forbids the best expectation; the poet of ‘‘The Man
with the Blue Guitar’’ would replace the unreliable
teleology of political systems, as well as the illusory
teleology of religious creeds, with the certain futur-
ity available in common life.
He thus endsThe Man with the Blue Guitar,the
volume that includes both the title poem and ‘‘Owl’s
Clover,’’ with ‘‘The Men That Are Falling,’’ present-
ing a daily, earthly dream as both a political and a
religious satisfaction. Its hero is a socialist soldier as
well as a religious believer, and yet he ‘‘loved earth,
not heaven’’ (174); he desires his actual time and
place rather than a Christian afterlife or political
paradise. His yearning is therefore a ‘‘desire...
beyond despair’’ (173); his dream can become
‘‘life’s voluble utterance’’ (174), ‘‘syllables,’’ Stevens
writes, ‘‘That he spoke only by doing what he did.’’
The challenge of the poem, and of Stevens’s quo-
tidian poetics, is to make one’s own ordinary
‘‘doing’’ into this sort of art, this sort of religion,
and this sort of politics: a daily desire for ordinary
reality. What Stevens callsthe ‘‘demnition grind’’
(Letters766) of the quotidian will then allow what
the hero finds in ‘‘The Men That Are Falling’’:
‘‘fulfillment of desire, / In the grinding ric-rac’’
(174).
This fulfillment means martyrdom, however;
Stevens’s dreamer ‘‘loved earth, not heaven, enough
to die’’ (Collected174). To replace a timeless future
with an ordinary ‘‘time to come’’ (151) is to forgo
the promise of eternal life for the certainty of
eventual death. Stevens’s everyday poetry does
not ignore this implication, but it finds a different
sort of eternality in his ordinary world and everyday
dreaming. He does so most fully in ‘‘The Auroras of
Autumn,’’ with its brotherhood of sleepers accept-
ing a fateful ‘‘tomorrow’’ (362); here a mastery of
repetition masters even a mortal dawn (355–63).
The development marks Stevens’s movement
fromTransport to Summerand ‘‘Notes Toward a
Supreme Fiction’’ toThe Auroras of Autumnand
its title poem. As the seasonal progress of the titles
suggests, and as numerous readers have noted, the
latter confronts the threat of age and death inher-
ent in earthly change. In ‘‘Notes’’ these changes
seem to promise an earthly eternality, through the
ceaseless renewal of days and seasons, but ‘‘The
Auroras of Autumn’’ doubts this endurance, for it
admits the gap that the repetitions of ‘‘Notes’’
would heal: the divide between the world’s ‘‘fresh-
ness’’ (344) and one’s own. This gap is evinced in
the questions of that fateful ninth canto:
Shall we be found hanging in the trees next
spring?
Of what disaster is this the imminence:
Bare limbs, bare trees and a wind as sharp as
salt?
The stars are putting on their glittering belts.
They throw around their shoulders cloaks
that flash
Like a great shadow’s last embellishment.
(362)
The world grows no older with each return;
there is always another sunrise or spring.
Humans, however, age with each repetition,
and must expect, eventually, a final evening or
autumn. The bare limbs of human life do not
presage a vernal return when we shall be ‘‘hang-
ing in the trees’’ with new fruit; they show the
‘‘imminence’’ of that mortal ‘‘disaster’’ that
‘‘hanging’’ also evokes. Our advancing barren-
ness presages a last, terminal ‘‘embellishment’’—
what ‘‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’’
calls a ‘‘total leaflessness’’ (407).
From his earliest work, Stevens knows this
diminution to be inherent in human memory. In
‘‘Anglais Mort a` Florence,’’ for instance, a
doomed protagonist with a ‘‘self returning
mostly memory’’ recognizes that ‘‘A little less
returned for him each spring’’ (119), and in the
description of spring in ‘‘Notes’’ Stevens asks
‘‘why / Should there be a question of returning
or / Of death in memory’s dream?’’ (338). We
remember today as a repetition of yesterday,
thus registering temporal progress, while each
of the world’s unremembering iterations, by con-
trast, enacts a fresh ‘‘beginning’’ rather than a
comparative ‘‘resuming.’’ In ‘‘Notes’’ Stevens
wonders if humans can experience this unending
refreshment by eradicating recollection. He real-
izes, however, that such a solution has its diffi-
culties: memory allows the ‘‘dream’’ as well as the
death, the distinction of imaginative conscious-
ness as well as the distinction of mortal
termination. Recollection of past days, after all,
allows the creation of days to come; in ‘‘Notes’’ it
is ‘‘later reason’’ (346) that allows human beings
to ‘‘make of what we see, what we see clearly /
And have seen, a place dependent on ourselves.’’
One effort of ‘‘Notes’’ is the struggle to maintain
this power while resisting its fatal implications:
the strain is evident in a contemporaneous lec-
ture when Stevens mentions ‘‘the question of the
relationship of the imagination and memory,
which we avoid’’ (681).Of Modern Poetry