Late Poems: Places, Common and Other 239all. Venus has mostly vanished, though there is “a mother with vague severed
arms” (CP438). As a force, she has become Penelope, the longed-for and
longing woman of this earth. As with old subjects and arguments, so with old
topoi. The leaves, birdsong, light, evening, flowers, fire, ghosts, dwelling
places: Stevens sums up over these familiar topoi. Some old figues reappear
though not others: the ghosts, the angel, the reader, but not the scholar or
rabbi or mentor. Of his old selves, the Spaniard remains (I shall come to
him), and a new name comes forward, retrieved from the early letters, Ariel.
Not Prospero, commanding then leaving a world, but Ariel, also leaving a
world, about to be released into his own element, air: “Ariel was glad he had
written his poems.” Stevens’ memory is going back forty-four years. “I like
to write most when the young Ariel sits, as you know how, at the head of my
pen and whispers to me—many things; for I like his fancies, and his
occasional music.... Now, Ariel, rescue me.... Ariel was wrong, I see” (L123,
124, June 17 and 19,1909; CP532).
I mentioned the reappearance of Ulysses in these late poems,
reappearance because Ulysses like Virgil was there at the start. Crispin’s
journey is an “Odyssey”; du Bellay’s sonnet on Ulysses is mentioned more
than once. Among the gods, Vulcan is closest to Stevens. Among legendary
mortals, Ulysses is his alter ego, just as piusAeneas is Eliot’s. Many-sided
Odysseus, wily, resourceful, gifted with words and so loved by Athena, is
nonetheless simple in feeling and desire. I think Stevens liked him especially
because he journeyed to earthly paradises, cohabited with goddesses, was
promised immortality if he would stay, and always refused. “The nymph
Calypso ... yearning that he should be her husband ... tended him, and said
that she would make him immortal and ageless all his days; yet she could
never persuade the heart in his breast” (Odysseyxxiii.333–36, repeating
vii.256–57, Loeb). Penelope and Ithaca, that poor land and that rich woman,
make a home for Ulysses that no heaven can provide. It is that sense of home,
which is also du Bellay’s sense, that makes Ulysses a potent figure in Stevens’
late poetry. Du Bellay also reppears in the late work (OP198, 1951).
Stevens’ old genius for borrowing and inventing proper names
continues. Throughout his work, there are a surprising number of actual
names, surprising because our memory may tell us that there are not many.
Actual names sometimes act as a metonymy for a system of belief or ideas, or
for the spirit of an age, or for a tradition of thought: “In the John-begat-
Jacob of what we know ... In the generations of thought” (OP103). Thus also
in Description without Place,with Calvin or Queen Anne of England or Lenin:
“Things are as they seemed to Calvin....” Stevens occasionally uses the names
of friends and acquaintances, as well as family names like John Zeller.