Late Poems: Places, Common and Other 245reflection to imply that we only see on or into water when it is still: “Fish in
the unruffled lake.”) Common reflections in both senses of the word are
ruffled when their surface is fluttered. The poem also “flows through many
places, as if it stood still in one” (representations of actual places like Mount
Monadnock and also the topoi of poetry). As in many late poems, Stevens
moves from wit to intense desire:
He wanted to feel the same way over and over.He wanted the river to go on flowing the same way,
To keep on flowing.“Feel,” rhyming with both “real” and “not real” in the preceding line, alters
the tone of the opening line. Something is suppressed here, like a lament—
or in Stevens’ unexpected metaphor, like an apostrophe: “There seemed to
be an apostrophe that was not spoken.” What is this apostrophe? Like the
one forbidden on the funicular, as we travel up a nonvisionary mountain?
Like the spouting “volcano Apostrophe”? We may hear a suppressed “O”
flowing through the poem, as if Stevens thought something like “O wild
West Wind,” but would not speak it. His negative, “not spoken,” plays on a
paradox of absence and presence. This line is especially fine because of the
pun on apostrophe, a pun that current theories of apostrophe have not
thought of. An apostrophe is also a mark of elision. In this sense, apostrophe
is definedas something “not spoken,” so that “there seemed to be” an elision,
a contraction, something omitted but understood. This is a secondary
meaning that limits the sense of loss or suppression in something “not
spoken.” It is as if Stevens said: I could write an apostrophe but will only
evoke the thought of one, eliding it like apostrophe in another sense; that
little mark stands for, or evokes, the “O,” etc., of appropriate apostrophe. As
it happens, there are no apostrophes of either kind in the poem; the
grammatical and rhetorical pun is “not spoken.”
Thematically, this is a poem of solitude, recalling other solitudes in
Stevens’ poetry. It closes on a most unusual desire for him, a desire to feel
oneness, unity, paradisal vision—or to feel what it would be like to feel that
way. It remains only a passing desire. Stevens’ poem begins with paradox, and
goes on to meditation on the fact that some things, though changed, look
and feel so nearly the same. This is as true of nature as of the self, and the
two may be connected. Wordsworth is our most familiar writer on this
theme. “Though changed,” he comes again for restoration to the river Wye.
The question of its change is not raised, and its restorative power seems