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Life Is Motion: Motion in Stevens
-Good evening, and thank you all for being here. When Jennifer Homans, Founder
and Director of the Center for Ballet and the Arts, invited me to be the inaugural Kirstein
lecturer, she assured me that I could talk on poetry, since the Center firmly situates ballet
among the other arts, all of which are connected by their creative invention, and all of
which need scholarly investigation.
Because the Center is dedicated first to dance, I couldn’t resist inquiring into
Wallace Stevens’s announcement of the identity of life and motion. To imagine motion in
a given phase of life—adolescence, old age—is not easy, nor is the effort to find verbal
equivalents for ordered or disordered motion. Like every concept, motion implies its
opposite, which Stevens names “chaos,” and I’ll be talking about both poems of motion
and poems of chaos as they exemplify Stevens’ articulation of his emotions, from youth
to age.
Stevens’s extraordinary copulative claim—“Life is Motion”—arrives as the
declarative and philosophical title of a poem in his radical first volume, the 1923
Harmonium, published when the poet was 44. Although Stevens had been composing
poetry since his student days at Harvard, writing could be at best only an intermittent
activity during the years in which he earned his law degree, held a succession of jobs,
travelled as a surety lawyer, moved (from Reading to Cambridge to New York, to
Farmington, to Hartford) and married badly. But once his career in Hartford was
established, the drive to write could express itself again, and he was lucky enough to
compose great poems until his death at seventy-five.
The words that follow Stevens’ unequivocal claim that life is motion come as a
rude surprise:
Life Is Motion
In Oklahoma,
Bonnie and Josie,
Dressed in calico,
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Danced around a stump.
They cried,
“Ohoyaho,
Ohoo”. . .
Celebrating the marriage
Of flesh and air..1
(65)
This is Stevens’s New World version of Keatsian classicism: “Bonnie” and “Josie” are
presented as childlike nicknames, but translated they are also among the names given two
of the three Graces, Beauty and Joy. The dancers in Stevens’ poem wear not the gauzy
garments of Botticellian Graces but sturdy calico; their unintelligible “cries” are
syllables, not words. The girls are in no greenwood, not even in a place with trees; they
orient their dance around a stump.
Oklahoma did not gain statehood until 1907, when Stevens was twenty-eight; all
through his youth, the terrain later called “Oklahoma” had been an unspecified area
within “Indian Territory.” To Stevens as a boy, the territory would have seemed foreign
and primitive, and the subsequent state name—with its strange Native American
syllables, “okla” and “humma”—may have seemed foreign as well. Stevens places his
ecstatic dancers Beauty and Joy in time as firmly as he had placed an immobile manmade
jar in space a few poems earlier, in his famous poem “Anecdote of the Jar” (60). By
replacing his gray and bare manmade jar by two young girls engaged in intentional artmotion, and by defining life itself as motion, and by reducing his former lavish Tennessee
“wilderness” to his Oklahoma “stump,” Stevens withdraws from his earlier conception of
life as an enigmatic stand-off between manmade art and wild nature: the jar “did not give
of bird or bush, / Like nothing else in Tennessee.” “Life Is Motion,” by contrast, relates
not a standoff but a cooperation of life and art. They mutually create each other in the
motion of the dance, as natural flesh takes on aesthetic being in the designed dancemotion in space.
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Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson
(New York: The Library of America, 2007) 65. All subsequent quotations from Stevens
will be drawn from this volume and will be parenthetically indicated in the text.
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Stevens creates a notable change in diction from the dancers’ quoted syllables to
his narrator’s stately concluding words, characterizing dance-as-ceremony, poem as
epithalamion. Bonnie and Josie are, as Graces, attendants on the goddess Venus, and are
celebrating not a marriage of two human beings, but rather “the marriage of flesh and
air.” Dance marries flesh and air in an intentional choreography occupying not only
space (as the jar had done) but also time.
How will this American poet—so conscious of both European tradition and
American insubordination-- invent original ways to represent mobility in words?
