by Harold Bloom
Shelley’s dead thoughts are driven like withered leaves by the pride of the poetic will. Promethean to his core, the revolutionary Shelley brings fire, sparks of prophecy. A Humean intellectual with a Promethean heart, he hears only reality and yet aspires to human renovation. Stevens, who echoes perpetually Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry,” defiantly joined his precursor when he proclaimed that the lights astral and Shelleyan would at last transform the world.
Wallace Stevens, “Montrachet-le-Jardin”
WALLACE STEVENS evidently wrote “Montrachet-le-Jardin” early in 1942. He was a lover of French culture and Burgundy wine, and the Nazi occupation of France weighed upon his spirits. Deliberately declining to write war poetry, Stevens nevertheless profoundly catches both the moment and an eternal dimension in this subtle poem.
An oblique prelude culminates in the assertion “Man must become the hero of his world.” Stevens then makes brilliant allusion to Shakespeare’s song in Cymbeline:
Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages,
Thou thy worldly task has done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages.
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
Fear no more the frown o’ th’ great,
Thou art past the tyrant’s stroke;
Care no more to clothe and eat,
To thee the reed is as the oak:
The sceptre, learning, physic, must
All follow this and come to dust.
Fear no more the lightning-flash.
Nor th’ all-dreaded thunder-stone.
Fear not slander, censure rash.
Thou hast finish’d joy and moan.
All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee and come to dust.
No exerciser harm thee!
Nor no witchcraft charm thee!
Ghost unlaid forbear thee!
Nothing ill come near thee!
Quiet consummation have,
And renowned be thy grave!
Act 4, Scene 2
Fear never the brute clouds nor winter-stop
And let the water-belly of ocean roar,
Nor feel the x malisons of other men,
Since in the hero-land to which we go,
A little nearer by each multitude,
To which we come as into bezeled plain,…
This acute juxtaposition of Shakespeare and Stevens leads to a moment of vision that haunts my painful nights as I struggle to recover:
A little while of Terra Paradise
I dreamed, of autumn rivers, silvas green,
Of sanctimonious mountains high in snow,
But in that dream a heavy difference
Kept waking and a mournful sense sought out,
In vain, life’s season or death’s element.
That “heavy difference” also stems from the song in Cymbeline. As he does so frequently, Stevens turns to his muse, “the auroral creature musing in the mind.” It is again characteristic of Stevens that he closes in the throwaway mode:
And yet what good were yesterday’s devotions?
I affirm and then at midnight the great cat
Leaps quickly from the fireside and is gone.
It is not so much that Stevens negates his affirmation by qualifying it. The poem affirms. Like his true forerunner, Walt Whitman, Stevens is an affirmer and not an ironist. He could not always confront his own Whitmanian spirit. Yet it refuses to abandon him.
In “Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu,” from the volume Ideas of Order, the opening is a negation:
That would be waving and that would be crying,
Crying and shouting and meaning farewell,
Farewell in the eyes and farewell at the centre,
Just to stand still without moving a hand.
In a world without heaven to follow, the stops
Would be endings more poignant than partings, profounder,
And that would be saying farewell, repeating farewell,
Just to be there and just to behold.
You can term this an acceptance of our mortality or a playful despair. The lilt goes against the somber realization. The Whitmanian spirit at the center of Wallace Stevens rises up:
To be one’s singular self, to despise
The being that yielded so little, acquired
So little, too little to care, to turn
To the ever-jubilant weather, to sip
“The ever-jubilant weather” is the victor over both doctrine and hesitation:
One likes to practice the thing. They practice,
Enough, for heaven. Ever-jubilant,
What is there here but weather, what spirit
Have I except it comes from the sun?
Whitman and Stevens practiced their poetry for earth, not heaven. Envision “ever-jubilant” as a direct address to Walt Whitman. Weather is the movement of wind and the absence or presence of the sun. The poet in Stevens, as in Whitman, is always in the sun. There are poets like Shelley and Hart Crane for whom the rising of the wind is the crucial stimulus. Whitman and Stevens are elevated to vision by the jubilant sun.
