Modern American Poetry

Douceurs, Tristesses 139

Or symbol of malice. That we partake thereof,

Lie down like children in this holiness,

As if, awake, we lay in the quiet of sleep,

As if the innocent mother sang in the dark

Of the room and on an accordion, half-heard,

Created the time and place in which we breathed ...

We have already seen the wintry fear “unmade” by an imagined comedy or

flippancy; now we are offered a resolution by a pure ethereality. But this

moving ending, attached to a stanza that began in the arid vein of Description

without Place,in a toying with the philosophical mode, makes a centaurlike

poem, half abstract discussion, half wish-fantasy, with no middle term of the

real to join these two detached poles of the unreal. The ninth canto makes a

lulling effort to assimilate terror and innocence, affirming simply that disaster

May come tomorrow in the simplest word,

Almost as part of innocence, almost,

Almost as the tenderest and the truest part.

But what is remembered of this poem is not that assumed naïveté, but the

etched anticipation of a secularized doomsday:

Shall we be found hanging in the trees next spring?

Of what disaster is this the imminence:

Bare limbs, bare trees and a wind as sharp as salt?

As before, Stevens answers his own question, this time pairing the earthly

wasteland with its wonderfully burnished cause, a mustering of the heavenly

army:

The stars are putting on their glittering belts.

They throw around their shoulders cloaks that flash

Like a great shadow’s last embellishment.

Here, as in the last lines of The Auroras,Stevens is remembering a passage in
Owl’s Cloveron evening, where the old woman spoils the being of the night:

Without her, evening like a budding yew,

Would soon be brilliant, as it was, before