Stevens’ solution in “Life Is Motion” is to substitute for the classical three Graces--all
beautifully intertwined as they dance--two rural companions in calico dancing around a
stump. He abandons intelligible classical language in favor of the girls’ elemental cries, a
song without words However—as we may hear only on rereading—their syllables
almost aspire to the nascent name of their young state: Oh-kla-ho-ma, “Oh-ho-ya-ho”:
it’s nearly there. The American circle-dance, though intentional, is folk-derived,
spontaneous and as yet untouched by high culture, but high culture stands behind the
poem. Stevens conceals the mythological ground of tradition, introducing it only by
implication in the girls’ names. Motion is created here by the primitive rhythms of the
short lines, by the double meanings of Bonnie and Josie, by the replacement of dance by
syllabic cries, and by the change of language from the simple to the ceremonial.
That is Stevens at 44. If we look backward to Stevens as a 21-yr-old Harvard
undergraduate, we find him publishing, in the Harvard Advocate, the unmistakable
forerunner of “Life is Motion,” grandly called “Statuary.”2 In this embarrassingly bad
two-stanza poem, with its archaic “hath,” his young dancers are not rustic but urban, and
they ostentatiously bear the divine names of Apollo and Diana:
The windy morn has set their feet to dancing—
Young Dian and Apollo on the curb,
The pavement with their slender forms is glancing,
No clatter doth their gaiety disturb.
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“Statuary,” in the group called Street Songs in The Harvard Advocate (April 3, 1900).
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Stevens at twenty is not yet aware that the pentameter--the least dance-like meter in
English--hardly suits a dance-poem. The title “Statuary” betrays the young poet’s
dubiousness about the status of his classical personages: are they live flesh or animated
marble statues? Stevens ends with sententious youthful editorializing on the appeal of
their divine and joyous gaiety:
No eyes are ever blind enough to shun them,
Men wonder what their jubilance can be,
No passer-by but turns to look upon them—
Then goes his way with all his fancy free.
(493)
In the most famous of his aphorisms, Stevens declared that “A change of style is a
change of subject” (910), and the change in style between the deplorable undergraduate
“Statuary” and the mature “Life is Motion” denotes Stevens’ change of subject. At 44,
“rewriting” “Statuary,” he adopts a radically different view of the motion suitable to life
in America. He rejects his earlier translation of the classical gods to an American city,
places them instead at the treeless frontier, changes god and goddess into two of the three
Graces, identifies them as young Beauty and Joy by the diminutives “Bonnie” and
“Josie,” deprives them of intelligible speech while suggesting that they are approaching
the word “Oklahoma” with their approximating syllables “Ohoyaho”; and finally defines,
through his narrator, the sensual spontaneity of their celebration, as their dance marries
flesh to air. There was no believable flesh in “Statuary,” and nothing in its décor to
intimate a marriage of the body and the atmosphere.
Throughout his life, as in this instance, Stevens “rewrote” his central motifs,
always inventing a change of style enacting a change of view. Tracking almost any
Stevensian concept as it mutates over the decades reveals that his richest subjects (of
which “motion” is one) generate a profusion of poems—each poem, of course, hoping to
bring out some unexamined aspect ot that concept or to repudiate a former view of it.
The concept of dance—an order designed by a human imagination and expressed by a
mobile human body--is one of those rich subjects.
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However, under the solacing order and joy afforded by motion, motion implies, as
every concept does, its opposite—undirected and incoherent motion, which Stevens will
call “chaos.” By what means can he arrive at a believable chaos on the page? Before
returning to ordered motion—ordered life—I need to stop to follow the track of chaos
The word “chaos” first appears in the 1923 sequence “Sunday Morning” as a
synonym for the physical world: “We live in an old chaos of the sun” (56). Thirteen years
later, in “The Idea of Order at Key West” (105-106), the nature that opposes meaning is
no longer the sun and its irrational universe but the “inhuman” and tumultuous ocean,
with its “meaningless plungings” threatening the furor poeticus, “The maker’s rage to
order words of the sea” (106). It is not until 1942, in the uneasy volume Parts of a
World, that Stevens’ tentatively and interestingly describes himself as a “Connoisseur of
Chaos. By now, Stevens has seen World War I followed by the Russian revolution, the
great Depression of the thirties, National Socialism in Germany, the rise of American
Marxist literature, and the beginning of World War II. Historical succession produces, he
sees, a variety of incompatible ideologies, philosophy itself becoming a form of
intellectual chaos, with each truth becoming, over time, “just one more truth, one more /
Element in the immense disorder of truths” (194-95). For a moment, a wistful
supposition arises to voice the poet’s continued yearning for order:
But suppose the disorder of truths should ever come
To an order, most Plantagenet, most fixed. . .
The sheer unlikeliness of this Platonic Plantagenet order causes the poet’s supposition to
collapse. And Stevens’s temporary attempt at imagining a connoisseur of chaos is itself,
though appealing, unsustainable:
The pensive man. . . He sees that eagle float
For which the intricate Alps are a single nest.
Although mortal man cannot exist at that height from which the jutting Alps become “a
single nest,” he can at least, by taking thought, conceive of such an eagle’s view—really,
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a God-like view--not tethered to life on earth. The Tennessee “wilderness” of “Anecdote
of the Jar” has been transmuted into an Alpine wilderness; and just as the manmade jar
“did not give of bird or bush / Like nothing else in Tennessee,” the eagle’s view, we
could say, “does not give of human life.” 3
Troubled by the presence of Marxist and populist factions to which he cannot
subscribe, and unsure of his responsibility to public issues, Stevens creates ambitious
poems that veer between a syntactic simplicity when addressing workers in “Idiom of the
Hero” and elaborate intellectual and rhetorical theses in didactic poems with such parodic
titles as “Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas.” In “Idiom of the Hero”
(184) “workers”—that plural noun dear to Marxist discourse—introduce he word “chaos”
as they sum up their distress:
I heard two workers say, “This chaos
Will soon be ended.”
Angered by the Marxist contempt for the aesthetic, Stevens bitterly refutes the workers’
Utopian fantasy of a better world-order, wealth after poverty, wholeness after brokenness.
Yet he realizes that their word, “chaos,” is also the correct description of his own
emotional and intellectual disorder and despair.
This chaos will not be ended. . .
Not ended, never and never ended.
I am the poorest of all.
I know that I cannot be mended.
The eagle descends from Keats’s sonnet on the Elgin Marbles: “My spirit it too weak . .
.And I shall die / Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.” Keats ends with a tempered
claim—that if he cannot, like the eagle, soar into the sun, he can feel, standing before the
marbles, “a sun / A shadow of a magnitude.”
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For the poet, the inflexibility of the Marxist prescriptive order of “socialist
realism” abolishes all the motions that are, and must be, intrinsic to art as to life. Yet
Stevens himself, still longing for a justification of art, turns to his own Utopian fantasy of
permanence in a long and discursive and satiric treatise called “Extracts from Addresses
to the Academy of Fine Ideas” (227). What he now proposes as a solution to chaos--is as
inimical as Marxism to the motion that is life. Abandoning the worker-diction of “Idiom
of the Hero,” Stevens dreams of a morally static sensual existence undisturbed by
thought, a world of irrational moods as fluctuating as that amoral guide, the weather:
It is enough
To believe in the weather and in the things and men
Of the weather and in one’s self, as part of that
And nothing more.
“Nothing more” precludes any separture from this sensual belief, as Utopian in its way as
the economic hope of the workers. But such anti-intellectual sensual complacency
cannot last, and completely collapses in a time of war: “Blood smears the oaks. / A
soldier stalks before my door” (239).
Stevens in mid-life is convinced of the impotence of philosophical ideas--whetheer classical or Christian or Marxist or hedonistic—as valid sanctions for existence.
He places a new confidence in individual feeling, intrinsically trustworthy as ideas are
not. Speaking of himself in the third person, Stevens, in wonder, finds his former wintry
self thawing in an April that releases torrents of feeling. As “Extracts” ends, present
participles, insisted upon, articulate for the poet the joyous emotions of resurgent being,
as if the “-ing” of “being” itself generated a blooming of life in participial form:
[W]inter would be broken and done,
And being would be being himself again,
Being, becoming seeing and feeling and self,
Black water breaking into reality.
(230)
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Being, being , / Being, becoming, seeing, feeling, / breaking. With the awakened trust in
feeling, life can once again be analyzed as motion—warmth, an excitation of the senses, a
renewed self. “Being” almost eliminates, in its exhilaration, the difference between
nouns and verbs, as the tautology “being would be being” insists on life-energy as the
primal good, manifested as the “black water” of depressive winter at last disappears with
the melting of ice into the seeing and feeling of April.
