Modern American Poetry

Douceurs, Tristesses 135

Except the lavishing of itself in change,

As light changes yellow into gold and gold

To its opal elements and fire’s delight,

Splashed wide-wise because it likes magnificence

And the solemn pleasures of magnificent space.

The cloud drifts idly through half-thought-of forms.

In these childlike phrases, we sense the “innocence” Stevens will later claim
for the aurora: it is “splashed wide-wise,” it “likes magnificence,” it likes the
“solemn pleasures” of its playground, magnificent space.
This will to change of the aurora is rather like the will to change of the
west wind (in Notes,It Must Change, x), in which metaphor is seen as
something we imitate from nature, from this “volatile world.” The will of
Noteswas directed, human, urgent, “A will to change, a necessitous/ And
present way”; the aurora’s will is idle, purposeless, lavish, purely pleasurable,
and inhuman. Against the aurora there suddenly appear terrified birds,
surrogates for the poet as he recoils from the aurora’s meaningless if
gorgeous will-to-change:

The theatre is filled with flying birds,

Wild wedges, as of a volcano’s smoke, palm-eyed

And vanishing, a web in a corridor

Or massive portico.

This matches Tennyson’s recoil from the perception of a purposeless
universe, as Sorrow speaks to him in In Memoriam:

“The stars,” she whispered, “blindly run,

A web is woven about the sky.”

The surrealism of the birds, dehumanized into wedges, made fluid in form
like the auroras themselves, startling and evanescent as spurting smoke,
tenuous as a web, and mysteriously palm-eyed, is the surrealism of the
poet’s terrified response as he feels himself momentarily caught up into
the metamorphoses of the lights, absorbed into a nature constantly
shifting shape. With an effort of mind he rejects the temptation to be
drawn into the undertow of these waves, and sets his scholar of one candle
against “the earth’s whole amplitude and Nature’s multiform power