(^140) Helen Hennessy Vendler
The harridan self and ever-maladive fate
Went crying their desolate syllables, before
Their voice and the voice of the tortured wind were one ...
That uninhabited evening would have a sky “thick with stars/ Of a lunar light,
dark belted sorcerers,” and Stevens would wish to be free of the old woman
so that he could “flourish the great cloak we wear/ At night, to turn away from
the abominable/ Farewells” (OP,45, 46, 71), those farewells that begin The
Auroras of Autumn.Our disaster (and Stevens would have been conscious of
the etymology of the word) is in fact the gathering of the stars, and the green-
queen-like embellishments of summer yield to a different kind of jewels. To
see the stars in this way is to awake from the stolid sensual drowse of the
Danes in Denmark, “for whom the outlandish was [only] another day/ Of the
week, [just slightly] queerer than Sunday.” Exposed to the auroras, Stevens,
like Melville’s dying soldier, has been “enlightened by the glare,” and the final
flippancy of the last canto, juggling discrepant phases of man’s feelings and the
world’s landscapes, still yields, at the end, to the total reign of the auroras,
“these lights/ Like a blaze of summer straw, in winter’s nick.” It is these flaring
lights, and the apprehensive questions they raise, that are the radiant center
of the poem: Stevens’ theatrical auroras and his repeated interrogations of
them create his most ravishing lines. From this, the most economical and yet
the most brilliant of his long poems, he will pass on to the looser and quieter
recapitulations of An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.
NOTES
- Credences of Summerwas first published in Transport to Summer(Knopf, 1947). The
Auroras of Autumnfollowed the next year in The Kenyon Review,10 (Winter 1948): 1–10,
and was republished in the volume of which it was the title poem (Knopf, 1950). - Frank Kermode’s simplistic account of Stevens’ “tone of rapture” in his “total
satisfaction, the moment of total summer ... the paradise of living as and where one lives,”
in this “passionate celebration of this August heat” (Wallace Stevens,pp. 106–107) has been
somewhat corrected by later readers. Joseph Riddel, for instance, sees a “lingering
nostalgia” but concludes that “it is a time for marriages, for balances” (The Clairvoyant Eye,
pp. 218, 223), a phrase which scants Stevens’ own uneasiness that will find full voice in The
Auroras of Autumn. - See “Wallace Stevens” by Michael Lafferty, Historical Review of Berks County, 24
(Fall 1959): 108: “The whole series, ‘Credences of Summer,’ seems written in
reminiscence of a hike over Mount Penn, from whose Tower Stevens could see ‘Oley, too
rich for enigmas.’” - It seems possible that Stevens’ central construct in Credences of Summer—the mountain,
the throne, the old man—may owe something to Wordsworth’s Excursion(IX, 48ff):