In Stevens’s next volume, the postwar publication bearing the grateful title
Transport to Summer, a poem called by the sleep-walking name “Somnambulisma” (269)
offers a strange parable of the interactive motions of the ocean, a bird, and a scholar to
describe the unity of being, seeing, and feeling. Stevens creates an allegorical
personage, “the scholar,” whose mental motions enable the completion of poetic
imaginings. The scholar is one of the three figures here of life as motion: the first is the
rolling sea of the physical universe; the second is a restless bird longing to inscribe itself,
by its claws, on the unstable sand; and the third is the absolutely necessary creative
scholar, Stevens’s personification of the creative power of learning when inseparable
from emotion. The motions of life manifest themselves: the ocean rolls, the bird makes
futile attempts to leave a trace on the sand, and the scholar makes the indispensable final
contribution to the poem. The scholar is defined as someone “feeling everything” who is
clothed not in imperial regalia but in individual “personalia.” Without the scholar’s
fertility of learning and imagination and feeling, nature would be, says Stevens, “a
geography of the dead,”
In which no scholar, separately dwelling,
Poured forth the fine fins, the gawky beaks, the personalia,
Which, as a man feeling everything, were his.
By eking out, with fine-growing fins and young beaks, the suggestive contours of
the interaction of ocean and bird, the scholar, dwelling in solitude, enacts the divine “fiat”
of Genesis. In the scholar, Stevens has found a figure to incorporate the ingenious and
free motions of the intellect in poetry, but he maintains the necessary aesthetic hierarchy
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of functions. The intellect is necessarily subordinate to the originating will of the bird and
the sensuous scene-setting of nature, but poetry would not be complete without the
scholar’s receptivity to the enticing potential of the half-created fishes and birds, and his
ability to add a final flourish to their contours through his intensity of feeling. In such a
poem, Stevens makes us aware of his own subjection to the unintelligibe ocean, of his
own frustration in trying to inscribe himself on the shore, and of his own amusementtinged joy in seeing his mind adding a final elegance to form. In the parable we see an
aesthetic and perfected composite of grand nature, elevated inscriptive intention, and
intellectual joy. For all its initial frustration, it ends as a happy poem: the apprentice has
seen, as he sleepwalks, the arrival of his masterpiece of personalia—that is, a style
inseparable from himself.
Stevens is ready—after his high investment in the emotions--to invent, in his 1947
sequence “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” the poetry that satisfies him, which he
defines as “the fiction that results from feeling” (351). The fiction originates itself again
and again, culture by culture, but the initial pleasure of a new cultural synthesis—moral,
erotic, intellectual, symbolic--grows weaker as its repetitions seem more and more
routine. As a culture wanes, and meaninglessness seems truer than meaning, the act of
motion feels almost mechanical: birdsong, for instance, becomes in “Notes,”
A thing final in itself and, therefore, good:
One of the vast repetitions final in
Themselves and, therefore, good, the going round
And round and round, the merely going round,
Until merely going round is a final good. . . .
(350).
An earlier poem, “The Pleasures of Merely Circulating” (120) had already mocked as
insufficient the ancient myth of life’s cyclical recurrence, embedded in its predictable
plot in which the Age of Gold declines into the successive Ages of Silver, Bronze, and
Iron, and then returns as Gold once again. The primal Paradise, the garden visited by
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angels, declines, as the cycle repeats itself, into the angel’s descent to the clouds, and
then into the utter vacuity of a childlike pleasure in watching inhuman nature in the
“merely circulating clouds”:
The garden flew round with the angel,
The angel flew round with the clouds,
And the clouds flew round and the clouds flew round
And the clouds flew round with the clouds.
Stevens confronts these inane, if pleasurable, motions with the deathly aspects of life that
the mindless routine of “merely circulating” can neither encompass nor describe:
Is there any secret in skulls,
The cattle skulls in the woods?
Do the drummers in black hoods
Rumble anything out of their drums?
