Modern American Poetry

(^128) Helen Hennessy Vendler
that whiteness: his mind, in other words, must admit the phenomenon, but
will not for a long time admit its significance. Instead, it casts around for
ways of explaining this whiteness, or ways of softening its harshness. The
scene develops brilliantly by slow increments, beginning with a sketched line:
Farewell to an idea ... A cabin stands,
Deserted, on a beach. It is white.
The mind immediately skitters off into harmless explanations of that whiteness:
It is white,
As by a custom or according to
An ancestral theme or as a consequence
Of an infinite course.
As soon as Stevens begins on a multiplicity of “or’s” we sense his uneasiness.
The deadly observant eye returns, and notes that
The flowers against the wall
Are white.
But again the qualifiers multiply in haste and confuse the issue beyond any
possible clarity: the flowers
Are white, a little dried, a kind of mark
Reminding, trying to remind, of a white
That was different, something else, last year
Or before, not the white of an aging afternoon.
Whether fresher or duller, whether of winter cloud
Or of winter sky, from horizon to horizon.
Every means is used to distract the attention from the adamant dry whiteness
of the flowers, including the rephrasing of “reminding,” the evasiveness
about time, the unwillingness to decide between fresher and duller, and the
uncertainty about cloud or sky. But the relentless eye is not to be put off, and
now it is joined in its infallible perception by the whole body, which senses,
in the same flat sentence-form used for the eye’s notations, that