Modern American Poetry

Douceurs, Tristesses 115

Is there an imagination that sits enthroned

As grim as it is benevolent, the just

And the unjust, which in the midst of summer stops

To imagine winter?

After the question is put, a simple ease of landscape is never regained. The
analytic is in the ascendant, as detachment, generalization, and removal from
the scene take precedence over receptivity. The poems do not fail, but the
human effort to rest in the present is predestined to collapse, at least for
Stevens, who never was a poet formed to chant in orgy to the summer sun.
Fifteen lines after he has asserted that the summer land is too ripe for
enigmas, the central enigma of moment and context rises in him, and the
hope of serenity is lost. But the end was foreshadowed in the elegiac and
brutal claims for the land’s ripeness with which the poem had begun:

Now in midsummer come and all fools slaughtered

And spring’s infuriations over and a long way

To the first autumnal inhalations, young broods

Are in the grass, the roses are heavy with a weight

Of fragrance and the mind lays by its trouble.

Now the mind lays by its trouble and considers.

The fidgets of remembrance come to this.

This is the last day of a certain year

Beyond which there is nothing left of time.

It comes to this and the imagination’s life.

All of Stevens’ praise of summer is put in negative terms. There is “nothing
left of time,” and

There is nothing more inscribed nor thought nor felt

And this must comfort the heart’s core against

Its false disasters—these fathers standing round,

These mothers touching, speaking, being near,

These lovers waiting in the soft dry grass.

The scene is composed of details of warmth and feeling—the young broods,
the fragrant roses, the mythical fathers, mothers, and lovers—but they
emerge from the heavy toll of the mind’s trouble, the disasters (even if false)