These are unignorable threats of death—the animal skulls, denoting unavoidable
organic mortality, and the awful reduction of music to drumming produced by blackhooded funereal attendants. Although Stevens has often meditated on death (declaring, in
“Sunday Morning,” that “Death is the mother of beauty,”) he has seemed to evade—or at
least to postpone—bringing into full view two events to which pleasure, whether sensual
or intellectual, is no remedy: tragedy and death. Are they not included in the aphorism
“Life Is Motion?” Stevens’s relatively unconvincing gestures to catastrophic motions in
wartime now find personal equivalents: life’s motions in the poet’s anticipation of death.
The conclusiveness of death does away with all fantasies of eternal recurrence; how shall
the poet find figures for the motions and emotions surrounding the prospect of death?
Stevens’s admission of death into the precincts of his imagination prompts a
serious inquiry into the fundamental opposite of order, Chaos. For Stevens, Chaos is, and
remains, an unbearable concept first truly explored in his great poem of old age, “Chaos
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In Motion And Not In Motion” (311). [ Chaos comes late in the 1947 volume Transport
to Summer, lurking under the poems of barely rescued happiness. Transport to Summer
had opened with a poem entitled, with considerable irony, “God Is Good. It Is a
Beautiful Night” (255) There, the poet addresses the moon, reminding it of a tragic past
made visible in the inert “head and zither on the ground,” in propinquity to “the book
and shoe, the rotted rose / At the door.” Amid those casualties-- intellectuality, music,
memory, and eroticism--only “the fiery wings” of the moon reawaken motion: “In your
light,” says Stevens to the moon, “the head is speaking”: speech is renewed in the motion
of the lips of the head of an apparent corpse. Although the resurrected player of the
zither picks up his instrument, his motions are ones of effort, “picking thin music” and
“squeezing” a red fragrance from an exhausted source.:
In your light, the head is speaking. It reads the book.
It becomes the scholar again, seeking celestial
Rendezvous,
Picking thin music on the rustiest string,
Squeezing the reddest fragrance from the stump
Of summer.
This imagined end, in which the dead head is resurrected under the presiding moon, is an
unsustainable fantasy. ]
By abandoning unsustainable fancies of even minimal resurrection, and by
conceding that life is always incorrigibly tragic in itself, Stevens is forced into more
truthful imagery. Perhaps, he thinks, one can mute one’s personal and present pain at the
apprehension of death by taking a long historical view. In a poem published during
World War II, “Dutch Graves in Bucks County” (258-61), Stevens [dispenses with
addresses to the suprahuman moon and instead invokes] addresses the successive
generations of his dead Pennsylvania “Dutch” ancestors, (Dutch being a corrupted form
of “Deutsch”). His ancestors in their “sooty graves,” with their distant historical
overview, can surely regard the chaos of “these violent marchers of the present” as but
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one epoch of human expression, one after which reassuring periods of peace will prevail.
But Stevens must abandon this fantasy, too, admitting at last that there are no truly placid
periods: each generation repudiates its predecessor, imposing, by its “mobs of birth,” not
a new peace but rather a violent new chaos:
This is the pit of torment that placid end
Should be illusion, that the mobs of birth
Avoid our stale perfections, seeking out
Their own, waiting until we go
To picnic in the ruins that we leave.
The “mobs of birth” are Keats’s “hungry generations” that “tread down” their parents. In
the savage evolutionary motion of history, every cultural perfection, disabused of its selfillusions of permanence, perceives in torment its own abolition. A long view of history
does not mitigate the force of inevitable destruction.
Stevens’s search for adequate motions of consciousness in old age culminates in
the great poem I have already mentioned, “Chaos in Motion and Not in Motion.” In old
age, the declaration that life is motion holds true, but in a new and horribly different
way—[it moves not as resurrected zither-music, not as historical repetition in ancestral
lines, but rather as a swarming chaos. Stevens creates, in] “Chaos in Motion and Not in
Motion” offers a pitiful and comic and appalling portrait of a person suffering the frantic
and yet leaden feelings of old age. Remembering once again his German origins in the
Pennsylvania “Dutch,” Stevens satirically presents his turbulent self as “Ludwig Richter,
turbulent Schlemihl.” If life is motion, what sort of life is this new and paradoxical
motion in which intense accelerations of memory and perception are accompanied and
opposed by an absolute stasis in which nothing at all is happening or can happen? In age,
do the outward yearnings of both bodily desire and individual thought, in their depressed
search for adequate objects of desire and the adequate repose of intellectual truth, fade
into barrenness? The speed of experience becomes more and more surreal: in old age, life
is still motion, yes, but the swarm of motions becomes intolerable in its vortex of
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incoherence: we are already nearing the end, says the poet: we are in the fourth act of the
tenth scene in the tenth series of our spinning spectacle, and chaos whirls around us in
macabre motion. It lays bare the tatters of our Western culture, from theology to opera:
the impotent churches have become deaf to prayer and mute in prophecy, and Wagnerian
sopranos desert their exalted arias for the boredom of repetitive scales. The animating
spirit of “Chaos in Motion and Not in Motion” is not the Pentecostal wind of consolation
nor the Shelleyan West Wind praying for the spring Zephyr, but a wild wind of incipient
death, bringing into a summer day an apocalyptic thunderstorm of lighning and winter
rain, torturing the poet with the deadly acceleration and irrational violence of his final
days:
Oh, that this lashing wind was something more
Than the spirit of Ludwig Richter . . .
The rain is pouring down. It is July.
There is lightning and the thickest thunder.
It is a spectacle. Scene 10 becomes 11,
In Series X, Act IV, et cetera.
People fall out of windows, trees tumble down,
Summer is changed to winter, the young grow old,
The air is full of children, statues, roofs
And snow. The theatre is spinning round,
Colliding with deaf-mute churches and optical trains.
The most massive sopranos are singing songs of scales.
In the chaotic collision of theatre, impaired churches, and surreal “optical trains,” the
spectacle exhausts itself, and, as he closes the poem, Stevens sums up his encompassing
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deprivation, his inability--though desire has not died--to think of a single thing he
actually desires. He feels the chill of standing intellectually outside of his own life in
cold observation of its epistemological and temporal dissolution, and, most terrifying of
all, registers a rage at the absolute absence within himself of genuine feeling, as he
becomes, at the climax of his frenzied confusion, “All mind and violence and nothing
felt.” The destructive wind—which matches his own inner turbulence--obliterates even
speculation: the poet has, in the totalizing presence of death, “nothing more to think
about”:
And Ludwig Richter, turbulent Schlemihl,
Has lost the whole in which he was contained,
Knows desire without an object of desire,
All mind and violence and nothing felt.
He knows he has nothing more to think about,
Like the wind that lashes everything at once.
Stevens will never invent a better set of equivalents for mental terrors, but
brilliant as the poem is, its chaos is not his last word on life as motion. Yes, in his own
room he is impelled to extinction by what seems a malign fate, but when he looks to the
sublime motions of the universe—not his personal ones, not the historical ones of his
buried ancestors, but rather the motions ordained by physical law--he abandons his rage
against the Fate bent on extinguishing him. Necessity is indifferent to our lives: it is no
Hardyesque spectre of the spheres, but rather a mathematical result of the billions of
convergences that bring about change in all things, even in the heavens themselves.
“Life Is Motion”: what are the motions of the failing life that contemplates a
future of nothing but losses? The beautiful and pitiless universe exhibits the sublime
motions of the serpentine aurora borealis, those “Northern lights” already the subject of
poems by both Emerson and Dickinson. “The Auroras of Autumn” (355), Stevens’s
greatest sequence, is a stunning exploration of the unpredictable but compelling motions
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of those constantly changing celestial waves of color. The scholar-poet remains below,
with a single candle in his his solitary cabin, and when he opens the door he faces a fiery
spectacle in the heavens, an enormous panorama neither astral nor terrestrial:
He opens the door of his house
On flames. The scholar of one candle sees
An Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame
Of everything he is. And he feels afraid.
(359)
The Stevensian aesthetic, which has been rendering life by inventing words and images
and structures for the characteristic motions of each human stage, finds its ultimate
replica in the terrifying but beautiful late-life aurora, itself so various as to defy
definition. Stevens’ lines send out casts of the imagination seeking to identify and
interpret the unpredictable motions of the aurora:
It is a theatre floating throug h the clouds,
Itself a cloud, although of misted rock
And mountains running like water, wave on wave,
Through waves of light. It is of cloud transformed
To cloud transformed again, idly, the way
A season changes color to no end
Except the lavishing of itself in change,
As light changes yellow into gold and gold
To its opal elements and fire’s delight,
Splashed wide-wise because it likes magnificence
And the solumn pleasures of magnificent space.
