Modern American Poetry

Douceurs, Tristesses 113

This rock and the priest,

The priest of nothingness who intones—

It is true that you live on this rock

And in it. It is wholly you.

It is true that there are thoughts

That move in the air as large as air,

That are almost not our own, but thoughts

To which we are related,

In an association like yours

With the rock and mine with you.

But the assertion of relation, undermined by the same bitterness we have
seen in the rejection of Cinderella in Notes,collapses in the final couplet:

The iron settee is cold.

A fly crawls on the balustrades. (OP,88)

“This” clearly does not include the complete “that,” as the settee and the fly
stand outside the harmonious relation of thoughts, the rock, and the poet
with his interior paramour.
The attempt to make “this” (the present moment) include “that” is the
soul of Credences of Summer,and is expressed in the intellectual pivot of the
poem: “One day enriches a year ... / Or do the other days enrich the one?”
“The indifferent experience of life,” as Stevens said in Two or Three Ideas
(1951), “is the unique experience, the item of ecstasy which we have been
isolating and reserving for another time and place, loftier and more
secluded.” (OP,213). Or, as he put it programmatically in Notes,the function
of poetry is “forthwith,/ On the image of what we see, to catch from that/
Irrational moment its unreasoning.” Stevens stands in the perfection of an
August day in harvest, and asks whether this day in Oley, in its uniqueness,
includes all others in the year, or whether it stands extrinsic to them. To fix
the attention on the present is not at all a new idea in Stevens’ verse; what is
new is the expression of the idea in the present tense, in the actual scene, in
the poetry of “this” and “here” and “now.” Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,by
its nature, had been a program for action, a Utopian poem, and had about it
a marvelous note of expectancy, confidence, and buoyancy. Credences of