Modern American Poetry

(^124) Helen Hennessy Vendler
on the tower or the robin on the beanpole, but where the old man reads no
book and the robin takes no flight, the serpent is engaged in perpetual
rapacious motion, wriggling out of its egg, sloughing its skin, gulping objects
into itself, moving in the grass. There are at first two serpents, one on the
earth and one in the sky, and the motion of the canto is a nervous ascent and
descent and reascent and redescent, a vertiginous uncertainty expressed in
antiphonal rhetoric:
This is where the serpent Or is this another wriggling
lives, the bodiless. out of the egg?
This is his nest. These lights may finally attain
a pole
In the midmost midnight and
find the serpent there,
In another nest.
This is his poison: that we
should disbelieve even
that.
Unlike Credences of Summer,which staved off interrogation as long as it could,
The Auroras of Autumnencourages the anatomy of the season, and the analytic
questions which form so strong a thread in the construction of the poem
begin in the fourth line of the first canto. Stevens’ demanding intellectuality
stops in the midst of summer to imagine winter because it is natural to him to
be reflective and abstract, even idly metaphysical, because he “likes
magnificence/ And the solemn pleasures of magnificent space” (vi). But there
are two manners of the analytic moment. One rests in the metaphor, say, of
the serpent, and keeping the vehicle intact asks whether this moment is
“another wriggling out of the egg”; the other sort departs from the original
metaphor, and inventing surrogate poet-selves (like the inhuman author in
Credences of Summeror his counterpart the spectre of the spheres in The
Auroras of Autumn) uses these supplementary selves to pose the questions.
By the time Stevens reaches out to his disembodied spectre he has
stepped considerably beyond the autumnal moment, and at the end, he
converses with the rabbi in speculative and generalizing terms, juggling his
combinations of happiness and unhappiness. With a wrench, at the end of
the last canto, he returns to his original autumnal and auroral metaphors, and
only retrieves his balance in the final tercet, where the spectre is violently set
down to live all lives,