Modern American Poetry

Douceurs, Tristesses 119

That stopping, waiting, and watching while a complex of emotions falls
apart into a soft decay is a psychological alternative to the active purging
and redecorating of the second canto, just as the scarcely perceived sound
made by the bird is an alternative to the marriage hymns of the natural
greenery, and as the salacious weeds are an alternative to the fragrant roses
of the opening. And both these “natural” extremes (of greenery or of weeds)
are alternatives to the celestial possible: the luminous, the princely, the
flashing sapphire stations before the king. Next to that aristocratic Round
Table, the low primitiveness of the robin’s utterance stands in a sinister
guttural:

This complex falls apart.

And on your bean pole, it may be, you detect

Another complex of other emotions, not

So soft, so civil, and you make a sound,

Which is not part of the listener’s own sense.

Stevens has prepared us for this scrawny bird sound by the “green”
marriage hymns and by two other passages in the poem—the choirs of the
fourth canto and the trumpet of the eighth. These two are also mutual
parodies, or, to speak more gently, sideglances at each other, mutual forms of
critical reference. The choirs express final achieved polyphony, a primary
which is not primitive but superbly complex, a primary free from doubt, as it
was defined earlier in “Man Carrying Thing” (350). Things uncertain,
indistinct, dubious, were there defined as secondary:

Accept them, then,

As secondary (parts not quite perceived

Of the obvious whole, uncertain particles

of the certain solid, the primary free from doubt ...) (350–351)

But here, in Credences of Summer,we are, in theory, confronted with “the
obvious whole,” “the certain solid,” as Stevens assures us that the
normally secondary senses of the ear, less immediate than the eye,
swarm

Not with secondary sounds, but choirs,

Not evocations but last choirs, last sounds