Modern American Poetry

(^246) Eleanor Cook
constant. Doubleness that is not quite the same is felt differently by a twenty-
eight-year-old looking back five years and a sixty-nine-year-old.
Stevens’ word “cataracts” is surprising if read descriptively, for there is
no reference to cataracts in the body of the poem. (This quiet riddling device
is one he likes, as we know from Invective against Swansand Ghosts as Cocoons.)
Allegorically, the word implies a turbulence of feeling that is not spoken.
Allusively, the word recalls some of Wordsworth’s most memorable lines: “I
cannot paint / What then I was. The sounding cataract / Haunted me like a
passion.” Stevens works against Wordsworth’s sense of how memory may
refresh us and become “the bliss of solitude.” His title responds to
Wordsworth sotto vocewhen we emphasize its first word: This Solitude of
Cataracts.His desire is not just for what he has had, but for what he never
had—that biblical and Miltonic sense of being at the center:
He wanted the river to go on flowing the same way,
To keep on flowing. He wanted to walk beside it,
Under the buttonwoods, beneath a moon nailed fast....
Just to know how it would feel, released from destruction,
To be a bronze man breathing under archaic lapis,
Without the oscillations of planetary pass-pass,
Breathing his bronzen breath at the azury centre of time.
This is desire for an earthly paradise, American version, as the “buttonwood”
tells us. (The tree is the Platanis occidentalis,the American plane-tree, another
species of the genus under which Eve first saw Adam, a tree of felicitous
associations.) The diction, beautifully ordinary and clear, comes with the
resonance of associative sound. The moon of mutability is stopped here,
nailed as if on some stage set. If Stevens could “be a bronze man breathing
under archaic lapis,” he would be under the archaic lapis of the biblical
heavens, like Milton’s steps “on Heavens azure” (PLI.297). Stevens’ word
“archaic” is pointing us toward archaic usage. “Breathing his bronzen breath
at the azury centre of time” links “azury” and “archaic lapis” in an implied
lapis lazuli, which is the Arabian origin of the word “azure.” The two words
are quite separate in modern usage, but once were nearly the same like so
many other near-doubles in this poem.
The “planetary pass-pass,” punning finely on French passe-passeor
sleight of hand, suggests the illusion in our reading of the passing planets.