meditation," knowing
Sharon Cameron 587
This content downloaded from 184.171.112.49 on Sun, 20 Sep 2020 21:49:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms and acknowledging its own creative role, not only foris a coherent universe, but also landscapes and peoples it. Unlike "The Snow Man," this poem can be located. It takes place in Penelope's bed- room; in the morning as the sun comes through the window; at the moment of waking; in the dream-fantasy of being half awake. It takes place in the way in which that fantasy reflects reality and also strengthens it:
Is it Ulysses that approaches from the east, The interminable adventurer? The trees are mended. That winter is washed away. Someone is moving On the horizon and lifting himself above it. A fonrm of fire approaches the cretonnes of Penelope, Whose mere savage presence awakens the world in which she dwells. She has composed, so long, a self with which to welcome him, Companion to his self for her, which she imagined, Two in a deep-founded sheltering, friend and dear friend. The trees had been mended, as an essential exercise In an inhuman meditation, larger than her own. No winds like dogs watched over her at night. She wanted nothing he could not bring her by coming alone. She wanted no fetchings. His arms would be her necklace And her belt, the final fortune of their desire. But was it Ulysses? Or was it only the warmth of the sun On her pillow? The thought kept beating in her like her heart. The two kept beating together. It was only day. It was Ulysses and it was not. Yet they had met, Friend and dear friend and a planet's encouragement. The barbarous strength within her would never fail. She would talk a little to herself as she combed her hair, Repeating his name with its patient syllables, Never forgetting him that kept coming constantly so near. (CP 520)
Part of the knowledge conveyed by the poem is that of the simul- taneity of experience, the density and many-sidedness of it. Be- cause this world is not paper-thin, it admits of both complexity and confusion. It is a world that contains several realities and one in which, therefore, questions about the nature of reality make sense.2 The question with which the poem begins, which it repeats and which it finally answers equivocally in the seventh stanza ("It was Ulysses and it was not") is central to an understanding of the way in which reality is transformed by the mind and in which the resulting
588 Ideas of a Self in Three Poems by Wallace Stevens
This content downloaded from 184.171.112.49 on Sun, 20 Sep 2020 21:49:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms transfornation is real. And the poem strongly suggests that trans- formation or change is part of what "meditation" means; means, not simply from Penelope's point of view, or from the speaker's, but also from the point of view of something larger which participates in the same essential process. This something larger is alluded to in the first stanza and referred to explicitly in the fourth:
The trees are mended. That winter is washed away.
The trees had been mended, as an essential exercise In an inhuman meditation, larger than her own.
Why, one wonders, does the speaker say the trees have been "mended"; the winter "washed away"? What is the purpose of talking this way about the trees with their new leaves or the snow's melting? One mends something that is imperfect or torn. Winter is a season of imperfection, of sickness; a season needing a cure. Perhaps spring is someone's idea of what such a cure might be. Whose idea, precisely, we don't know. But it is something as medic- inal and necessary as the idea of a god might be. We are told this meditation is "larger" than Penelope's and that is only right since what governs a world ought to be larger than what governs a life, and we are told it is "inhuman." But much as these facts set it apart from Penelope's meditation, what draws the two together is the essential nature of both. For the speaker seems to be suggesting that one day the world took stock of itself and found itself lacking. Spring was its attempt to remedy that fact. Even the world was enriched by its own fantasy. There is a sense of excitement at the beginning of the poem which does not dissipate but rather becomes transfonned in the sixth stanza when the speaker pauses to qualify what he has related. Here we are told that Ulysses' return is not, perhaps, actual or real in the way we have thought it. But that return is not, therefore, unreal, and our discovery of what is "actually" happening neither negates nor replaces our knowledge of what has happened; rather it supplements that knowledge. I have made a distinction between what actually happens and what seems to happen and, in this poem, that is a dangerous distinction to make. Because it implies that something is less real for having .... existed in the idea of it, alone, / In the sense against calamity.. ." and that is emphatically not so. What is, in fact, impressive about the poem is how convincingly the world of the mind is called into existence. And that is partially a
Sharon Cameron 589
This content downloaded from 184.171.112.49 on Sun, 20 Sep 2020 21:49:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms consequence of the fact that we experience this world in much the same way as Penelope does. We stand, via the speaker, midway between Penelope's consciousness and the world that feeds it; or midway between Penelope's consciousness and the world it feeds. To untangle the relationship or to express it less reciprocally is to imagine a relationship other than the one expressed in this poem. What stirs Penelope and awakens her is the "savage presence" of "fire" approaching her window and shining through it. The wonder of this description lies in how much it accounts for: it is an accurate description of the morning sun, growing stronger as it moves up- ward, and also of what Ulysses' homecoming might be like.3 Penelope feels it as the latter. Perhaps she is half asleep. Perhaps she knows what she imagines not to be true. Perhaps there is a sense in which imagining it makes it true (like Donne's: "So if I dream I have you, I have you"). Perhaps she has the fantasy be- cause she would not have enough without it. In any case, she imagines not only Ulysses' return, but also the self she would be were she to welcome him home. Finally, she imagines the self they would be together:
His arms would be her necklace And her belt, the final fortune of their desire.
