Late Poems: Places, Common and Other 241his future wife,^10 and also as Ariel, a figure who enters his poetry only late in
life. Comic in sound (said Stevens), bumbling and so part of a modesty topos,
these early masks are mostly drawn from other worlds. Milton Bates has
provided a fine account of them.^11 Their function is not simple, as witness
our disputes over Peter Quince’s role in his poem. Sometimes they approach
a dramatic character, for example, Crispin. Sometimes they seem something
like dramatic masks, or characters who speak the prologue or epilogue,
presenters under whose aegis a poem goes forward. Michael Hamburger’s
term, a “mask of style,” fits them well.^12 They are at once part of the action
yet detached from it, mediators of a kind between audience and poem.
Sometimes they seem defensive. Stevens remarked on the different
characters present within all of us, and imagined a trunkful of costumes in
our mental makeup: “There is a perfect rout of characters in every man—and
every man is like an actor’s trunk, full of strange creatures, new & old. But
an actor and his trunk are two different things” (SP166). Stevens does not
write dramatic monologues proper, but his word-play with names, and with
the word “mask,” make his interest in dramatic functions clear. Our
discussions of the changing dramatic monologue, of dramatis personae, and
of theories of the mask should look again at Stevens’ names.
One series of characters has not been remarked on, and that is the
Spanish series of figures that appear all through Stevens’ work. They run
from Don Joost in 1921 to the demanding hidalgo in 1949 (CP483), a
tutelary spirit and poetic conscience in one. “Don Joost is a jovial Don
Quixote,” said Stevens (L464), a remark that makes no sense of his unjovial
poem, From the Misery of Don Joost.(It follows The Comedian as the Letter C,
also a very uncomfortable mixture of joviality and misery.) Sometimes the
Spaniard plays a guitar, as Stevens himself did literally and also poetically. He
may be Don John (CP49) or Don Juan (OP64) or simply Don Don (CP104).
Stevens does not especially like him in these last manifestations, nor as the
“moralist hidalgo” (CP186). It is in the mature verse that the hidalgo comes
into his own: “The knowledge of Spain and of the hidalgo’s hat— / A
seeming of the Spaniard, a style of life, / The invention of a nation in a
phrase (CP345) ... This was / Who watched him, always, for unfaithful
thought. / This sat beside his bed, with its guitar ... Nothing about him ever
stayed the same, / Except this hidalgo and his eye and tune” (CP483). The
Spaniard is a singer and a lover and a fighter. In one desperately bitter,
uncollected poem, he considers mock-fighting like mon oncle’s, and gives it
up (The Woman Who Blamed Life on a Spaniard[OP34]).
Once we hear this Spanish figure through Stevens’ work, we begin to
discover other appearances. The “Spaniard of the rose” (CP316) is still