Modern American Poetry

Douceurs, Tristesses 121

A mind exists, aware of division, aware

Of its cry as clarion ...

Man’s mind grown venerable in the unreal.

That venerable mind belongs to what Stevens will call the Omega in man,
peering forever into distances. Credences of summer are only possible when
that aspect of the mind is suspended by an effort, so that for a moment the
present can suffice and the distant can “fail” the normally clairvoyant eye.
As Stevens has moved further and further away from the original gifted
moment when the scene subdues the intellect and the mind lays by its
troubles, he has approached a vantage point in which the mind, in a new
ascendancy, more than half creates what it perceives. The final canto in
Credences of Summerbegins very coldly indeed, with the poet as a deliberate
and distant manipulator of marionettes:

The personae of summer play the characters

Of an inhuman author, who meditates

With the gold bugs, in blue meadows, late at night.

He does not hear his characters talk.

The poem has passed from noon to night, and the gold bugs and blue
meadows are the nighttime imitation of the gold sun and the blue sky of
earlier stanzas. But as the puppet master sets his characters in motion, they
achieve some life of their own: they bulge beyond his control, and they wear
mottled costumes, wanting to take on the ideal self-forgetful ripeness of
summer, but remaining personae nevertheless. To the end they remain
fictions, and their costumes are moody, and they are free only for a moment.
Even so, Stevens risks sentimentality in the ending,

In which the characters speak because they want

To speak, the fat, the roseate characters,

Free, for a moment, from malice and sudden cry,

Complete in a completed scene, speaking

Their parts as in a youthful happiness.

No criticism of this passage, or of the entire stance of Credences of

Summer,could be more pointed than Stevens’ own later backward glance in

“The Ultimate Poem Is Abstract,” written about a day which also seems

plenary, full of revelations, placid, blue, roseate, ripe, complete: