Modern American Poetry

Douceurs, Tristesses 125

That he might know

In hall harridan, not hushful paradise,

To a haggling of wind and weather, by these lights

Like a blaze of summer straw, in winter’s nick. (x)

The energy of repudiation directed toward Credence of Summerin The
Auroras of Autumnis nowhere clearer than in this igniting of the Oley hay
mows. As they go up in flame, in a blaze of summer straw, they produce the
streamers of the auroras, and the hushful paradise of August gives way to the
hall harridan, a fit locale for “the harridan self and ever maladive fate” that
went crying through the autumn leaves in Owl’s Clover.Like the inhuman
author of Credences of Summerwho meditates with the gold bugs, and like the
serpent who meditates in the ferns, the spectre meditates a whole as he lives
all lives, and the whole that he envisages is to be, in some season, relentlessly
in possession of happiness by being relentless in knowledge. Someday,
Stevens hopes, we may find

The possible nest in the invisible tree,

Which in a composite season, now unknown,

Denied, dismissed, may hold a serpent, loud

In our captious hymns, erect and sinuous,

Whose venom and whose wisdom will be one. (437)

But that new composite androgynous stability of serpent and nest, described
in “St. John and the Backache,” is not attained in The Auroras of Autumn,
which remains bound in its glittering motion, a brilliant reproduction of
Stevens’ apprehensive compulsion in change.
To the extent that The Auroras of Autumnremains a poem of the sky and
motion, it is a dazzling performance. Indoors, it weakens, and it falters in its
regressive motion toward childhood, before the serpent entered Eden. The
first canto summons up three manifestations of the Fate-serpent, which are
rapidly reduced to two, as the visionary image of the serpent transcendent,
relentless in happiness, belonging purely to an airy nest, is dismissed. The
other two levels of being remain. One is the simple animal nature of the
serpent as he lives in the ferns, on the rock, in the grass, like an Indian in a
glade, native and hidden; in this nature his head is wholly zoological—
flecked, black-beaded, visible. The serpent’s pure bestiality makes us
disbelieve in his possible transcendence; we are sure of his naturalness as he
moves to make sure of sun. But in contrast, there is the changeable serpent,