She dreams a world into existence, "mending"' the present world, giving it what it needs to make it less imperfect, healing it. And then the question of what she has experienced occurs to her. Perhaps it has occurred to her all along and only now occurs to us:
But was it Ulysses? Or was it only the warmth of the sun On her pillow? The thought kept beating in her like her heart. The two kept beating together. It was only day.
To what do we suppose "the thought" in the second line to refer? Which thought? The thought of Ulysses? The thought of the wannth of the sun? Or Penelope's attempt to distinguish between these alternatives: the magnitude of that thought? The question is important because, at first glance, it would seem consonant with the meaning of the poem to have "thought" refer only or primarily to Ulysses: to have the thought of Ulysses beat in Penelope like her heart. But the reality established here is more complex. For gram- matically, "the thought" refers to "the warmth of the sun" with an equal if not greater priority. It is the thought of that warmth, perhaps the gratitude to it for making her think of Ulysses, that
590 Ideas of a Self in Three Poems by Wallace Stevens
This content downloaded from 184.171.112.49 on Sun, 20 Sep 2020 21:49:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms beats in Penelope like her heart. But if what I have just said is true, "It was only day" does not mean what we might expect it to mean. It is not, for example, said admissively or concessively, as though Penelope had made a mistake and had realized it. On the contrary, what becomes clear here is that one need not relinquish one reality in order to acknowledge another; that it is, in fact, the co-existence of the two realities that keeps Penelope alive: "The thought kept beating in her like her heart / The two kept beating together." It is only day that provides so much. What Penelope is mirrors what she has seen: her "barbarous strength" is a consequence of "the savage presence" she has wit- nessed. Even the phrases echo each other. Penelope, at the end of the poem, manifests the kind of belief that resists skepticism de- spite its consciousness of the origins of belief, or perhaps because of that consciousness. In the last stanza, we see Penelope fully awake and as credulous as she was at the beginning of the poem. That is as it should be. It is what we believe that is real. It is what is real that has the power to save us. There is a sense of closure about "The World As Meditation" that is not unlike the closure in "The Snow Man," for in both poems the self and the external world are defined by their relation to each other. The snow man is defined by his relation to winter; Penelope is defined by her relation to Ulysses. The snow man drains the world of its meaning. Penelope fills the world with the detail and extravagance of her desire. Both poems speak to the problem of how man confronts his loneliness, of whether there is anything with which to confront it. Perhaps one essential difference between the two poems has to do with the kind of closeness that exists between the respective speakers and their subjects. In "The Snow Man," I suspect the speaker is talking about himself though his manner of doing so is not direct, hiding as he does behind the props of a hypothetical "one" and a projected "listener." Sill, he knows what "a mind of winter" is because he is in a position to know. In "The World As Meditation," closeness is a consequence of affection and respect. One would have to care for Penelope a great deal to probe her mind as gently as the speaker does and to yield such delicate results. In "The Snow Man," the speaker impresses us with how shrivelled the world is. In "'The World As Meditation" the speaker shows us how much the world holds, how large it is when filled to capacity. But it is only in a poem like "Final Soliloquy Of The Interior
Sharon Cameron 591
This content downloaded from 184.171.112.49 on Sun, 20 Sep 2020 21:49:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Paramour" that the self turns to itself as toward a legitimate object of meditation. People have different notions of what it means to "get into" someone else's mind; to describe what might constitute knowl- edge of someone else. One might say, for example, that "The Snow Man" is a poem which shows us what it is like to feel cold. But one does not have to travel inward to tell that. One does not even, in fact, have to touch on the subject of feeling. For cold is what hap- pens when one abdicates feeling; when, for some reason, feeling has become too painful. Reality freezes at the surface. It does not yield. That is the terrible predicament of the speaker in "The Snow Man." In "The World As Meditation," Penelope's fantasy weaves itself between the reality of the day-clear world and the reality of the imagination. But while her vision of reality is assuredly more com- plex than that of the speaker in "The Snow Man," it is not, there- fore, less complacent. She never allows herself to experience (or we never see her experiencing) anything but complete satisfaction for the world which she in part inhabits, in part creates. Penelope's world is remarkably charming but it is also remarkably naive. It is not just that she is biding her time until Ulysses' return and doing it contentedly, it is that her contentment so closely resembles fulfill- ment that one wonders whether Ulysses' presence might not crowd that world, whether there would be space enough in it for him. The poem creates this feeling partially because we do not have a sense of what it would mean for Penelope to miss Ulysses. We never hear her question what necessitates the weaving of that fantasy, beauti- ful as it is. We do not experience her experience of loss. We never even experience her being except as it exists in conjunction with, and as a consequence of, Ulysses'. And that is because she never experiences herself apart from him.
III Given a world that is void, it is surely better to fill that world with the mind's projections than to thin to nothing. But, familiar as these seem, are they always the only alternatives? What is it we are when we let go of our preconceptions long enough to be anything? What is it we see when we disengage ourselves from what, in "Man Carrying Thing," Stevens calls secondary (parts not quite perceived Of the obvious whole, uncertain particles Of the certain solid ...) (CP 350)
592 Ideas of a Self in Three Poems by Wallace Stevens
This content downloaded from 184.171.112.49 on Sun, 20 Sep 2020 21:49:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms when we "unaccommodate" ourselves, as Edgar says in King Lear and stand as "poor, bare forked animals"? Is it only in our imagina- tions that we are able to endure this way? And what do I mean only? There is something in "Final Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour" to which these questions are central. In the other two poems, such questions were only hinted at. There is a directness and a thoughtfulness about "Final Soliloquy" as though the screen we inevitably stand behind in the presence (because of the pres- ence) of others has been lowered. "Final Soliloquy" suggests what "having a moment to myself' should mean; the moment when, much as I like you, I can close the door, shut my eyes and look inward. Alone, I try to hear myself think, listen to hear what shape those thoughts are taking. So there is a quality of searching about the poem (this is perhaps why some of the descriptions seem to encir- cle each other, each a new attempt at exactitude) and because of this searching quality there is an openness and presentness that we do not see in the other two. "The search / For reality," Stevens wrote in "An Ordinary Evening In New Haven," "is as momentous as / The search for god" (CP 481). The poem is an acknowledg- ment of that momentousness. And perhaps because of this acknowl- edgment, in honor of it, the speaker addresses himself, addresses the question of a self. Like all soliloquies and perhaps, as Mill suggested,4 like all poems, this speech is meant to be overheard. We are present on condition that we know our place:
Light the first light of evening, as in a room In which we rest and, for small reason, think The world imagined is the ultimate good. This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous. It is in that thought that we collect ourselves, Out of all the indifferences, into one thing: Within a single thing, a single shawl Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth, A light, a power, the miraculous influence. Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves. We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole, A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous. Within its vitil boundary, in the mind. We say God and the imagination are one ... How high that highest candle lights the dark. Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
Sharon Cameron 593
This content downloaded from 184.171.112.49 on Sun, 20 Sep 2020 21:49:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough. (CP 524)
