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have seen cowboys; I have seen prairie
dogs; hundreds of wild ducks, Indians in camp with smoke coming through
their discolored tent-tops; I have seen mountains swimming in clouds and bask-
ing in snow; and cascades, and gulches,” says a marveling Wallace Stevens
(1879–1955). Three days pulling past farms, prairies, and mountains on Cana-
dian Pacific Railroad in 1903 took him to British Columbia, the Rockies—fresh
from Harvard College and New York Law School and “particularly taken by...
the rock character of mountains above the timber-line.” This six-week hunting
trip stayed with him even to his deathbed—the virile poet vis-à-vis reality. “We
use nails to stir the tea.”
The mind, for Stevens, confronts nature, “pressing back against the pressure
of reality.” Besides their campfire, his Canadian journal records two fires burn-
ing: “One, the moon, lights mountainous camels moving, without bells, to the
wide North; another, the twilight, lights the pine tops and the flaring patches
of snow.” Mountainous camels or camel-like mountains, Stevens in later career
might have given them bells after all. And those pine tops, the flaring patches of
snow, could have qualified for his poem of earthly beauty, “Sunday Morning,”
where “Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail / Whistle about us their
spontaneous cries.”
After only a few days in British Columbia, he ’s exerting what Coleridge
called “my shaping spirit of Imagination.” Thus, “There are certain areas of
“the necessary angel of earth”
Wings of Wallace Stevens
“
I