Modern American Poetry

(^130) Helen Hennessy Vendler
are two manifestations of the same force. The identification is made first
syntactically: “the wind is blowing” and “the north is ... enlarging the
change” are the canto’s only independent clauses in the continuous present.
Later, the parallel is made metaphorically, as Stevens borrows the vocabulary
of wind in composing his auroras of “sweeps” and “gusts.” For the moment,
the enkindling fire of the auroras is not metaphorically reinforced, but the
fiery color later gives rise to other burnings in the poem, ending in the
wonderful invention of “the blaze of summer straw,” when Oley goes up in
flames.
The splendor of desolation in the sight of Crispin’s deserted cabin is
not matched again in the poem until the final cantos regather their energies
after the repudiation of the father. But there are gentler moments, in which
Stevens surmounts the dangers of pathos by having his “observant” eye, not
his rhapsodic one, note his fading tableaux. As he watches the dissolving
mother (iii), he phrases the scene in short empty sentences, the fatal notation
of necessity:^6
Farewell to an idea ...
The mother’s face, the purpose of the poem, fills the room.
They are together, here, and it is warm, with none of the
prescience of oncoming dreams.
It is evening.
The house is evening, half-dissolved.
Only the half they can never possess remains, still-starred.
It is the mother they possess, who gives transparence to
their present peace.
She makes that gentler that can gentle be.
And yet she too is dissolved, she is destroyed.
She gives transparence.
But she has grown old.
The necklace is a carving not a kiss.
The soft hands are a motion not a touch.
The house will crumble and the books will burn.
This canto depends on the continuing antithesis of the beauty and the
dissolution of the mother, an antithesis which reaches its strictest point in the
two rigid sentences at the center of the poem: “She gives transparence. But
she has grown old.” The images of this canto and of the next are quarried
from the early ode “To the One of Fictive Music,” but the imposition of the
stern syntactic form on the yielding lyric material makes for a new sort of