I hear the voice that is speaking. It belongs to someone assertive who shrugs off illusions and knows enough not to make large claims; who states, for example, that it is "for small reason" he thinks as he does. The speaker is also tired by, seeking shelter from, external experience and he finds that shelter in the ritual over which he presides in the poem. I cannot point emphatically to the lines that make me feel the speaker's weariness, but I can say that my feeling results from the cumulative effect of statements which imply the knowledge of situations other than, and sometimes oppo- site to, the ones they describe: as "rest" implies the knowledge of weariness, as '"the intensest rendezvous" implies the knowledge of rendezvous in which the engagement is only 'social' and nothing passes but time. In brief, it is the voice of someone who is saddened by experience, aware of what there is to be sad about, and who seeks a remedy for this sadness: not elsewhere but here, not later but now. Well, then who is the person being spoken to? Because there are, after all, two people in the poem or two parts of one self. It is not I think, that the person being spoken to is different from the one I just described. It is that he is less than that person. He is someone who, perhaps, despairs often and who, perhaps, has reason to de- spair. If we could hear him speak, he might voice the following:
There is so little that is close and warm It is as if we were never children. ("Debris Of Life And Mind," CP 338)
Or, at any rate, so I imagine him. And I imagine him the way I do partially because of the tone in which the speaker addresses him. The speaker talks kindly to this other self, but he does not talk to him as to an equal. He adopts the tone one uses to convince some- one who has need of belief. For the other self, participating in the speaker's knowledge without having access to his strength, looks for "the miraculous influence" and finds it lacking. The fiction of the poem is that, in the process of the utterance, that influence is created; those selves are brought together and made whole. "How high that highest candle lights the dark." Speech in the poem cures, mends, brings together. It has the same function as speech in ceremony and, as a matter of fact,
594 Ideas of a Self in Three Poems by Wallace Stevens
This content downloaded from 184.171.112.49 on Sun, 20 Sep 2020 21:49:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms speech in a particular kind of ceremony: the ceremony of devotion. Only this ceremony is silent, has need of creating silence. It hushes the world not so that something else might become audible (there is nothing else) but rather so that something else might happen. Thus the question becomes: what is it that is being celebrated and in what does that celebration consist? Celebration in this poem is very much like what ""meditation" is in ""The World As Meditation." The essence of both is their capacity to transform experience. Here the transformation involves changing a light into a candle powerful enough to burn a shape into the darkness. The shape, perhaps, of a room. It consists in the knowledge of the self and the subsequent acknowledgment of something larger than the self. Finally, it in- cludes the discovery of where these transformations have been tak- ing place: "Within its vital boundary, in the mind." And there is a comfort in this discovery, the comfort we feel when we are con- fronted with something that is familiar because it is ours. So the room becomes a dwelling. What is being celebrated through all of this? Surely it must be something other than a self confronting itself, or at least it must be some other way of talking about that not so special phenomenon. Because there is something in this poem that has thus far eluded me; something, as Stevens said in ""Man Carrying Thing," that has " resist[ed] the intelligence / Almost successfully" (CP 350). Perhaps what I have left unsaid is simply the obvious: that such a confrontation is the result of connections having been made. For the poem is very much concerned with the problem of connection, of whether and how it is possible to establish the vital connection between one thing and itself, of whether, to paraphrase Wittgen- stein, we can, in our imaginations, put one thing into its own shape and see that it fits. But what are the prior connections that make this possible? How, for example, do I connect the last line in the first stanza and the first two lines in the second:
we rest and, for small reason, think The world imagined is the ultimate good. This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous. It is in that thought that we collect ourselves, Out of all the indifferences into one thing.
