Douceurs, Tristesses 141
Rightly it is said
That man descends into the VALEof years.
Yet have I thought that we might also speak,
And not presumptuously, I trust, of Age,
As of a final EMINENCE; though bare
In aspect and forbidding, yet a point
On which ‘tis not impossible to sit
In awful sovereignty; a place of power,
A throne, that may be likened unto his,
Who, in some placid day of summer, looks
Down from a mountain-top,—say one of those
High peaks, that bound the vale where now we are.
Faint, and diminished to the gazing eye,
Forest and field, and hill and dale appear,
With all the shapes over their surface spread.
- Harold Bloom in “The Central Man,” Massachusetts Review,7 (Winter 1966): 38,
cites Emerson and Dickinson as other users of the image of the auroras.
- I adopt here the punctuation of the first printing of The Auroras of Autumnin the
Kenyon Review.The sense and cadence of this passage seem to require a period, not a
comma, after “dreams,” and the Collected Poemshas no absolute authority. There is no
punctuation at all, for instance, in the Collected Poemsfollowing the word “base” (Aurorasi,
l.13) though something is clearly needed. The KRversion has Stevens’ familiar three
periods. In vi, the KRdoes not have the hyphens in “half-thought-of,” and it has a simple
period instead of three periods after l.18. There is also a simple period closing viii. The
next edition of Stevens will doubtless be a variorum.
- I have been told by Harold Bloom that Chatillon is the proper name of a
Renaissance translator of the Bible from Hebrew into Latin and French, one Sebastián
Castellio (1515–1563), or Castalion, as he is sometimes called (see Enciclopedia Universal
Illustrada,Madrid, s.v. Castalion). The passage remains obscure, and perhaps the choice of
name may rather be dictated by Stevens’ recurrent châteaux, built by his figures
resembling, in their desire for a mise-en-scène,the father of Auroras.See, for instance,
“Architecture,” an early poem later dropped from Harmonium:
Architecture
What manner of building shall we build?
Let us design a chastel de chasteté.
De pensée ...
In this house, what manner of utterance shall there be?
What heavenly dithyramb
And cantilene?
What niggling forms of gargoyle patter?
And how shall those come vested that come there?
In their ugly reminders?
