Modern American Poetry

(^132) Helen Hennessy Vendler
Stevens’ simplicity of response to the mythological mother is replaced
in the next canto (iv) by his ambivalent attentions to the father. On the one
hand, the father is descended from the outmoded Jehovah figures, giants,
mythy Joves, and so on, of earlier poems, but on the other hand, he has
agreeable qualities in common with both Canon Aspirin and the angel of
Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,those acrobatic seraphic figures who leap
through space. Stevens’ language becomes archaic, as the father is said to sit
“as one that is strong in the bushes of his eyes,” with a pun on bushy
eyebrows and the burning bush. He sits in “green-a-day” (another
reminiscence of Credences of Summer),but is also perpetually in motion, just
as “green-a-day” is also “bleak regard”; he stops in summer to imagine
winter, and his rapid oscillations from saying no to no and yes to yes and yes
to no are imitated in the poem by the oscillations between the moving and
the motionless. Like the girl at Key West who “measured to the hour its
solitude” he “measures the velocities of change,” and by his motion
establishes a norm of nature; but unlike the singing girl, the father is
sometimes comic, as “he leaps from heaven to heaven more rapidly/ Than
bad angels leap from heaven to hell in flames.” The tension of attitudes
mounts as Stevens constructs an apotheosis of the father, moving fully into
the regressive diction of “To the One of Fictive Music”:
Master O master seated by the fire
And yet in space and motionless and yet
Of motion the ever-brightening origin,
Profound, and yet the king and yet the crown—
The sentimental effort breaks here, as Stevens brusquely forsakes his
celebratory incantation-weaving and says dismissively:
Look at this present throne. What company,
In masks, can choir it with the naked wind?
Exit the whole shebang, as Stevens had said earlier about Crispin’s fiction,
and with this dismissal we leave, not only this scene, but the throne and the
motley company of Credences of Summer.The autumnal wind has blown
pretenses away, and the creator-father becomes, in consequence, the object
of contempt, the “fetcher” of negresses and clawing musicians and slavering
herds, the hospitalier of a disorderly riot.^7 With this denial of meaning to
poetic gesture, the first half of the poem comes to a close, in a cynicism that