Modern American Poetry

(^118) Helen Hennessy Vendler
The other immeasurable half, such rock
As placid air becomes.
Stevens had once admitted “This is the pit of torment, that placid end/
Should be illusion” (292), but here, for this brief moment of idealization, he
sustains the immobility of his myth:
It is the rock of summer, the extreme,
A mountain luminous half way in bloom
And then half way in the extremest light
Of sapphires flashing from the central sky,
As if twelve princes sat before a king.
The earlier old man has been enhanced into the sun-king, a Charlemagne
surrounded by twelve peers; and the tower has been metamorphosed into the
airy half of the mountain, previously seen in the “green” passage as a
squatting throne, but here as a flashing beacon. It is a radiation upward of the
entire original scene, and of course brings about its own downfall, or in
literary terms its own parody. When we next see the tower, in the ninth
canto, it has turned into a beanpole; the green mountain has been dwarfed to
a weedy garden in decay, and the old man has degenerated into a cock robin
perched on the beanpole, no longer garbed in a “ruddy ancientness” which
“absorbs the ruddy summer” but instead huddled, waiting for warmth.
The imperatives with which Stevens will begin the scene in the
salacious garden parody the confident imperatives of the second canto.
There, action was paramount and insistent:
Postpone the anatomy of summer ...
Burn everything not part of it to ash.
Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky ...
And fill the foliage with arrested peace.
But like a fabliau coexisting with a miracle tale, the beast fable of the robin corrects
this energetic and idealized perspective with a low and slackened demand:
Fly low, cock bright, and stop on a bean pole. Let
Your brown breast redden, while you wait for warmth.
With one eye watch the willow, motionless.