Stevens could not avoid this question long.
‘‘Esthe ́tique du Mal,’’ a few years later, explicitly
considers the interrelation of imagination, memory,
and death; and by the time of ‘‘An Ordinary Eve-
ning in New Haven,’’ Stevens’s ordinary returns
can admit that divide between self and world that
predicts mortality as well as permits creativity.
Description of recurrence in this latter poem
acknowledges the difference between human time
and the earth’s mode: while the world’s ‘‘oldest-
newest day is the newest alone’’ (406), humanity
hears ‘‘old age’’ (407) in the evening wind. But
human time in ‘‘An Ordinary Evening’’ could
also be like the world’s: like Stevens’s Omega, a
lunar figure of imagination and memory, human
life might be ‘‘refreshed at every end’’ (400). To
know this promise, humanity’s ‘‘serious reflection’’
(408) must be ‘‘composed/Neither of comic nor
tragic but of commonplace,’’ as Stevens writes
after reconsidering his ‘‘total leaflessness’’ (407):
one must consider human death neither as the
‘‘clipped’’ (37) relation of the ‘‘Comedian’’ nor as
the tragic doom of the ‘‘Anglais,’’ but as one more
iteration in the world’s commonplace pattern.
Thus ‘‘The Auroras of Autumn’’ follows the eve-
ning wind with the belief that whatever is immi-
nent, however disastrous,
may come tomorrow in the simplest word,
Almost as part of innocence, almost,
Almost as the tenderest and truest part.
(362)
Here any future, even death, is but a diurnal
refreshment in the life of the world; this sunrise
enlarges Stevens’s ordinary mode beyond the
limits of individual existence. It must enlarge Ste-
vens’s ordinary habits as well, though, and to
frightening proportions: to submerge a personal
life in the cycles of an impersonal earth, one’s
willingofwhatistocomemustaccordwithwhat
‘‘An Ordinary Evening’’ calls the ‘‘the will of wills’’
(410). One’s desire must desire its own elimination.
Because ‘‘Auroras’’ knows the means and cost
of that self-abnegation to be an evacuation of mem-
ory, this poem faces theproblem of recollection
that ‘‘Notes’’ avoids. However painful the process,
the ‘‘tomorrow’’ (362) of ‘‘Auroras’’ would eradi-
cate the sense of having-been that proves one’s
division from the world’s ‘‘new-come bee’’ (338).
‘‘Farewell’’ (355, 356, 357) to that sense, Stevens
writes; farewell to the past; farewell to all reminders
of ‘‘something else, last year / Or before’’ (356). The
repeated good-byes of ‘‘Auroras’’ render yesterday
no more than ‘‘an idea’’ (355, 356, 357); they elegize
elegy, we might say, using the genre’s characteristic
repetitions to eradicate rather than preserve what
has been. Stevens had long known that ‘‘practice’’
for death, in ‘‘a world without heaven to follow’’
(104), must be the ‘‘WavingAdieu, Adieu, Adieu’’
that an earlier poem describes, and he repeats in
‘‘Notes’’ the importance of ‘‘throw[ing] off’’ (330)
what one has ‘‘like a thing of another time.’’ ‘‘Auro-
ras,’’ however, casts away not just a particular
event but an entire personhood: the very idea,
self-constitutive and self-confirming, of an individ-
ual history. However much one desires it, this
identity cannot be preserved; neither a mother’s
adulation nor a father’s authority will survive the
changes of fate. One must abandon these narcis-
sistic props, forgo the assumption that human life
is a scripted story designed by parental solicitude;
the only true theater is the indifferent, impersonal
process of the northern lights themselves. This
earthly transience will destroy the ‘‘scholar of
one candle’’—the distinct self, holding his own
light, who sees the fires of necessity ‘‘flaring on
theframe/Ofeverythingheis’’(359).
‘‘And he feels afraid’’ (359), writes Stevens.
‘‘Auroras’’ presents the greatest risk in Stevens’s
poetry. But it also presents the greatest reward.
Through bidding farewell tothe idea of this ‘‘single
man’’ and his single past, Stevens finds a new iden-
tity and a new past. If one no longer seeks to retain
a specific childhood, the poem finds, a changeful
fate does not seem like vituperative opposition.
Rather, it can be the object of one’s quest. Free of
human parentage, a poet can take necessity itself as
both birthright and heritage. He finds, in so doing,
precisely the security that he had thought lost, the
‘‘transparen[t]... peace’’ of a childhood union and
the reassuring beneficence of a ‘‘mother’s face’’—
the very ‘‘purpose of the poem’’ (356), Stevens
writes. This is the same ‘‘vivid transparence’’ and
‘‘peace’’ (329) that impel ‘‘Notes Toward a Supreme
Fiction,’’ as the envoi to that work suggests, and the
same that the poet anticipates in the crystalline
harmony of its conclusion. In canto 9 of ‘‘Auroras’’
he may finally ‘‘partake thereof’’:
Lie down like children in this holiness,
As if, awake, we lay in the quiet of sleep,
As if the innocent mother sang in the dark
Of the room and on the accordion, half-
heard,
Created the time and place in which we
breathed... (361)
Eden is no longer the paradise from which
humanity has been exiled, but the innocence ofOf Modern Poetry