Modern American Poetry

Douceurs, Tristesses 137

When the leaves are dead,

Does it take its place in the north and enfold itself,

Goat-leaper, crystalled and luminous, sitting

In highest night?

The third question asks, in a cold horror, and with an echo of the Psalms, what
indeed these heavens proclaim: what is the source of the aurora’s splendid
contrast of black sky with white light; is it true that it adorns itself in black by
extinguishing planets in its snowy radiance, and does it leave unextinguished
only those planets it decides to retain for its own starry crown?

And do these heavens adorn

And proclaim it, the white creator of black, jetted

By extinguishings, even of planets as may be,

Even of earth, even of sight, in snow,

Except as needed by way of majesty,

In the sky, as crown and diamond cabala?

The absolute accuracy of these suspicions is confirmed as Stevens answers his
own questions in precisely the fated terms of his previous formulation,
repeating the leaps and the extinguishings; but putting them, this time, not
as nouns, but as instant verbs:

It leaps through us, through all our heavens leaps,

Extinguishing our planets, one by one,

Leaving, of where we were and looked, of where

We knew each other and of each other thought,

A shivering residue, chilled and foregone,

Except for that crown and mystical cabala.

We remain finally only as an adjunct to that diadem which has so swallowed
up the known. “To see the gods dispelled in midair ... is one of the great
human experiences ... We shared likewise this experience of annihilation. It
was their annihilation, not ours, and yet it left us feeling that in a measure,
we, too, had been annihilated. It left us feeling dispossessed and alone in a
solitude, like children without parents, in a home that seemed deserted.”
These sentences from “Two or Three Ideas” (OP,206–207) are not the only