Modern American Poetry

(^134) Helen Hennessy Vendler
Human Arrangement
Place-bound and time-bound in evening rain
And bound by a sound which does not change,
Except that it begins and ends,
Begins again and ends again—
Rain without change within or from
Without. In this place and in this time
And in this sound, which do not change,
In which the rain is all one thing,
In the sky, an imagined, wooden chair
Is the clear-point of an edifice,
Forced up from nothing, evening’s chair,
Blue-strutted curule, true—unreal,
The centre of transformations that
Transform for transformation’s self,
In a glitter that is a life, a gold
That is a being, a will, a fate. (363)
This forced transformation, set up in defiance of the monotonous scene,
reminds us of Stevens’ apocalyptic transformations, nowhere more baldly put
than in Owl’s Clover,where the porcelain muses are to repeat To Be Itself,
Until the sharply colored glass transforms
Itself into the speech of the spirit.
Such transformations are one-directional, lifting the subject up a notch from the
real to the unreal. But the beautiful transformations of the aurora are directionless:
... It is of cloud transformed
To cloud transformed again, idly, the way
A season changes color to no end.