Modern American Poetry

(^126) Helen Hennessy Vendler
whose head has become air, whose tip is higher than the stars, whose nest is
not the low grass but yet is still the earth, this time the earth in total
panorama:
This is his nest,
These fields, these hills, these tinted distances,
And the pines above and along and beside the sea.
This changeable serpent lives in present participles, gulping, wriggling,
flashing, and emerging, and he is the true genius of the poem. The wholly
natural beast, at ease in the glade, is the presiding spirit of Stevens’ willful
wish, even here, to be entirely at home in the world, to be an Indian in
America, an aborigine indigenous to the place. The children who appear in
the poem are the regressive human embodiment of the Indian-serpent,
which in its pristine innocence is a biological serpent native to Eden, not an
interloping malice. This serpent is dismissed in favor of the grimmer
changing one, and the epigraph to The Auroras of Autumncould well be
Donne’s harsh couplet from “Twicknam Garden”:
And that this place may thoroughly be thought
True paradise, I have the serpent brought.
Like Donne, “blasted with sighs” in spite of the garden, Stevens here bids
farewell to the idea which engendered Credences of Summer—the idea that
one could give credence to summer, that the mind could lay by its trouble,
that honey could be hived and a festival held. “As the Eye altering, alters all,”
the luxuriant haymows bleach to an expanse of desolate sand.
The four cantos that follow the appearance of the serpent are like the
scenes following an overture. The overture is the warning—hard-surfaced,
intellectual, abstract—but the scenes are elegiac, subtle, personal, “toned” as
the overture was not. In the last canto of the four (canto v), the elegiac tone
is routed in disorder, and the cause of the rout seems to be a surge of violent
disgust for the mythologized father of the poem, who is a mixture of
Prospero and Caliban. In his Prospero-role, the father “fetches tellers of
tales/ And musicians;” he “fetches pageants out of air,/ Scenes of the theatre,
vistas and blocks of woods/ And curtains like a naive pretence of sleep.” But
as Caliban, the father grossly fetches negresses and “unherded herds,/ Of
barbarous tongue, slavered and panting halves of breath.” The second
perspective wins, finally, as the speaker brutalizes the pageant: