mastery of repetition, in which his thoughts play
consort to the ‘‘Queen of Fact’’:
Sunrise is his garment’s hem, sunset is hers.
He is the theorist of life, not death,
The total excellence of its total book. (414)
The largest order of existence, these lines sug-
gest, is a tournamonde world, a day-and-night
pattern of sunrise and sunset or imagination and
actuality. Death is only a part of the vital totality:
every ‘‘Ordinary Evening,’’ even a fatal one, yields
to another aurora. Even the ‘‘outlandish,’’ in the
words of ‘‘The Auroras of Autumn,’’ comes as
‘‘another day // Of the week’’ (361–62). Such
days, moreover, confirm one’s own theories and
histories. ‘‘He has thought it out, he thinks it out,’’
Stevens writes of his ruler, ‘‘as he has been and is
(414).’’ The periodic syntax of this canto—the
recurrent ‘‘again’’ of the scholar’s writing, as well
as the parallel clauses of the text that he writes—
rhetoricallyenactstheassuranceinalifeof
returns, where any fact to which one wakes is a
reality one’s ‘‘fore-meaning’’ helps to create.
‘‘The Auroras of Autumn’’ suggests the same
with its own description of life’s ‘‘total excellence’’
(414), an innocence ‘‘Like a book at evening beau-
tiful but untrue, / Like a book on rising beautiful
and true’’ (361). These lines make the beautiful
truth of ‘‘Auroras’’ into one more everyday Keat-
sian dream, rising to its own proof; indeed, cantos
8and9castone’sentirelifeassuchadream,an
existence in which one imagines, ‘‘sticky with
sleep’’ (362), the innocent tomorrow of a return
to dust. Keats implies this, seeing the pattern of
Adam’s dream and waking as the pattern of
‘‘human Life and its spiritual repetition’’ (Letters
37). In ‘‘The Auroras’’ and ‘‘An Ordinary Evening’’
Stevens extends the quotidian implications of
Keats’s very earthly heaven, finding recompense
not in the repetition of the hereafter but in the
returns of the here and now. The paradisal song
of an ‘‘innocent mother’’ in ‘‘Auroras’’ plays noth-
ingmoreorlessthananearthly‘‘timeandplace’’
(361), the same ‘‘poem of the earth’’ (730) that
Stevens imagines in ‘‘An Ordinary Evening’’ and
plays on the ‘‘Blue Guitar.’’ The tender truth of
that song’s innocence, ‘‘Auroras’’ therefore prom-
ises, inheres in even the most ordinary rhythms,
and Stevens suggests as much in late letters, when
he writes that daily rounds are a ‘‘profound grace’’
as well as a ‘‘destiny’’ (843), or explains that ‘‘A
walk to the office restores one’s innocence’’ (Hun-
tington WAS 3753, 23 Apr. 1951).
‘‘[A]nd almost the best innocence of the
U.S.A.,’’ that letter adds: an earthly heaven is
a common, democratic one. ‘‘The Auroras of
Autumn’’ suggests this fact when it moves
smoothly from an affirmation of necessity to an
invocation of community—a group of ‘‘hale-
hearted landsmen’’ (361). Stevens would over-
come the alienation of singularity with an iden-
tity grounded in a collective setting; thus this
poem, Stevens’s most personal, must also be his
most public. Conviction of worldly innocence
means the assurance that ‘‘We were as Danes in
Demark all day long’’ and ‘‘knew each other
well.’’ ‘‘We thought alike,’’ Stevens writes,
And that made brothers of us in a home
In which we fed on being brothers, fed
And fattened as on a decorous honeycomb.
(362)
To take one’s time and place as inheritance
and dwelling is to acknowledge indigenous frater-
nity with everyone on earth. In one of Stevens’s
favorite puns, this shared native place is a
honeycomb—‘‘decorous’’ in its beauty as well as
its appropriateness—that both feeds and manifests
human be(e)ing.
It is also a language: these landsmen think
alike and think of each other in ‘‘the idiom of an
innocent earth’’ (361). The line might remember
Paulhan’s comparison of language and honey,
‘‘which bees make apparently without thinking
about it’’ (Paulhan 8); Stevens would certainly
have appreciated that the English word common-
place, like the lieu commun that Paulhan praises,
equates a shared rhetoric with a shared setting. In
‘‘Auroras,’’ this idiom furthers the daily music of
the blue guitar or the ‘‘blazoned days’’ (332) of
‘‘Notes,’’ affirming that humankind’s creations
join the maternal song of its environment: as
Keats argues in ‘‘The Fall of Hyperion,’’ any person
can be a poet, or tell his dreams, ‘‘if he had lov’d /
Andbeenwellnurturedinhismothertongue’’
(361). When Stevens specifies that tongue as the
song of an ‘‘innocent mother’’ (Collected361), the
love it would speak as desire for an earthly parent,
he extends Keats’s commonplace poetics to include
the entire ‘‘drama that we live’’ (362)—as a mortal
existence, in its imagination of innocence, over-
comes its guilty fear of any conclusion.
TheRock,Stevens’s last collection, describes
that lifelong dream, beginning with ‘‘An Old Man
Asleep’’ (427) and ending with an old man just
waking up. It repeatedly manifests the quotidian
mode that starts in ‘‘The Man with the BlueOf Modern Poetry