Modern American Poetry

(^122) Helen Hennessy Vendler
This day writhes with what? The lecturer
On This Beautiful World Of Ours composes himself
And hems the planet rose and haws it ripe ...
If the day writhes, it is not with revelations.
One goes on asking questions. That, then, is one
Of the categories. So said, this placid space
Is changed. It is not so blue as we thought. To be blue
There must be no questions ...
It would be enough
If we were ever, just once, at the middle, fixed
In This Beautiful World Of Ours and not as now,
Helplessly at the edge, enough to be
Complete, because at the middle, if only in sense,
And in that enormous sense, merely enjoy. (429)
Credences of Summer,which begins “at the middle,” is undermined by the
difficulties made so bald in this later poem. To be blue, there must be no
questions. Stevens’ desperate, if truthful, expedient with which to end the
poem is the creation of the inhuman author whose characters undergo
spontaneous generation for a flicker of feeling. This inhuman author is the
hermit in the hermitage at the center, and he, not the senses, controls the
ending of the poem. Earlier, Stevens had denied that the natural mountain
depended in any way on the hermit:
It is not
A hermit’s truth nor symbol in hermitage.
It is the visible rock, the audible.
But if the personae of summer are the author’s creations, so perhaps is the
rock of summer, and the poem, by posing what are for Stevens the false poles
of reality on the one hand and imagination on the other, diverts him from his
truer subject: the variety of several imaginative modes playing on any one
thing. He is never more uneasy than when he is trying to claim some
autonomy for haymows in Oley, as he does earlier in the poem; it forces him
into his concluding evocation of a disembodied and inhuman author as
proper counterpart to the irremediably obdurate hay.