What connection does "therefore" imply and does it refer, as it seems it must, to the prior assertion that "The world imagined is the
Sharon Cameron 595
This content downloaded from 184.171.112.49 on Sun, 20 Sep 2020 21:49:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms ultimate good"? It is only, I think, from the rest of the poem that the phrase "the world imagined" gains clarity, becomes light to us. For if we stop to think about it, the phrase is strangely or perhaps just ambiguously put. When a person says "the world imagined," he can mean to emphasize one of two things: the fact that the world about which he is speaking is imagined, that is, not real; or that the world about which he is speaking has been realized through the imagina- tion. In this context, I think I am meant to infer the latter, for if the poem makes anything explicit it is the reality of what is being de- scribed. The s'peaker's world may be bounded (it is its boundaries that make it recognizable) but that world exists. Perhaps the phrase is meant to draw our attention to the act of imagining: putting it this way calls our attention to how that world came into being, as though thought had suddenly become con- scious of itself. The speaker concentrates that world into being. His concentration partially explains the formality of tone. As when we prepare for an important occasion we take special care, we attend to our actions with a watchfulness normally reserved for others: we watch out for ourselves. But then the speaker says that this imagined world is "the ulti- mate good" or he says he thinks it is, and the qualification is impor- tant not because it undermines conviction but rather because it tells us precisely where conviction is rooted. That imagined world is ultimate in a literal sense, for it is the final as well as the most fundamental place to go. It is, for example, ultimate in the same sense as I am the ultimate authority with respect to something I have seen; where there is no external referent that matters; where I have no one to appeal to but myself. That world is "the ultimate good" because without it there is nothing, the kind of nothing suf- fered by the speaker in "The Snow Man." This speaker has not only called a self into being, he has also looked upon it with pride and with love. It is perhaps what God once felt when he imagined his creation, a suggestion which be- comes explicit in the fifth stanza: "We say God and the imagination are one." Here, "we say" does not weaken the assertion in any way. It locates the origins of meaning in the articulation of meaning. So: "We say God and the imagination are one." Because the imagina- tion has the power to rekindle belief Because it takes an imagina- tion to feel the presence of a God. Because the imagination, like God, makes me present to myself by asking me to look inward.
596 Ideas of a Self in Three Poems by Wallace Stevens
This content downloaded from 184.171.112.49 on Sun, 20 Sep 2020 21:49:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Because it is only when I am present to myself that I can ever be present to others. The speaker is encircled:
Within a single thing, a single shawl Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth, A light, a power, the miraculous influence.
Well, what is that single thing which ministers to our poverty and gathers us within its reach? The speaker says it is "a warmth / A light, a power, the miraculous influence." Mentioning one quality calls forth another: warmth evokes light, light strengthens into power. It is here that I imagine the two selves in the poem to become one. The articles indicate this by becoming definite. The claim, made definite, is therefore more strenuous. What, in this context, would belief mean? Perhaps it would mean belief in the possibility of wholeness; that we have the power to save ourselves and, if this is true, that there is something worth saving. It would be belief in a possibility similar to one which Stevens expressed in "Asides On The Oboes:
. . X The impossible possible philosophers' man, The man who has had time to think enough, The central man, the human globe, responsive As a mirror with a voice, the man of glass, Who in a million diamonds sums us up. (CP 250)
At any rate, some transition takes place after the third stanza. For from this point on, I am distinctly conscious of a change in tone. I feel a drowsiness sift through the speaker as if he were resting from the strain of being conscious. Now that what he had in mind has been accomplished, it is safe to rest:
Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves. We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole, A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.
