Late Poems: Places, Common and Other 247They do seem to return to the same orbits as they pass and then pass again,
with “pass-pass” accelerating the pace. Yet they do not: that seeming
sameness by which “pass” reduplicates “pass” is itself a passe-passe or
illusion, with the eye deceived by a motion. The second word “pass” is not
the same as the first, because it comes after itself and so sets up an echoing
compound. The planets, once assumed to be beyond change, follow the same
pattern of near-sameness, for their orbits vary slightly each time.
With these senses of “pass-pass” and “azure” in mind, we return to the
word “cataracts” and consider it diachronically or in its “pass-pass” aspect.
Like “azure,” “cataracts” has an archaic meaning (OED 1). It once meant the
floodgates of heaven, which in the old cosmography were thought to keep
back the rains. When they go, the deluge comes. (Cataractae,says the
Vulgate.) Either as something dashing down or something holding back
complete inundation, the word is a powerful figure for an aging human
being. The ghost of an old cosmography hovers in “cataracts” and “lapis”
and “azury.” But in the end, Stevens’ desire to be part of an old scheme is
unreal for him.
Stevens returns to his earlier vexed subject of birdsong. Song of Fixed
Accordevokes the maddeningly insistent cooing of mourning doves on spring
mornings. Poets see various suns at five and six and seven of a spring
morning, but this dove accepts them, “Like a fixed heaven, / Not subject to
change.” “Fixed accord” of the title implies a song about fixed accord or a
song made by fixed accord. The various sound patterns wonderfully imitate
the dove, and one repetition imitates it visually: “hail-bow, hail-bow, / To this
morrow” and we see the bobbing head of the dove. One small sound, “a little
wet of wing,” evokes an early line from Le Monocle,“Among the choirs of
wind and wet and wing,” a farewell to torrents of erotic song. “Softly she
piped” also allows back into Stevens’ work the much-abused trope of pipes.
Yet the poem comes with a caveat, gentle and insistent like the song of
a mourning dove. This is hersong of fixed accord; we are free to hear
something more. There is a fine unobtrusive movement from simile to
metaphor over the ellipsis. The dove speaks “like the sooth lord of sorrow”
in line 2, and “the lord of love and of sooth sorrow” arrives at the end. This
is day’s “invisible beginner” as against the visible beginner, the sun. “The
lord of love and of sooth sorrow, / Lay on the roof / And made much within
her.” She appears to have summoned her lord, muse, and male all at once.
Stevens’ play with archaic and religious diction makes this an earthly version
of the bird of the Holy Ghost. Milton’s inspiring Holy Spirit has, dovelike,
satst brooding, not on the vast abyss and made it pregnant, but on one female
dove and made her pregnant, whether with song or more, Stevens keeps