[Christopher Mulrooney]

<FONT >Autumn Refrain

The skreak and skritter of evening gone
And grackles gone and sorrows of the sun,
The sorrows of sun, too, gone... the moon and moon,
The yellow moon of words about the nightingale
In measureless measures, not a bird for me
But the name of a bird and the name of a nameless air
I have never—shall never hear. And yet beneath
The stillness 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.

This is a poem in which it seems to me that it's very difficult to determine precisely what is being said, because of certain ambiguities. A "residuum" of the "skreak and skritter of evening" "grates" "these evasions of the nightingale" (whose "nameless air" the poet "has never—shall never hear"), and the "stillness" ("everything gone, and being still") under which the residuum "resides" is "in the key of that desolate sound."</FONT f>

[Brett Thibault]

Hi Chris,

Ideas of Order is one of my favorite books, and I think most of the poems maintain the thematic of natural order. The operative is “I think”, because I don’t have a paraphrased Rosetta Stone in mind for any of Stevens’ poems, nor do I think that sort of thing necessary or desirable.

But, when I realize the speaker in the poem is autumn, and that the symbolism has at its base refrain, as a referent, the lines become less distracting in terms of unity and coherent thematic. To me, it’s autumn’s lament of never knowing the nightingale, a symbol for sweetness in music and life, a burgeoning and procreation—things autumn as a season will never know, or night, visionary imagination (Shelley, Keats, Hardy, Coleridge) and the nursing mother (Florence) (earth), which are immediately transferable to the human condition via refrain, and kin to our never knowing truth because the “mind is smaller than the eye”: Steven’s more than rational distortion.

I find the verses in Ideas of Order are Steven’s most lucid in describing his worldview. The above is my interpretation only—of course—and may be simplistic in its brevity. For example, the myriad symbolism of the Nightingale and the moon could take paragraph upon paragraph to reach the ultimate point of confusion and futility in interpretation, so here brevity is a high virtue.

BT


[This message has been edited by Brett Thibault (edited December 15, 2001).]

[Christopher Mulrooney]

Dear Brett,

Thanks for your help. I was pressed by other matters, now that I look at it, it appears to add up to: The residuum (being still) of evening grates upon the stillness (these evasions of the nightingale), and the former determines the key of the latter.

Sincerely yours,
C. Mulrooney



[This message has been edited by Christopher Mulrooney (edited December 17, 2001).]

[graywyvern]

i think this is clearly a reply to Keats's "Ode To
A Nightingale". but Stevens is being haunted by the
absence of that which haunted Keats.

[This message has been edited by graywyvern (edited December 29, 2001).]

[ginger]

Another from Stevens, which I like a great deal...

The High-Toned Old Christian Woman

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That's clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began. Allow,
Therefore, that in the planetary scene
Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,
Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,
Proud of such novelties of the sublime,
Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,
May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves
A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.
This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.

[A. E. Stallings]

To me, this is a poem, at least to some degree, about an American poet and being part of, and yet alien to, the English tradition. There are no nightingales in North America, which is why he will never hear one, and yet the nightingale is THE bird of English poetry (Keats, Milton, etc., that famous adverb "darkling"). But melodies unheard are sweeter...

There is a very different poem, but with that a similar mixed feeling about the nightingale, its reality and symbolism, by Ransom, "Philomela." Regarding her (the nightingale's) relationship with America:

Not to these shores she came! this other Thrace,
Environs barbarous to the royal Attic;
How could her delicate dirge run democratic,
Delivered in a cloudless bouncless public place
To an inordinate race?

[Clive Watkins]

Since Ginger has widened this thread by posting "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman", let me follow her lead. (Isn’t this in blank verse, however?)

Here are three free-verse poems by Wallace Stevens, the first, quite well-known, "The Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock" from 1915, and two which are less well-known - "Gallant Chateau", written in the early thirties, and "the Woman in the Sunshine" from 1948. These last show a side of Stevens’s writing which is sometimes overlooked in the attention paid to his longer, more ambitious poems, for both are, I feel, oblique and at the same time intensely personal, expressive of a complex sense of erotic loss and resignation. (Arguably the impulse in each can be related to that in the more whimsical "The Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock".)

All three show, I think, a fine control of rhythm - which means a control of the relationships of syntax, sense and line-endings, and not just of accentual patterns.

Clive Watkins


The Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock

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


Gallant Chateau

Is it bad to have come here
And to have found the bed empty?

One might have found tragic hair,
Bitter eyes, hands hostile and cold.

There might have been a light on a book
Lighting a pitiless verse or two.

There might have been the immense solitude
Of the wind upon the curtains.

Pitiless verse? A few words tuned
And tuned and tuned and tuned.

It is good. The bed is empty,
The curtains are stiff and prim and still.


The Woman in Sunshine

It is only that this warmth and movement are like
The warmth and movement of a woman.

It is not that there is any image in the air
Nor the beginning nor end of a form:

It is empty. But a woman in threadless gold
Burns us with brushings of her dress

And a dissociated abundance of being,
More definite for what she is -

Because she is disembodied,
Bearing the odors of the summer fields,

Confessing the taciturn and yet indifferent,
Invisibly clear, the only love.




[This message has been edited by Clive Watkins (edited January 21, 2002).]

[Tom]

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[This message has been edited by Tom (edited January 30, 2005).]

[Clive Watkins]

Bric-à-brac? Nope!

Clive Watkins