It is right that the speaker should feel the order as an "obscurity" for he is no longer standing outside of it. Being within it, he is in a position to feel it in a way previously inaccessible to him and dif- ficult to speak about with language. Maybe what he is experiencing is similar to moments between sleep and waking when I feel the "obscurity" of warmth. I cannot exactly locate the warmth (though I
Sharon Cameron 597
This content downloaded from 184.171.112.49 on Sun, 20 Sep 2020 21:49:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms have a very conscious sense of its being where I am) and I cannot tell in what it consists (though I have a very conscious sense of being affected by it). But despite, or perhaps because of these ig- norances, I can say of myself that I have knowledge of warmth. It is, I think, in a comparable sense that the speaker says that he "feels ... a knowledge." It is because he is encompassed by, wrapped within, an order that he feels it as an obscurity. The speaker feels the obscurity "of that which arranged the ren- dezvous." If all he means by the pronoun "that" is "myself," why doesn't he just say so? Why does he surround the statement with mystery? Well, because "myself," as we ordinarily think of it, or neglect to think of it, is not all that he means and because there is a sense in which what he does mean is mysterious. For a self, de- pending upon how we inhabit it, grows and diminishes on different occasions, is sometimes recognizable and sometimes not. This is why an expression like "I really surprised myself' makes sense, although it is rather an astonishing statement. How does one sur- prise oneself? Can you plan a surprise for yourself the same way, for example, that you can plan a surprise for other people? The illusion of "otherness" that we sometimes bestow upon ourselves in those rare moments when we truly find ourselves good company is what, I think, is operative here. But it is important that the illusion of otherness be recognized as illusion. Otherwise the "miraculous influence" is not imagined but is instead falsely imagined. The first line of the next stanza address- es itself to that fact. It makes explicit the speaker's knowledge of where the rendezvous is taking place. But between these two stan- zas, a strange transition (that is, one I need to account for) has taken place:
Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves. We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole, A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous. Within its vital boundary, in the mind. We say God and the imagination are one ... How high that highest candle lights the dark. What is the relationship between the first line of the fifth stanza and the perceptions voiced in the fourth? They are not, for example, connected grammatically. ""Within its vital boundary, in the mind" is a separate sentence, although logically I would expect it to con- nect with and conclude the previous sentence. Because it does not,
598 Ideas of a Self in Three Poems by Wallace Stevens
This content downloaded from 184.171.112.49 on Sun, 20 Sep 2020 21:49:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms because I find the absence of such a connection unusual, I suppose the speaker to be calling my attention to something. In fact, I not only find the grammatical relationship between these two stanzas disjunctive and therefore noteworthy, I also have the jarring feeling that, with the first line of the fifth stanza, I have been given the answer to a question I did not and perhaps ought to have asked. For "Within its vital boundary, in the mind" answers the question of where this rendezvous is taking place. Because the line is set off as it is, I sense the speaker nudging me to recognize the priority of the information it gives. In that line, he seems to be hinting that all the perceptions of the fourth stanza are predicated upon the knowledge conveyed in the fifth; that "
Sharon Cameron 599
This content downloaded from 184.171.112.49 on Sun, 20 Sep 2020 21:49:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms The fiction that we are hearing speech inside a mind partially explains why the first line is both disjunctive and proper (actually it is more accurate to say that what is disjunctive about the speech is not that it exists as it does, but that we are hearing it). But there is another reason why the speaker does not indicate a specificity of place; why "as in a room" is not a more elaborate way of saying "in a room," but is rather a more accurate way of saying something else. For it is impossible to be more precise than the speaker is being. One can no more "locate" the imagination than one can locate a feeling of sadness. About either one says, "It is 'here' " and points futilely. It is something of a curse that so much of our experience should go on inside where we cannot literally "place it" and where we are therefore at a loss to describe and sometimes even credit it. Perhaps that is what deludes us into thinking, occasionally, that it does not go on at all. It is the speaker grappling with this difficulty, and so attending to it, that accounts for my feeling of disjunctive- ness. In the last stanza the self and its surroundings are so fused as to be indistinguishable. For it is "out of' (because of, as well as stem- ming from) "the central mind" that the speaker says "We make a dwelling in the evening air"; where "evening air" is clearly some- thing external though something that, like the self, eludes defini- tions of place:
Out of this same light, out of the central mind, We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough.
The "central mind" is anyway not so much a place as it is that collective center of consciousness in which the individual imagina- tion has its genesis. In "Chocorua To Its Neighbor" Stevens acknowledged:
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)
As "Final Soliloquy" attests, that speech involves revelation. The speaker is no less alone than he was at the beginning of the poem, but he is not feeling loneliness. What he is feeling is his solitude. The speech is and remains a soliloquy. But if I take the
600 Ideas of a Self in Three Poems by Wallace Stevens
This content downloaded from 184.171.112.49 on Sun, 20 Sep 2020 21:49:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms title literally, then I know it is a final soliloquy: final, not only in the sense of "definitive"'but also in the sense ofV"last." Having looked inward and found substance, the speaker is now freed to look out- ward and find reality. What makes his dwelling " Sharon Cameron 601 This content downloaded from 184.171.112.49 on Sun, 20 Sep 2020 21:49:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms inability is a consequence of the kind of poem "Final Soliloquy" is. How, for example, would I picture the speaker of the poem? Would I picture him as poor? He does, after all, say that of himself. But if I have attended to the poem, I have learned that he is not only or primarily poor. Would I picture him as acutely conscious of him- self? But in the fourth stanza he says explicitly that consciousness of himself is obscured. Would I picture him as alone? Well, I could, but then I would be ignoring the sense of the poem's last line. In short, I would have difficulty picturing him any one way at all. "Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all, / Out of nothing to have come on major weather": that is the way Stevens saw us com- ing to life. It is not unlike the way in which, at our best, we come to poetry. For in both, it is the extent to which we can leave our past behind, or at least recognize it as ours, that we have room to make something else present to us. I think of the ghosts in "Large Red Man Reading" who wait desperately for some miraculous influence to help them take shape, to give them the insides that in their diversion with the wrong thing, they do not think they have: Poesis, poesis, the literal characters, the vatic lines, Which in those ears and in those thin, those spended hearts, Took on color, took on shape and the size of things as they are And spoke the feeling for them, which was what they had lacked. (CP 424) Sometime ago I had a conversation with a friend in which he reprimanded me for the fact that my taste in literature was less exclusive than his. He confessed that he only found value in a particular kind of poem: one which confirmed his own experience. In responding to his statement, I found myself fumbling for words. Even if I were to have granted that the function of literature is, as he suggested, one which involves self-confirmation, I would have wanted to make serious qualifications and I would have wanted those qualifications to have knocked a dent in his complacency. For literature never tells me that my experience is identical to someone else's. At best, it tells me that my experience is similar to that of others'. The difference between "similar" and "identical" is not only a semantic one. If, for example, I read a poem like "The Snow Man" for the purpose of evoking a particular feeling from within myself, then my attention wanders from the poem. But if I read the poem and find that the experience it presents, when held against my own, has a like shape, then I have genuine confirmation 602 Ideas of a Self in Three Poems by Wallace Stevens This content downloaded from 184.171.112.49 on Sun, 20 Sep 2020 21:49:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms of the fact that I am not alone. Literature makes me accessible to myself by making something else accessible to me. It is perhaps this phenomenon that accounts for the appeal of poems like "The Snow Man" or "The World As Meditation." In poems like these, we see ourselves easily. But literature also makes demands. Perhaps "Final Soliloqury Of The Interior Paramour" is less accessible because I have more to learn from it. In it, I cannot as easily recognize myself. Yet I read the poem and I think I understand it. Do I understand it partially because it has taught me how to understand it? If so, what has it taught me? Not something about my experience (since, as I admit- ted, my experience is often painfully different from the speaker's) but something rather about the possibility of an alternative to my experience. That poem makes me know what "having an alterna- tive" means. FOOTNOTES 1 The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York, 1954), p. 313. This volume will hereafter be cited as CP. 2 "The World As Meditation," unlike "The Snow Man," has a mythical context and that fact, itself, is a significant aspect of the poem's meaning because it brings into play (at whatever submerged level) the reader's knowledge of the various Ulysses myths. This is not just any woman dreaming about any man. The poem, in addition, makes one aware of a fact easily neglected: that the power of a myth is not simply derived from the way in which it resonates against history or fact but is also and perhaps primarily a consequence of the way in which it resonates against its own renditions. The complexity of the phenomena which enables us to recognize a composite of stories as "the Ulysses myth" is, in part, what creates the texture of the Stevens poem. 3 In "Credences Of Summer" we are told that the sun is what we must look at ... Without evasion by a single metaphor" (CP 373). In "Add This To Rhetoric" the sun is reality purged of man's images for it (CP 198). When man looks at the sun as source, he has the power to imagine a "major man" that symbol of human possibility. We find it pointless to inquire too closely into his identity. As Penelope knows, "The hot of him is purest in the heart" ("Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction," CP 388). 4In "What Is Poetry?" Sharon Cameron 603 This content downloaded from 184.171.112.49 on Sun, 20 Sep 2020 21:49:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms