Modern American Poetry

Douceurs, Tristesses 127

We stand in the tumult of a festival.

What festival? This loud, disordered mooch?

These hospitaliers? These brute-like guests?

These musicians dubbing at a tragedy

A-dub, a-dub, which is made up of this:

That there are no lines to speak? There is no play.

Or, the persons act one merely by being here. (v)

With this dismissal of the characters of the inhuman author Stevens turns the
puppet theater into a happening with no script. The central figure of the
father is rendered barbarous by the iterative sentence pattern into which he
is confined. Whereas the mother “invites humanity to her house/ And table”
the father “fetches” things and people, and the phrase “the father fetches” is
four times repeated in identical form, three times repeated in identical line
position, till the father is made an automatic robot. Under this manipulation,
the natural ripeness of Credences of Summerbecomes the decadent and self-
involved ripeness of the negresses who “dance/ Among the children, like
curious ripenesses/ Of pattern in the dance’s ripening.” The marriage hymns
of Oley are replaced by the “insidious tones” of the musicians who are
“clawing the sing-song of their instruments” at the father’s behest. The
source of the disgust for the father-impresario seems to be Stevens’ revulsion
against that deliberate primitivism of his own which wants summer, not
winter, and which sets itself to conjure up negresses, guitarists, and the
“unherded herds” of oxlike freed men, all in a vain attempt to reproduce on
an ignorant and one-stringed instrument the sophisticated chaos of the self.
But before he arrives at this recoil against his harmonium’s cruder
subterfuges, Stevens gives us the beautiful triad of poems each beginning
“Farewell to an idea,” where his elegy reaches a perfection of naturalness and
subdued restraint hardly possible in earlier long poems. These three cantos
are an elegy written before the fact, an anticipatory mourning in which “a
darkness gathers though it does not fall.” The first (canto ii) is a brilliant
exercise in more and less—a little more in one place, a little less somewhere
else—but in this season even more is less, since the positive comparatives are
mostly pejorative: the white of the flowers grows duller, and the lines of the
beach grow longer and emptier. Some equivocation remains in the
comparisons, but the direction of atrophy is clear.
Stevens’ tendency in the first elegiac canto is to match unequivocal
notations of skeletal whiteness against extremely conjectural modifiers of