111A blaze of summer straw, in winter’s nick.Wallace Stevens’ late version of pastoral is a double one, embodied in two
difficult poems—Credences of Summer(1947) and The Auroras of Autumn
(1948).^1 The two poems are in effect the same day seen from two
perspectives, Stevens’ Allegro and his Penseroso, a day piece matched with a
night piece (a night piece nonetheless auroral), his innocent Eden confronted
by his true Paradise, where he finds the serpent. They are two, or rather
twenty, ways (since each has ten cantos) of looking at middle age, when all
moments of life are potentially overcast by memory or fear. A poem takes us,
as Stevens said, from its “ever-early candor to its late plural,” and Credences
of Summerdescribes for us that late plural in all its harvest magnitude, while
the chill that falls across The Auroras of Autumnsprings, in contrast, from an
austerity of mind not far from Keats’s when he saw the Grecian urn as a cold
pastoral. Though the scene of middle age remains unchanged, “the Eye
altering, alters all.”
No previous long poem in Stevens’ collections had ever placed a lyric
speaker firmly in a landscape of the present moment: all had used the
haziness of a past distancing or the impersonality of an invented persona,
whether a woman, a shearsman, or a comedian. In contrast, the
HELEN HENNESSY VENDLERDouceurs, Tristesses
From On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens’ Longer Poems.© 1969 by the President and Fellows of
Harvard College.