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The cloud drifts idly through half-thought-of forms.
(359)
The workings of the aurora, as it “drifts idly through half-thought-of forms,” parallel the
drifting motions of subjectivity itself.
Yet the poet must depict the destructive energy of the aurora as well as its lavish
magnificence. If life is motion, what life is implied by the fearful electrical motions in
the heavens? It is the life of old age, lived in the painful recognition of griefs and
extinctions. As we watch, the aurora goes about its wild work of slaughter: our friends
and lovers, our parents and our children, are swept away before our eyes, and we remain,
the shivering residue of combustion, stripped of emotion:
It leaps through us, through all our heavens leaps,
Extinguishing our planets, one by one,
Leaving, of where we were and looked, of where
We knew each other and of each other thought,
A shivering residue, chilled and foregone.
(360)
In a surprising turn, Stevens asserts that since the motions of the cosmos are necessitated
by physical laws, they are innocent of malignity toward us, even though they are the
instruments of our obliteration:
So, then, these lights are not a spell of light,
A saying out of a cloud, but innocence.
An innocence of the earth and no false sign
Or symbol of malice.
(361)
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Although the auroras of Necessary Fate may be indefinable, they remain a
dazzling and powerful manifestation that unavoidably suggests moral and
epistemological equivalents. Stevens will be dead in five years, and yet he has the energy
to ask rhetorically whether there is in the auroras “an imagination that sits enthroned / As
grim it is benevolent, the just / And the unjust, which in the midst of summer stops / To
imagine winter.” The biblical allusion is to Matthew 5:45, in which Jesus says of God,
“he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on
the unjust.” As long as the oceanic auroras in the skies and the responsive imagination in
the heart are in motion, so is the poet, and so is his apocalyptic life.
Stevens could scarcely have foreseen the next phase of bodily existence, in which
there is no mind, and no spectacle, and no violence, and nothing felt. Silence falls, and
there is nothing to say: the hitherto ceaseless metaphorical alchemy by which experience
is transformed into language has died. [The old poet christens this life-moment “The
Region November” (472) in which his existence is effectively a posthumous one: earthly
change is, as always, present, but it is now untranslatable into speech, and creates in the
poet no life, no motion: the trees sway, they may even be saying something, but we can
deduce nothing from their opaque motion. Something is balking meaning: the trees say
“the way things say / On the level of that which is not yet knowledge: // A revelation not
yet intended.” (473) The poem can extract no life-analogy from the trees. And finally,
the poet’s field of view goes completely blank as his past world is erased. In “A Clear
Day and No Memories” (475) the mind “is not part of the weather,” no longer changing
as the weather changes; and even the motion of the physical universe has become “an
invisible activity,” incapable of poetic suggestion. With its invisibility the poet himself
becomes invisible; he is no longer in the scene:
Today the air is clear of everything.
It has no knowledge except of nothingness
And it flows over us without meanings,
As if none of us had ever been here before
And are not now: in this shallow spectacle,
This invisible activity, this sense.
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(475)
This “nothingness” has no accompanying presence, unlike the “nothing” in the famous
earlier poem “The Snow Man” (8). In actuality, the Snow Man lives among a wealth of
presences, in a landscape of winter beauty: around him are “the junipers shagged with
ice, / The spruces rough in the distant glitter // Of the January sun.” When the poet, at the
end of “The Snow Man,” says that he sees “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that
is,” he has killed his aesthetic nostalgia for the deciduous trees of the past, but hasn’t yet
advanced to the point where he can recognize the beauty of snow-laden evergreens
glittering in the sun. The glittering landscape of winter is invisible to the mourner of
summer; it adds up only to “the nothing that is.” The Snow Man can affirm, in his later
evolution, that “the absence of the imagination had itself to be imagined,” and after that
moment there is no abundant earthly something —whether summer leaves or glittering
evergreens—available to the bleak speechless Stevens of “The Region November.]
