Modern American Poetry

(^244) Eleanor Cook
Of right joining, a music of ideas, the burning
And breeding and bearing birth of harmony,
The final relation, the marriage of the rest.
We may start with the title, taking it as a directive, and follow the old-
fashioned method of image study. Moon images as a series of “pearly
women” are not hard to read, though we may quarrel about their “witchy
origins.” The moon as brown bear in a cave is an image that “remains
dismissed,” as Stevens says. When we recall his own “brown moon” that
opens Transport to Summer,the two antithetical moon types come clear.
Stevens is inventing a land of images, like the pays de la métaphore,a place
inhabited by images who are “congenial mannequins, alert to please”—
model models, so to speak. He devises moon images drawn from the sea, for
half- or quarter-moons may be reflected as shiny mermaids, “women as half-
fashion of salt shine.” (The acoustic effects are very fine here.) And he reads
a fable from the light and dark halves of the moon, in which the two halves
yearn for each other, are betrothed, and await marriage, consummation, and
the birth of harmony. The Motive for Metaphorhelps us read this fable, as does
Harmony, daughter of contraries, of Venus and Mars, allegorically Love and
Strife, and one presiding genius of Stevens’ volume Harmonium.Many of
Stevens’ late poems are like this; they play back over his own work, echoing
it, reshaping it, enlightening it. Here, for example, we might ask if The
Motive for Metaphoris also a fable of moon and sun. (We recall that its land
of the moon is half- and quarter- and mutable. Its land of the sun is full, and
fixes, as with the classical sun, “He Who Smites from Afar.”) Stevens’ vision
of union and harmony here is a metaphor, resting grammatically on a
repeated “as if.” Yet his tercet of appositive phrases sounds like positive
affirmation. The poem is a remarkable summing-up.
This Solitude of Cataracts(CP424) is a fluency poem of sorts, and a rich
one. It is a poem of desire, not so much the desire to stop time as the desire
to make it keep on flowing in the same way. The tension is between familiar
change and unfamiliar change. Stevens opens with a variation on Heraclitus:
“He never felt twice the same about the flecked river, / Which kept flowing
and never the same way twice, flowing....” The poem is full of doublenesses
that are near but not complete, whether syntactical or mimetic. The
reflections in the water are like the reflections of thought, “thought-like
Monadnocks” (with a ghost of Leibniz rendering that Indian name and
actual mountain “thought-like”). Yet they are not the same, not even a mirror
image, for on the surface, “wild ducks fluttered, / Ruffling its common
reflections.” (Auden also uses the word “ruffled” in a poem of doubleness and