Modern American Poetry

Late Poems: Places, Common and Other 237

Among the second selves, sailor, observe

The rioter that appears when things are changed,

Asserting itself in an element that is free,

In the alien freedom that such selves degustate:

In the first inch of night, the stellar summering

At three-quarters gone, the morning’s prescience,

As if, alone on a mountain, it saw far-off

An innocence approaching toward its peak.

Stevens’ title plays with the preposition “in,” for this is both, the desire felt
by a human to make love in a pagoda, and the desire felt by a pagoda to make
love. Stevens also plays with the different senses of “peak,” for the act of
making love has a peak both physiologically and emotionally. (And pagodas
are “strange buildings that come to a point at the end,” as Ruskin says.) We
recall the old trope of the body as a temple of the Lord, and remember that
for most of Stevens’ readers, a pagoda is a foreign or “alien” temple. If we
read the noun clause in the second line as describing itself, we note also that
a “rioter,” ‘‘when things are changed,” is anagrammatically a near-complete
erotic, an appropriate enough change in a poem about a desire to make love.
The poem is a gently witty, erotic, multilayered verse on overlapping
subjects: on desires of the body and of feelings; on primal desires for
morning, which a temple might desire, as in love; on the desire to make riots,
or anagrams, of letters, and to trope. The poem is close to a riddle poem.
(Query: Is the body a temple? A temple of the Lord? Answer: Sometimes it
is a pagoda.)
After I argued this case in 1983, two people mentioned the existence of
an actual pagoda that Stevens knew, the one overlooking Reading.^4 On
reflection, this made perfect sense. Once more, Stevens’ word-play is
connected with an actual place, even as he sums up over a history of troping,
and brings it and an actual place alive for us. We read freshly Shakespeare’s
“heaven-kissing hill” or Wordsworth’s more neutral verb: “these steep and
lofty hills ... connect / The landscape with the quiet of the sky” Tintern
Abbey.)Other writers can use tropes that are rude and funny. We look more
closely at the way tall buildings or trees or hills “meet” the sky, and see them
more fully in the act of considering our words.
The crowded style and self-lacerating wit of The Comedian as the Letter
Chave gone. There is little irony left, and it tends to be simple and clear, as