Modern American Poetry

Late Poems: Places, Common and Other 235

obviousness of Stevens’ language for his methods. Here Stevens achieves the
seemingly impossible, as he did also in An Ordinary Evening in New Haven:
to look through and at language at the same time. He opens his 1950 volume,
The Rock,with a poem ending on the line, “The river motion, the drowsy
motion of the river R.” The wordplay is presented to the reader as if in a
Shakespearean epilogue. Reader, the poem says, we all know of that old trope
and allegory, the river of time, the river of being, the capital-R River of Are.
Once more, here it is, repeated yet new, simple and evident, like this cadence.
It is as if the river began to say its own proper name, then fell asleep like an
old man, for this is a poem titled An Old Man Asleep.Stevens is writing of an
old man’s river, and Old Man River too—not the Mississippi but the typic
River.
I have isolated this one line, though my reading depends on the rest of
this short poem, and it is instructive to consider how:

The two worlds are asleep, are sleeping, now.

A dumb sense possesses them in a kind of solemnity.

The self and the earth—your thoughts, your feelings,

Your beliefs and disbeliefs, your whole peculiar plot;

The redness of your reddish chestnut trees,

The river motion, the drowsy motion of the river R.

We hear behind this poem Stevens’ earlier fluency poems and somnambulist
poems: Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shore, Frogs Eat Butterflies,and especially the
powerful poem, Somnambulisma.^3 What keeps this late lyric from sliding
back into a pleasing exercise like the first two poems? Two things, I think,
that are largely present in the late lyrics: a sense of dialectic, and the universal
human subject of the way things look and feel when one is old. Stevens’
dialectic in the late poems may be muted but it is clearly present. His subject
matter is strongly human, and his “I” or “he” emerges as acting, willing,
desiring. Word-play can afford to be as obvious as “the river R” when it plays
against a tough dialectic and on a human subject. The danger for a lesser
poet would be portentousness, but Stevens’ touch is sure.
Stevens’ familiar play with grammar goes on, for example with
prepositions, a play I have noted from the start. The Woman in Sunshineturns
on an unexpected use of “in”; the effect is obvious. In The Plain Sense of
Things,the play with “in” is unobtrusive. The last stanza of Stevens’ ten-part
elegy, Auroras of Autumn,sounds baroque in its prepositions; it has more play