Modern American Poetry

(^136) Helen Hennessy Vendler
consign’d for once to colors,” as Whitman once said of a prairie sunset. It
is up to the scholar to destroy the aurora, this named thing, and render it
nameless by seeing it as a new phenomenon. The intellectual formulation
here is suspect and should not be scrutinized, but the confrontation that
follows, as the single man opens the door of his house on flames, is a
worthy climax to the poem:
The scholar of one candle sees
An Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame
Of everything he is. And he feels afraid.
As changeful light, the aurora is innocent; as flame, it is dangerous; as cold
fire, Arctic effulgence, it is the intimidating unknown. Stevens, in this
version of “the multiform beauty” (OP,12), has found the final correlative
for his reflections on middle age and for the fear and fascination of ongoing
process.
When Stevens passes from these illustrations of the aurora to an
analysis of it, the advance on Credences of Summeris most visible. Instead of
the rather sterile playing-off of the day against the year, the queen against her
kin, and the soldier against the land, those social and communal questions
always less than urgent to Stevens, we encounter a question more immediate
to him, as it was to Keats: why it is, and how it is, that the dreamer venoms
all his days, and cannot know, as other men do, the pain alone, the joy alone,
distinct. Stevens advances in fact (in canto vii) to three questions—his last
great interrogation of the world, since he will come, in An Ordinary Evening
in New Haven,to pure declaration. The first question examines the necessary
passage from the pastoral to the tragic:
Is there an imagination that sits enthroned
As grim as it is benevolent, the just
And the unjust, which in the midst of summer stops
To imagine winter?
The summer throne of “quiet and green-a-day” has stiffened itself into the
throne of Rhadamanthus, and the father’s motion from heaven to heaven
now becomes more like a leap from heaven to hell. Stevens’ second question
personifies the leaper, now robed and composed in the deathly magnificence
of the auroras: