Soundings for Home 177dismissed merely because we think that we have long since
outlived the ideal. The truth is that we are constantly outliving it
and yet the ideal itself remains alive with an enormous life (Part
One, “Three Academic Pieces”).In Frost, the ideal aspect of metaphor exists only that it may be tested.
Metaphor is an education by which the reader learns to be “at ease with
figurative values,” at ease not to luxuriate but the better to know “how far
[he] may expect to ride” a metaphor “and when it may break down with
[him]” (“Education by Poetry”). That is how one becomes “safe in history”
or “in” science. Being “safe in” anything is clearly not a condition proposed
by Stevens’ “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.” Stevens therefore can write
a kind of ecstatically imagined poetry seldom found in Frost:
Close the cantina. Hood the chandelier.
The moonlight is not yellow but a white
That silences the ever-faithful town.
How pale and how possessed a night it is,
How full of exhalations of the sea ...
All this is older than its oldest hymn,
Has no more meaning than tomorrow’s bread.
But let the poet on his balcony
Speak and the sleepers in their sleep shall move,
Waken, and watch the moonlight on their floors.
This may be benediction, sepulcher,
And epitaph. It may, however, be
An incantation that the moon defines
By mere example opulently clear.
And the old casino likewise may define
An infinite incantation of our selves
In the grand decadence of the perished swans.
(From “Academic Discourse at Havana”)Stevens’ is a poetry of possible impossibility, a poetry of vacation,
which is at least as valuable as any “momentary stay against confusion,” and
bound to be more rapturous.
When Stevens and Frost met, not for the first time, in February 1940
in Key West, Stevens remarked, “Your trouble, Robert, is that you write
poems about—things.”To which Frost replied, “Your trouble, Wallace, is
that you write poems about—bric a brac” (Thompson, II, 666). In an earlier