Modern American Poetry

(^236) Eleanor Cook
of prepositions than any three lines I know. They challenge and establish
different senses of place:
As if he lived all lives, that he might know,
In hall harridan, not hushful paradise,
To a haggling of wind and weather, by these lights
Like a blaze of summer straw, in winter’s nick.
One grammatical-rhetorical punning is especially fine, a pun on apostrophe,
to which I shall return. As for play with figures, I hear less of this, though it
includes one example that is especially remarkable because Stevens admits
anagogic metaphor. This is Of Mere Being,to which I shall also return.
The etymological play continues, and we need it in order to read well
such a poem as This Solitude of Cataracts.In The River of Rivers in Connecticut,
“there is no ferryman. / He could not bend against its propelling force.” The
ferryman would be Charon if he were there, just as the preceding “shadow”
would be a shade of the dead if it were present. “Bend against” is so nearly,
and yet not quite, the literal, etymological meaning of “reflect” (“bend
again”). Stevens is punning richly and beautifully and fiercely, punning his
life-force against all the pull of the dead.
Tropes continue to be literalized, dead metaphors revived, idioms
punned upon. “Fixed one for good” (CP529) can be deadly (good = forever)
or excellent (good = the cause of goodness). In July Mountain(OP114–15),
We live in a constellation
Of patches and of pitches ...
In an always incipient cosmos,
The way, when we climb a mountain,
Vermont throws itself together.
“Ver” and “mont” do combine to make the green mountain, Vermont. And
Greek symballein,whence our “symbol,” means “throw together.” When we
climb a mountain, then, word and state and the etymological “mountain” of
Vermont self-symbolize. It is not that they “are symbolized.” This is not
Coleridgean symbolism, but a composing like “piece the world together,
boys” or “patches the moon together.”
One late poem that is close to a riddle poem literalizes a common
trope. This is The Desire To Make Love in a Pagoda(OP91).