Philosophical Implications in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens’ first book of poetry, Harmonium, which contains, “Sunday Morning,” “Anecdote of the Jar,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” and the “Comedian as the Letter C,” introduces readers to Steven’s esoteric vocabulary, rigorous care in the crafting of his poems, and vision of poetry as the principal fusion of the creative imagination and objective reality. In this way, Stevens’ poetry appraises the relationship between mind and world, or between the world as it simply is and the world as it is configured by human cognition and imagination. For example, by focusing on a number of grammatical constructions and operators, Charles Altieri, in his book, Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity, suggests that “the linguistic building blocks” of poetry have “philosophical implications” hidden within them, and that grammar, really, can be affective or philosophical. That is, the language of a poem can be a way of locating possible states of agency in the world.
With that in mind, this essay has two animating ideas. First, that some poetry, really, is an engagement with the ways in which we organize and reorganize ourselves, since the linguistic building blocks of poetry have philosophical implications latent within them. That is the second animating idea: the work of poetry is affective or philosophical. Art is a philosophical practice, as it were, since both art and philosophy focus on the ways in which we are organized and the possibility of reorganizing ourselves. Of course, both are in the business of language, and thus both, I would suggest, are a “species of common genus,” to quote Alva Noe, whose book, Strange Tools, investigates these ideas directly.
To explore how this might work in Wallace Stevens’ poetry, I begin with Charles Altieri’s premise that, because the poem need not always address itself as in the class of things that are poems, the language in a poem becomes a way of locating possible states of agency in the world. Other scholars, too—notably, Jeffrey Blevins—have extended Altieri’s arguments into other philosophically charged grammatical investigations, building, for example, upon Altieri’s “love [for] how ‘as’ complicates actual situations by combining temporal, qualitative, and psychological registers for staging events so that there is simultaneity in events, parallelism in qualities, and opportunities for expressing the manner of one’s interactions with objects (116).” For Blevins, as for Altieri, it is the interaction of the diverse grammatical functions of any given “as” or “is” that engenders the philosophical implications at the heart of Stevens’ poetry. In this essay, working predominantly with Blevins’ article entitled, “How Stevens Uses the Grammar of ‘Is,’” and by looking closely at one of Stevens’ poems, the ravishing “Sunday Morning,” I will argue that Stevens offers readers the opportunity to experience an affective form of poetic embodiment that organizes and reorganizes our world in manifold ways, and might, along the way, tell us something significant about who we are and how we choose to define ourselves.
I would like to engage, first, without complicating either Blevins or Altieri’s respective grammatical inquiries, with a close reading of Stevens’ poem, “Sunday Morning.” In this poem, as in most of his poems, Stevens offers readers the opportunity, as they engage the imagery of sight, sound, and motion, to experience a form of otherwise impossible poetic embodiment—namely, an alteration or disruption of physical experience that carries a distinct aesthetic signature of felt disorientation. But how does he manage to do so? To answer this, we must analyze and assess the particular confidence that occurs not so much in terms of the expressive self but in an abstracted self whose longings take the form of Stevens’ desire to resuscitate poetry to the core of common existence. That, actually, is a claim I have borrowed from Altieri, who, by interpreting the possibilities for poetic embodiment along “situational” contours in the poetry of Stevens, focuses on forms of experience whereby a concern for worldliness shifts from imagining functions of language to the notion of expressing the energies that the mind can formulate so as to construct a sense of perpetual-event in which the poetic mind attempts to animate what we can only perceive.
Generally speaking, then, the poem evolves as a discussion between two voices: the questioning woman, whose pleasure in life is limited by the awareness of death, and the other, more or less, authoritative voice that attempts to comfort and reassure her that the world is enough simply as it is—that, really, it is all there is to be satisfied or happy about in the first place. For example, in the first section, the woman initially enjoys the “Complacencies of the peignoir, and late / Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,” until she is moved to focus on its transience and ephemerality, which then lead her to remember her church—which, apparently, she is not attending—and ultimately to allow self-reproach and guilt to enter and disturb her enjoyment. Certainly, even as fear and guilt settle in, the woman’s entire being feels as if it is drawn into another environment, as, for example, her “dreaming feet” lead her to “silent Palestine”—the location of Christ’s sacrifice (15). At the same time, I would suggest that the scene animates much more than a mere metonymical or spatial environment: the final line, “Dominion of the blood and sepulcher,” can easily be read beyond its spatial register, as the transformation of the opening “coffee and oranges” and “sunny chair” moved by the affinities of metaphor. In this way, it might be said that the woman’s aesthetic enjoyment finds its analogue in a religious symbol that concerns physical life as well, in the image of Christ’s internment and bondage.
By this logic, the conception of Stevens’ poetic world—the continuous cycle of birth, death, and seasonal transformation—is, in the eyes of the poet, more lasting than any possible religious notion of it. That is, perhaps, why the second voice immediately responds to the woman’s experience in the form of an argument—“Why should she give her bounty to the dead?”—suggesting, rather obviously, that the woman should not attempt to separate herself from the world by redefining herself as an emblem of divinity (16). With this, Stevens proceeds, in the third section, to explain the condensed “history” of religion’s evolution—from Jove’s motherless birth, to the virginal birth of Jesus, to the “commingling” of our blood, and eventually landing at the possibility of a completely human notion of existence and fulfillment:
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
A part of labor and part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent blue. (39-45).
Obviously, upon a cursory glance, the woman conveys the possibility of evolving from the thought of heaven to a sense of divinity “that must live within herself” (23). However, Jove, too, is induced with the entirely human concept of kingliness—“He moved among us, as a muttering King”—indicating, I think, that the narrative of evolving religion, for Stevens, depends in important ways upon the device of personification. Interestingly, the notion of “the very hinds [who] discerned it” locates Jove hierarchically, until, that is, the recognition of “blood commingling” enlivens a second reading, concerning the human and divine relationship that is at the heart of the Christian project. The final, third stage of this embodiment projects a purely Stevensian notion of anthropomorphism, leaving the “earth” and “sky” in a connective, yet mostly ambiguous, relationship. In short, then, to imbue the human with a sense of the divine would, for Stevens, transforms earth into paradise, the sky becoming an expression of ourselves rather than a marker of our division.
In the fourth section, the woman is initially unable to accept the speaker’s argument, given her sense of life’s ephemerality: “But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields / Return no more, where, then, is paradise?” (49-50). The speaker then proceeds to assure her that there is, actually, an active notion of human permanence, although not in the individual form. Likewise, in the fifth section, when the woman claims that she still requires “some imperishable bliss”—that is, some individual sense of continuity—the speaker provides the comfort that “Death is the mother of beauty,” or, to put it differently, the continual cycle of life and decay creates desire, which could not exist in the absence of life’s transience (62-65). In an interesting twist, the sixth section envisions an unlively “heaven” in which “ripe fruit never fall[s],” and suggests that such an environment would be boring and aesthetically displeasing. For Stevens, that is because change is responsible for the development of beauty, and thus change is what brings about beginnings and endings. Thus, in some respect, the aspects of “Sunday Morning” that I have focused on, perhaps, can be distilled to the powerful Stevensian declaration: “Death is the mother of beauty.” In fact, this reading, as far as I can tell, is supported by the “boisterous devotion” that characterizes part seven—that is, the pagan men who seem to connect with some mystical source, releasing their individuality to its larger, collective identity. At the same time, however, section eight is remarkably quiet, returning as it does to the image of “water without sound”—suggesting, I would submit, that the beauty of nature ultimately provides only isolation and estrangement—“Downward to darkness, on extended wings”—and thus, by corollary, it might be said that the release the woman has discovered by letting go of her Christian faith offers no significant return besides the awareness of nature’s vulnerability, of which she plays a crucial part. Whether this final image of isolation negates the sun worshippers pagan ritual, ultimately, is up for the astute reader of Stevens to decide.
In sum, I have argued, using Altieri and Blevins (and to a lesser extent, the animating concerns of Alva Noe) as a jumping off point, that “the linguistic building blocks” of poetry have “philosophical implications” hidden within them, and that grammar, really, can be affective or philosophical. That is, the language of a poem can be a way of locating possible states of agency in the world. I have showed, hopefully, that poetry can be an engagement with the ways in which we organize and reorganize ourselves, since—again—the linguistic building blocks of poetry have philosophical implications latent within them. By extension, I have attempted to show that art is, indeed, a philosophical practice, because both art and philosophy focus on the ways in which we are organized and the possibility of reorganizing ourselves. With that in mind, I argued that “Sunday Morning” is a rather robust example of Altieri’s premise that, by interpreting the possibilities for poetic embodiment along “situational” contours, Stevens focuses on forms of experience whereby a concern for worldliness shifts from imagining functions of language to the notion of expressing the energies that the mind can formulate so as to construct a sense of perpetual-event in which the poetic mind attempts to animate what we can only perceive. This is, particularly, I conclude, how Stevens is able to arrive at such an encompassing claim as “Death is the mother of beauty.”
