Modern American Poetry

(^112) Helen Hennessy Vendler
confrontation of the present is insisted on over and over in these two poems;
the eye is not allowed to stray, but is kept tightly bound by the repetitive
“this” and “here” of successive lines:
This is the last day of a certain year.
This, this is the centre that I seek.
This is where the serpent lives, the bodiless.
Here, being visible is being white.
The scrutiny represented by the insistence on the demonstrative adjective
and pronoun is a new mode for an expansive poem in Stevens. Though it is
more evenly sustained in The Auroras of Autumnit is best described in
Credences of Summer:
Three times the concentred self takes hold, three times
The thrice concentred self, having possessed
The object, grips it in savage scrutiny,
Once to make captive, once to subjugate
Or yield to subjugation, once to proclaim
The meaning of the capture, this hard prize,
Fully made, fully apparent, fully found. (vii)
This hard prize, so grasped and so exhibited, over and over, is the ever elusive
present, so likely, like the ghost of Anchises, to evade embrace. These poems
represent the wresting of Stevens’ naturally elegiac style into a temporarily
topographical poetry. Again, the result is happier in The Auroras of Autumn,
where elegy and description are kept in a dissolving equilibrium, and present
and past remain in a fluid focus. But in both poems, Stevens calls the present
internal moment “this,” and everything outside it in space and time “that,”
and the purpose of these two seasonal pastorals of inner weather is to find a
relation between “this” and “that,” a relation shadowed forth in an earlier
poem, “This as Including That” (1944–45):
This rock and the dry birds
Fluttering in blue leaves,