Modern American Poetry

Douceurs, Tristesses 117

perhaps, if we are to speak justly. The final resolution—that this midsummer
day containsall the rest, but without souvenir (rather as a concept contains,
virtually, all its instances)—is an ingenious but frigid appropriation from
logical abstraction. Its weakness is betrayed as Stevens has to buttress it by
his gaudy language, always produced in moments of strain: the soldier who
bristles and looms comes in phrases not flesh but fustian.
Because this blustering solution is a false one, the poem will have to
begin all over again, resorting in turn to both self-enhancement and self-
parody. Earlier, in the third canto, a visionary exaltation had been sketched
in a tableau of height attained in the here and now:

This is the barrenness

Of the fertile thing that can attain no more.

It is the natural tower of all the world,

The point of survey, green’s green apogee,

But a tower more precious than the view beyond,

A point of survey squatting like a throne,

Axis of everything, green’s apogee

And happiest folk-land, mostly marriage-hymns.

It is the mountain on which the tower stands,

It is the final mountain ...

It is the old man standing on the tower,

Who reads no book.

The tower, the mountain underneath it, and the old man above it, though
drawn from Stevens’ walks to the tower on Mount Penn,^3 are all emblems of
the perfect day “in Oley when the hay,/ Baked through long days, is piled in
mows.” After the analytic questions about the day arise in the fifth canto,
however, a different stance is needed: the tower and the old man are
dispensed with, and the mountain is made to do duty for all three. The day
had first been construed in pure greenness as green’s green apogee, with its
natural mountain base, its prolongation into the man-made tower, and its
coronation with the human;^4 now in its self-enhancement it becomes at once
purely “natural” without tower or man, and at the same time purely mythical
and celestial, with only the most minor concessions to the original green.
Metaphysics surmounts the physical:

It is a mountain half way green and then,