Modern American Poetry

(^116) Helen Hennessy Vendler
of the heart’s core, the fidgets of remembrance, the slaughtering, even of
fools, and the repetitive knell of negative phrases. It is with all our memories
of negative phrasing used pejoratively that we hear Stevens say “There is
nothing more inscribed nor thought nor felt,” and we feel the truth of
deprivation in his paradoxes to come, when he will speak of “the barrenness
of the fertile thing that can attain no more,” and of “a feeling capable of
nothing more.”^2
Credences of Summer,as I have said, turns on the difficult relation
between the moment of satisfaction and “the waste sad time stretching
before and after.” Stevens attempts a Hegelian synthesis of the two in a triple
invoking of a day, a woman, and a man, all raised above the norm into an
embellishment, a queen, and a hero. He asks how they are related to that
matrix which they resemble and from which they rise, and his answer falls
into a logical scheme:
One day enriches a year.
Thesis: One woman makes the rest look down.
One man becomes a race, lofty like him, like him
perpetual.
Or do the other days enrich the one?
Antithesis: And is the queen humble as she seems to be, the
charitable majesty of her whole kin?
The bristling soldier ... who looms in the sun-
shine is a filial form.
The more than casual blue contains the year and
other years and hymns and people, without sou-
venir.
Synthesis: The day enriches the year, not as embellishment.
Stripped of remembrance, it displays its strength—
the youth, the vital son, the heroic power.
The extreme neatness of this processional resolution, in which the day, at the
end, has metaphorically absorbed the queen (in the word “embellishment”)
and the soldier (in the word “heroic”), is not particularly convincing, since
the permutations seem summoned not by feeling but by a too avid logic.
After suggesting that a day in Oley can enrich a year as embellishment,
Stevens makes the counterassertion that routine provides the necessary
backdrop for the effect of this day: the other days, then, enrich the one,