(^250) Eleanor Cook
is contained in its words or its leaves, and vice versa; it also isits words or
leaves. So also space is contained in the mind, and vice versa; it also isthe
mind.
This use of “is” sounds like the merest play of the verb “to be” or of
“being.” Yet such a visionary sense “at the end of the mind” is also of utter
and very being. These are no longer the “intricate evasions of as”; here “as
and is are one” (CP476, 486). This is being as in the A isB of anagogic
metaphor. And we recall Stevens’ old play with “B,” “be,” “to be”—of mere
being, so to speak. Anagogic metaphor is paradisal: this is as close to paradisal
language as Stevens will allow himself. He echoes the bird of the earthly
paradise from the lemon-tree land of An Ordinary Eveningin “dangle down,”
also rhymed on. He evokes the sun once more, for the phoenix lives in the
City of the Sun (Ovid, Met.XV.391–407). He uses no language of upwardness
and no language of home. The poem is of mortality yet with a sense of
immortality, though not personal immortality. It is a kind of will and
testament of song. Thus, I think, the touching on Yeats; this is a Byzantium
poem of sorts, a land of gold and kinds of transmutation. The “last thought”
is the last thought possible before we move beyond reason, whether toward
imagination or toward death.
I began by looking for the point at which Stevens’ poems break with
our expectations. More and more, his poetry ceases to have one or two or
three such points. They multiply, and the language “flitters,” to use a word
from Notes.If the late poetry displaces the reader at all, it is in a very different
way from the early work. And it also attaches, for it makes this too loved
earth lovelier still. These are poems of a man who loves this earth and does
not want to leave it. Nothing of this passion sounds in the early poems for all
their wit and pleasure. And paradoxically, for all their sensuousness. The
early poems may have been poems of Stevens’ heart. The late poems, some
of deprivation, are often poems of Stevens’ whole being.
NOTES
- Jarrell, The Third Book of Criticism(New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1979), p.
- Berger, Forms of Farewell: The Late Poems of Wallace Stevens(Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1985), pp. 143–45. - See Helen Vendler’s fine commentary in her Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of
Desire(Knoxville: University of Tennesse Press, 1984), pp. 69–72. - See my “Riddles, Charms, and Fictions in Wallace Stevens,” Centre and Labyrinth:
Essays in Honour of Northrop Fryeed. Eleanor Cook et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1983), p. 228. See also Joan Richardson, Wallace Stevens: A Biography(New York: