Modern American Poetry

(^248) Eleanor Cook
unclear. The play with the dove is like Joyce but the effects are Stevens’ own,
and finely controlled as they must be.
“Part of the res itself and not about it,” Stevens said in An Ordinary
Evening in New Haven,in the canto beginning “The poem is the cry of its
occasion.” In Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself,the cry is “a bird’s
cry.” Not birdsong but a call. (The call and the song of birds differ for many
species.) This is an Alpha cry, so to speak, as Stevens catches the strange
predawn effect of the first bird-sound. And the first strange predawn effect
of March, a very early beginning to birdsong at dawn. It will become loud
enough to interrupt sleep by May, and a little louder on this March morning
as other birds join in. Hence:
That scrawny cry—it was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.
The tentative, then surer, placing of that bird-cry imitates the mind and ear
coming to consciousness, at first hearing as in a dream, then realizing actual
sound, outside. The sound of the predawn that Stevens loves comes as a kind
of gift. He plays easily with old arguments of inside and outside, with a sense
of place, with puns and echoes, as he closes his poem and his volume on these
stanzas. He repeats “scrawny cry” three times, a repetition and mimesis
enriched by memory. For “scrawny” is our modern form of the word
“scrannel,” Milton’s word in “Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched
straw.” Stevens here writes of neither nightingale nor grackle nor any named
bird. This March sound recalls his autumn refrain of “skreak and skritter”
and “grackles” and “grates”—recalls and rewrites it, turning thin, false-piped
scr-sounds into thin, earliest sounds like “scrawny.” The old play with the
letter c is here too, placed before the reader with simple charm. The bird-cry
lines are full of c-sounds; the old wintry and sleepy worlds sound out “sh”
(“panache,” “papier-mâché”); c-sounds intrude slowly into non-c
“knowledge” in stanza ii and make a firm non-c simile at the end. Here is a
“nota,” c, that pre-cedes the sound of the choir, and, as a letter, is “part of the
colossal sun.” Like some precentor with a tuning fork, the bird sounds out
his note. Stevens moves among different senses in his old c-see pun, which
makes “choral rings” seen as well as heard.