Modern American Poetry

Late Poems: Places, Common and Other 249

The series “chorister,” “choir,” “choral,” is a little insistent, again
because of memory, I think. At least two memories are at work here, one of
song and eros, and one of song and the divine. One memory is Shakespeare’s
Sonnet 73 and its “bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang,”
repudiated in Le Monocle de Mon Oncleand attenuated in the bough of An
Ordinary Evening in New Haven.Choirs have ceased vexing Stevens, and a
scrawny cry can be much. He centers things on the sun, not on the light of
God, like Dante’s choral rings at the end of the Paradiso.He makes choral
rings, not perfect rounds. “Item: The wind is never rounding O,” he wrote
in 1942 (CP263). Item, we add: the choir is never rounding O but only C.^14
Coleridge’s great “choral echo” at the end of the Biographia Literariaechoes
the great “I am.” Stevens’ bird-cry is “part of” something, where “part of”
implies no transcendence, no sacramental symbolism, no associative analogy.
Recalling complex rhetorical and dialectical matters for some readers, the
poem remains simple and moving, scrupulously placed, a hymn.
Of Mere Being(Palm398) allows what Stevens has not allowed before,
anagogic metaphor, which we may hear in his explicit and implicit wordplay:

The palm at the end of the mind,

Beyond the last thought, rises

In the bronze decor,

A gold-feathered bird

Sings in the palm, without human meaning,

Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason

That makes us happy or unhappy.

The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.

The wind moves slowly in the branches.

The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

This slowly moving play of exaltation begins with the title and its obvious

double sense of “mere.” This is mere (bare, only) being and also mere (utter,

very) being. On the edge of things, including life, this is how being may be.

The implicit pun is on the word “phoenix,” which is what this fiery bird is.

The Greek word for this fabulous sacred bird is also used for a date-palm.

The bird “sings in the palm” and through a pun isthe palm. So also the poem