Age has not diminished my delight in Stevens’s “Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas”:
What
One believes is what matters. Ecstatic identities
Between one’s self and the weather and the things
Of the weather are the belief in one’s element,
The casual reunions, the long-pondered
Surrenders, the repeated sayings that
There is nothing more and that 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. So that if one went to the moon,
Or anywhere beyond, to a different element,
One would be drowned in the air of difference,
Incapable of belief, in the difference.
And then returning from the moon, if one breathed
The cold evening, without any scent or the shade
Of any woman, watched the thinnest light
And the most distant, single color, about to change,
And naked of any illusion, in poverty,
In the exactest poverty, if then
One breathed the cold evening, the deepest inhalation
Would come from that return to the subtle centre.
“Poverty” in Stevens is imaginative need. The “subtle centre” is the self open to the weather. “Ecstatic identities” are the entire program of Whitman at his most exuberant. In Stevens we hear them as “The hum of thoughts evaded in the mind.”
Edwin Arlington Robinson,
“Luke Havergal”
THE SHELLEYAN FICTION of the leaves achieved a triumph in Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Luke Havergal” (1896), though I will employ his revised text here. Robinson never married, because he was totally smitten with his sister-in-law and maintained a wholly honorable stance of reticence and reverence toward her throughout their lives. In 1914, he published his dark lyric “Eros Turannos,” a chant devoted to the difficult marriage of his brother and his forbidden beloved:
The falling leaf inaugurates
The reign of her confusion;
The pounding wave reverberates
The dirge of her illusion;
And home, where passion lived and died,
Becomes a place where she can hide,
While all the town and harbor side
Vibrate with her seclusion.
&n
bsp; We tell you, tapping on our brows,
The story as it should be,—
As if the story of a house
Were told, or ever could be;
We’ll have no kindly veil between
Her visions and those we have seen,—
As if we guessed what hers have been,
Or what they are or would be.
Meanwhile we do no harm; for they
That with a god have striven,
Not hearing much of what we say,
Take what the god has given;
Though like waves breaking it may be,
Or like a changed familiar tree,
Or like a stairway to the sea
Where down the blind are driven.
These are the three final octaves of a six-stanza poem. Amazingly dispassionate, “Eros Turannos” nevertheless conveys Robinson’s endless despair and his stoic resolution. He mounts to a climactic intensity as he salutes the enclosed erotic struggle, first with a Wordsworthian “changed familiar tree,” which recalls “But there’s a tree, of many, one,” from the “Intimations” ode. The final trope is Robinson’s own invention and always makes me think of the dreadful scene in The Battleship Potemkin where the director, Sergei Eisenstein, portrays the slaughter on the Odessa Steps, down which victims are driven into the sea.
In “Luke Havergal,” a poem I recite incessantly to myself, Robinson identifies with the lyric monologuist:
Go to the western gate, Luke Havergal,
There where the vines cling crimson on the wall,
And in the twilight wait for what will come.
The leaves will whisper there of her, and some,
Like flying words, will strike you as they fall;
But go, and if you listen she will call.
Go to the western gate, Luke Havergal—
Luke Havergal.
The western gate may be the threshold to the beyond. The “Ode to the West Wind” haunts Robinson, as the great trope of Shelley’s dead thoughts drive like withered leaves to quicken a new birth. Darkly, Robinson imagines the death of his beloved, yet I always wonder who is speaking the poem.
No, there is not a dawn in eastern skies
To rift the fiery night that’s in your eyes;
But there, where western glooms are gathering,
The dark will end the dark, if anything:
God slays Himself with every leaf that flies,
And hell is more than half of paradise.
No, there is not a dawn in eastern skies—
In eastern skies.
The unknown speaker urges Luke to turn his back on the east and accept instead a cosmos where “God slays Himself with every leaf that flies.” With the next stanza, we receive the revelation that Luke’s guide is among the dead:
Out of a grave I come to tell you this,
Out of a grave I come to quench the kiss
That flames upon your forehead with a glow
That blinds you to the way that you must go.
Yes, there is yet one way to where she is,
Bitter, but one that faith may never miss.
