Modern American Poetry

(^138) Helen Hennessy Vendler
possible gloss on The Auroras of Autumn,but they are a partial one: on the
one hand the great experience of extinction, leaving a hard brilliance like the
diamond crown in the impersonal universe, and on the other hand, the
dispossessed children, a shivering residue. A superb and unyielding glitter
surmounts everything else in these lines, as it dwarfs with its energy and
regality the pathos of the disinherited spectators.
But Sevens will not rest in the sublime. True to its nature, the tragic
imagination must beget its opposite. As we went from untroubled summer to
winter fatality, we now reverse direction, and go “from destiny to slight caprice.”
The only force regulating the leaper is its necessary polarity: “it dare not leap by
chance,” but it moves to unmake itself in comic flippancy—or so Stevens says.
The Auroras of Autumnitself does not rediscover summer in winter after having
discovered winter in summer. It is hard to imagine what might undo the aurora
borealis, as the aurora “undid” summer. Stevens becomes purely referential:
And thus its jetted tragedy, its stele
And shape and mournful making move to find
What must unmake it and, at last, what can,
Say, a flippant communication under the moon.
This seems an imposed order, not a discovered one, and Stevens’ uneasiness
with it is visible in his inference from “must” to “can.” In later poems,
Stevens will “unmake” tragedy, not through flippancy but through a
withdrawal from the theatrical mode in which the tragic perception voices
itself. From questions, dramas, theaters, histrionics, brilliancies, we pass in
Stevens’ work to a sober declarativeness. Here, and for the moment, in canto
viii, all that Stevens can summon up are gestures of willed assertion:
But [innocence] exists,
It exists, it is visible, it is, it is.
In this wish, the mother is replaced by a dream-vision of her absent self, no
longer old but rejuvenated, and the imaginary quality of the vision is
reinforced by the fictive “as if”:
So then, these lights are not a spell of light,
A saying out of a cloud, but innocence.
An innocence of the earth and no false sign