Where is the life that is motion, if it no longer exists in the old man darkening into
invisibility with his inaccessible memories? The life that is motion nonetheless persists,
thinks the poet, in an abstract Platonic Form of landscape, a virtual landscape devoid of
human emotion, without human thought. Emotion and thought are what the realm of
pure Idea lacks--until each new generation infuses into the Platonic geometry both human
feeling and human meaning. The landscape of Being—just Being, “mere” Being, as
Stevens calls it—seems to exhibit, in its minimal Platonic form, each item that the world
of artifice needs: a palm tree, a bronze stage-set, a golden bird. But Stevens rebukes the
notion of an eternally static set of Platonic Ideas by animating its Forms into continuing
action: the palm rises, the bird sings, a wind moves in the branches. Stevens’s ideal
landscape quivers with potential, ever-ready to grow from its tableau-like stasis to living
motion: in the virtual realm of the abstract Idea, life is suspended, not ended. “Of Mere
Being” (476) affirms, on a conceptual plane, the eternal present-tense motions of reality:
The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor,
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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.
If it is not the reason that makes us happy or unhappy, where is happiness to be found?
“Of Mere Being” claims that we find it in the mental tableaux of potential, ever on offer
to seeing and hearing. Because of the attraction these tableaux of possibility exert on us,
human desire infiltrates the realm of “mere being” and begins to activate it in words. The
Phoenix of “fire-fangled feathers” seems to promise future flight as soon as its wings lift;
and the motion of the wind, the singing of the bird, the rising of the slender palm, all
import a hovering action ready to begin. The characteristic Stevensian moment of verbal
play—as the bird’s fire-fangled feathers, by sonic contagion, “dangle down”—intimates
that word-play is intrinsic to the events emerging in this atmosphere, acting as a bridge
joining the symbolic pictorial motions to existential ones.
The limited number of life-phases—infancy, childhood, youth, and so on—makes
it necessary for each capable lyric poet to seek out an original and personal and accurate
set of images and idioms, and to forge them into a recognizable idiosyncratic style. The
function of that style is to represent, in Hopkins’s words, “the own, the abrupt self there.”
The motions of life, as Stevens lives it, beholds it, feels it, and remembers it, synchronize
themselves with motions of style unforgettably his own. Who but he could have
invented, to match old age’s rage and depletion “Chaos in Motion and Not in Motion?”
When we remember the adolescent undergraduate who set Diana and Apollo dancing in
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an American city, we realize how far his style, inherited from European poetry, had to
travel, how often it had to mutate, if it was to map his American world. “Of Mere Being”
displays the conjoined boldness and ease with which Stevens could transform Platonic
Ideas into a hovering sphere of potential, by showing the fire-fangled feathers dangling
down, soon to be vivified as the Phoenix lifts them. He sets the scene in an eternal
present tense, eternally available to the poetic imagination. He had the bravura to
announce, as the motto of the scene, “It is not the reason that makes us happy or
unhappy,” thereby freeing the Platonic Idea from the chill of abstract reason. He knew
how slight the motions can be that activate life in ear and eye —“The bird sings. Its
feathers shine.” Above all, he dares to show that the realm of the classical Ideal of
Reason lacks the essentials—human meaning, human feeling—which only the artist can
provide. The bird “Sings in the palm, without human meaning, / Without human feeling,
a foreign song.” It is only the artist who can make the song become native to our
moving life. “Of Mere Being,” in its firm rejection of ever-temperate Reason, is recalling
Keats’s sonnet sometimes called “What the thrush said,” which rejects the rule of
Knowledge as Stevens rejects the rule of Reason. And what the thrush said to the poet is:
O fret not after knowledge; I have none,
And yet my song comes native with the warmth;
O fret not after knowledge, I have none,
And yet the evening listens.
Listening to Keats’s thrush, Stevens writes his own version of the primal value of the
objects of ear and eye: “The bird sings. Its feathers shine.” In the tableaux of the Ideal,
the only admitted senses are hearing and seeing, called the “higher” senses because they
can occur without physical contact with the object. Smell, taste, and touch can enter only
after the aesthetic will brings the distant Ideal into the full-sensed Terrestrial,
transforming the Conceptual into the Embodied, vivifying the abstract Landscape into a
magical awakening. Then “Mere Being” becomes the earthly paradise, and Life is
Motion once again, this time in art.
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