Out of a grave I come to tell you this—
To tell you this.
We are not told the motive of this admonisher. Robinson seems to have been fixated on a chaste kiss his sister-in-law once bestowed upon his forehead. I always wonder why that flame has to be quenched, and I distrust the speaker. And yet the final stanza achieves a cognitive music that verges upon the Sublime:
There is the western gate, Luke Havergal,
There are the crimson leaves upon the wall.
Go, for the winds are tearing them away,—
Nor think to riddle the dead words they say,
Nor any more to feel them as they fall;
But go, and if you trust her she will call.
There is the western gate, Luke Havergal—
Luke Havergal.
Shelley returns in that medley of crimson leaves, winds, dead words, and the image of falling. So strong is his presence that I entertain the fancy that the voice emanates from the Promethean bard himself, whose skepticism was allied to a visionary Platonism that consigned dust to the dust while hymning the pure spirit returning to the “burning fountain” or “unextinguished hearth” where dwelt forms more real than living man.
Riddling the dead words may be vain, yet the splendor of Robinson’s poem transcends its unresolvable dilemma. The cumulative effect of the carefully crafted repetitions dwarfs the enigma of its plot and earns the belated poet something of the Shelleyan aura of victory despite the loss of eros. Yet Robinson was the bard of defeat, and the true epilogue of “Luke Havergal” is in “The Pity of the Leaves” (1897):
Vengeful across the cold November moors,
Loud with ancestral shame there came the bleak,
Sad wind that shrieked, and answered with a shriek,
Reverberant through lonely corridors.
The old man heard it; and he heard, perforce,
Words out of lips that were no more to speak—
Words of the past that shook the old man’s cheek
Like dead, remembered footsteps on old floors.
And then there were the leaves that plagued him so!
The brown, thin leaves that on the stones outside
Skipped with a freezing whisper. Now and then
They stopped, and stayed there—just to let him know
How dead they were; but if the old man cried,
They fluttered off like withered souls of men.
Plangency is the mark of this exquisitely bleak sonnet, which anticipates Robert Frost, with whom Robinson shared mutual esteem. Shelley, as superb a reader as ever to appear among the major poets, might have winced urbanely at this diminution of his prophetic metaphor in which the withered leaves quicken a new birth.
William Carlos Williams, “A Unison”
I REGRET THAT I HAD TO DECLINE Kenneth Burke’s kind offer to bring William Carlos Williams to meet with me at Burke’s home in Andover, New Jersey, in the early 1960s. Williams died in 1963, and I did not get down to Andover until the mid-1970s.
I came very late to a full appreciation of Williams. My conversion did not begin until I read the first volume of Paterson in 1951, five years after its publication. I went on to Spring and All (1923), which is one of the true American originals. Like most readers I was immediately enraptured by its superb opening lyric:
By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches—
They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—
Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf
But now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and
begin to awaken
This has a harsh intensity of inception, at once of infants, vegetation, and American poems. As an obstetrician and a pediatric physician, Williams delivered and cared for generations of babies, and one hears his love for that labor in the almost magical elegance of:
They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter.
In a prose passage of Spring and All, Williams cries out, “THE WORLD IS NEW.” Walt Whitman is the fountainhead of this American proclamation:
I have heard what the talkers were talking….the talk of the beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There was never any more inception than there is now
Nor any more youth or age than there is now;
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
“Song of Myself,” Section 3
I turn to the shorter poem by Williams that most moves me, “A Unison,” where the title brings together several of the meanings of “unison”: the same words spoken at once by two or more speakers; an identity of pitch in music; a concord, agreement, harmony, or musical parts combined in octaves:
The grass is very green, my friend,
and tousled, like the head of—
your grandson, yes? And the mountain,
the mountain we climbed
twenty years since for the last
time (I write this thinking
of you) is saw-horned as then
upon the sky’s edge—an old barn
is peaked there also, fatefully,
against the sky. And there it is
and we can’t shift it or change
it or parse it or alter it
in any way. Listen! Do you not hear
them? the singing? There it is and
we’d better acknowledge it and
