Modern American Poetry

Douceurs, Tristesses 133

touches both the events and their poems: “There are no lines to speak. There
is no play.”
One could hardly have guessed where the poem might go from here.
Credences of Summer,too, had come to a halt halfway through, and had had to
rephrase itself, first in celestial and then in “low” terms, in order to deal with
its original tableau of mountain, tower, and man. Here, Stevens saves himself
by forsaking for a moment his family myth and looking again at the auroras.
Earlier, they had only been sketched for us; we saw them once directly in the
view of the man on the sand, in a vivid blur of motion and color; and later we
saw them obliquely, in their sinister approach, when “boreal light/ Will look
like frost” as it lights the windows. But now, two great cantos (vi and vii) are
devoted to a panorama of the auroras, the first giving a physical account, the
second a metaphysical one. We have finally arrived at that anatomy of
summer that Stevens had so hoped to postpone, since summer, anatomized,
turns immediately to winter.
The first canto (vi) is exquisitely undemanding, as Stevens is content to
imagine no revelatory function for the auroras, no purpose to their activity,
simply change for the sake of change, transformation idly done “to no end.”
The absolute parity of all forms is established, emergence equals collapse in
interest and beauty, and activity exists for the time being without dénouement.
The mountain of Credences of Summeris no longer half green, half rocklike
air—nothing so stolid as that. In the boreal night the mountain is now rock,
water, light, and clouds, all at once, as Stevens describes the aurora:

It is a theatre floating through the clouds,

Itself a cloud, although of misted rock

And mountains running like water, wave on wave,

Through waves of light.

These transformations of the sky occur as an enormous relief to Stevens, as
he feels momentarily that he can give up the difficult labor of willed
imaginative transformation: the sky will do it all for him. In the past, he had
usually represented nature as the fixed principle, and the interpreting mind
as the chief source of change: even in “Sea Surface full of Clouds” the
variable surface is pressed into doctrinal service, and the changes have to be
seen as symbolic and ordered. In more violently willed transformations, the
mind plants in the sky a converse to the monotony of time and place, rather
as it placed the jar in Tennessee: