Modern American Poetry

(^120) Helen Hennessy Vendler
With nothing else compounded, carried full,
Pure rhetoric of a language without words.
The earlier current of paradoxical negatives eddies through this fourth canto, as
the thing that can attain no more, and the old man capable of nothing more,
produce the music compounded with nothing else, full but without words.
Stevens’ aim is to disappoint us subtly as he pairs each word of potential, like
“full” or “capable,” with a negation of potential. All of Credences of Summer,in
fact, may be seen as a meditation on that Keatsian moment in which the bees
find that summer has o’erbrimm’d their clammy cells. Direction must either
stop at the plenary season, or it imperceptibly conveys excess and decay, and
Stevens’ response is exactly that of the humanized bees: to think that warm days
will never cease, or to follow a devious logic of wish.
Things stop in that direction and since they stop
The direction stops and we accept what is
As good. The utmost must be good and is
And is our fortune and honey hived in the trees
And mingling of colors at a festival.
In the explicit critique of this passage in The Auroras of Autumn,Stevens will
question his harvest credences:
We stand in the tumult of a festival.
What festival? This loud, disordered mooch?
But Stevens expresses perceptible dualities even within Credences of Summer,
and can follow his celebratory polyphony with a single sharpened analytic
clarion, forsaking the seductive lingerings of the last choirs for the
peremptory fiats of the trumpet:
It is the visible announced,
It is the more than visible, the more
Than sharp, illustrious scene. The trumpet cries
This is the successor of the invisible.
And unlike those last choirs, which suppose nothing as they rise in the land
“too serene” for enigmas, the trumpet is fully conscious. It knows that