Snow fell, and the tea steamed; the clock ticked as the man turned the pages of his book.  Five years ago appeared a new edition of selected poems by Wallace Stevens, and it offers a handsome format for savoring the words of this great poet.  Stevens once described himself as “a dried-up Presbyterian,” and there is some controversy whether on his deathbed he converted to Catholicism.  For appreciating his poetry, however, that question has no bearing.

Stevens (1879-1955) was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, and following undergraduate work at Harvard, he studied at New York Law School.  After posts with the American Bonding Company and the Equitable Surety Company, he took a job in the fidelity and surety claims office of a new firm in Connecticut, the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company.  There he stayed, retiring as a vice president.  His life as a poet tended to occur after hours:  as he walked to work, words formed in his mind, flowed around and assembled themselves; upon returning home to his white gabled house, he went to his desk and began to write.

During his lifetime, his seven volumes of verse, as well as his Collected Poems (1954), received much acclaim.  He was honored with the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, two National Book Awards, an honorary degree from Harvard, and a Pulitzer Prize.  He also has the distinction of having expressed his frustration with Ernest Hemingway by breaking his fist on Hemingway’s jaw.  For all the critical praise for and scholarly analysis of his writing, there seems never to have been the sort of enthusiastic outpouring of admiration for Stevens that has attended his younger contemporary, T. S. Eliot.

Stevens’ hundreds of poems have evocative titles:  “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon,” “Sea Surface Full of Clouds,” “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” “Vacancy in the Park.”  “To an Old Philosopher in Rome” pays tribute to Stevens’ professor, George Santayana, who had retired to Rome, and “The Doctor of Geneva” might be about John Calvin.  Stevens’ roots in eastern Pennsylvania influenced “The Bed of Old John Zeller,” Zeller having been an ancestor of Stevens, and “The Countryman” is about the Swatara Creek, a meandering tributary of the Susquehanna River.

As with Eliot, religious sensibility or sensitivity pervades Stevens’ poems, fascination with the real and ideal intersecting.  Elegant and enigmatic, Stevens’ poems frequently defy easy quotation; it is hard to lift one of his lines and make it into an epigram.  To pick a poem more or less at random, “Late Hymn from the Myrrh-Mountain” could stand alongside anything by Eliot, although here and there Stevens can be more obscure.

“Already the green bird of summer has flown/Away.  The night-flies acknowledge these planets,/Predestined to this night, this noise and the place/Of summer.  Tomorrow will look like today,/Will appear like it.”  It concludes, “Take the diamonds from your hair and lay them down./The deer-grass is thin.  The timothy is brown./The shadow of an external world comes near.”  These impressions of late summer nights, musings on the passing of time, allude to spiritual elements, hymns and myrrh and mountains.

Consider also “God is Good.  It is a Beautiful Night.”  Again we are immersed in themes composing Stevens’ poetic world:  birds, night, music, delicate order created by God.  “Look round, brown moon, brown bird, as you rise to fly,/Look round at the head and zither/On the ground.”  Next comes more exhortation:  “Look round you as you start to rise, brown moon,/At the book and the shoe, the rotted rose/At the door.”  Always in Stevens one finds the fragility of life, the decaying edges and details of which man has not got round to pruning and tidying up.

“In your light,” the poet tells the brown moon, “the head is speaking.  It reads the book./It becomes the scholar again, seeking celestial/Rendezvous.”  That man reading his book at night is being creative:  “Picking thin music on the rustiest string,/Squeezing the reddest fragrance from the stump/Of summer.”

For Stevens, the conflict within the intellectual life, the inner life, is between harmony and brute force.  Squeezing from a stump contrasts with picking out a tune on a stringed instrument, perhaps a zither, perhaps the Psalmist’s lyre and harp, perhaps the blue guitar of Picasso.  Meanwhile, the reader encounters the phenomenon of synaesthesia, where one sense triggers another, as here, where a fragrance is seen as red.

“The venerable song,” begins the last stanza, “falls from your fiery wings./The song of the great space of your age pierces/The fresh night.”  Layers of meaning, of possible meaning, unfold within a poem by Stevens.  His poems require silent meditation, and apparently Stevens required it as well.  In 1951 he wrote to a fellow poet, “It may become necessary sooner or later to emigrate to some region where there are no radios, newspapers, etc., and where the natural man can be himself, saying his prayers in the dark without fear of being slugged.”

Stevens’ poems often conjure well-bred, suburban concerns, solitude that can become loneliness, fine sitting rooms where the paint has begun to fade and the petals are falling from an arrangement of flowers.  “The aunts in Pasadena,” we read in “Of Hartford in a Purple Light,” “remembering,/Abhor the plaster of the western horses,/Souvenirs of museums.”  Purple light is ambiguous, variously masculine or feminine, kingly or lady-like.  “What is this purple, this parasol,/This stage-light of the Opera?”  That purple light is silken or velvety, yet there is another kind.

“See the river, the railroad, the cathedral,” we are beckoned, “When male light fell on the naked back/Of the town, the river, the railroad were clear./Now, every muscle slops away.”  The purple of parasols and opera houses now gives way to the purple of dusk, of bruised shadows falling over the weary town after a long day’s life-draining work.

Professor John N. Serio, also editor of The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens, produced this excellent edition.  This selection draws one in deeper, so that, as in “The Reader,” one can sit all night “reading a book,/ . . . as if in a book/Of somber pages.”  Once within that world, once imagined into the book, “The somber pages bore no print/Except the trace of burning stars/In the frosty heaven.”

 

Daniel J. Heisey, O. S. B, is a Benedictine monk of Saint Vincent Archabbey, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where he is known as Brother Bruno.  He teaches Church History at Saint Vincent Seminary.