Modern American Poetry

Douceurs, Tristesses 129

The wind is blowing the sand across the floor.

With that union of the white sand to the white cabin and the white flowers,
the joining is made between the total atmosphere, dominated by the wind,
and the deserted cabin, its floors tenanted only by sand. The totality of
whiteness is at last admitted wholly:

Here, being visible is being white.

The scene becomes a white-on-white bas-relief, “the solid of white, the
accomplishment/ Of an extremist in an exercise.”
With this submission to the truth, the mind has left its deceits, and the
declarative statements become dominant and unequivocal:

The season changes. A cold wind chills the beach.

The long lines of it grow longer, emptier,

A darkness gathers though it does not fall

And the whiteness grows less vivid on the wall.

The severity of the language justifies a daring play on words:

The man who is walking turns blankly on the sand.

The man, to use Milton’s words, has been presented with a universal blank,
and becomes himself blanched and blank, like the scene. But because he has
finally granted the desolate whiteness in the landscape, he can give up
looking to it for sustenance, and can turn his fixed gaze away from the beach
and to the sky. What he sees, inhuman though it is, repays his glance: he sees,
but only after he has abjured land-flowerings, the great gusts and colored
sweeps of the Northern lights, and they are exhilarating:

He observes how the north is always enlarging the change

With its frigid brilliances, its blue-red sweeps

And gusts of great enkindlings, its polar green,

The color of ice and fire and solitude.

The verbal parallels between the celestial aurora and the chilling earthly
wind make us realize that the one does not exist without the other, that they