Wallace Stevens poetry Flashcards
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
‘I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.’
Perspective
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
‘A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one. ‘
implies the unity of perspective - not just gender, but across nature
However this itself becomes ironic - still ‘13 ways’
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
'I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after. '
Potential perspectives - like with the modernist questioning of time, as questions before/after
Peter Quince at the Clavier
Just as my fingers on these keys
Make music, so the selfsame sounds
On my spirit make a music, too.
Music is feeling, then, not sound;
And thus it is that what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring you,
Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music. It is like the strain
Waked in the elders by Susanna…
In AMSND, Quince is notorious for his struggles with poetic expression (struggling with metre and rhyme) – thus suggests difficulty of producing feeling in literaature
Furthermore, AMSND Quince is a craftsman – suggesting the PRACTICAL nature of literary expression, expressing physical realities – hence the pysciality of the musical expression in Steven’s quince? An attempt to extend beyond mere wrodds of literature, to other artistic and embodied forms?
Uses music as a metaphor both for thought and for poetry – emphasis thus upon the importance of ‘sound’ as a mode of ‘feeling’
Thus the repeated motif of ‘music’ – appearing 3 times in as many lines – must draw our attention; Stevens, in consciously repeating /echoing the same word, encourages the reader (or especially the listener – poetry as oratory] to strive for the deeper meaning underlying it, whereas using synonyms may not encourage such analysis
Thus repeating the same word encourages reader to strive for the ‘feeling’ which affects the ‘spirit’ underlying the sound of ‘music’ alone – deeper pierecing s
This determining pinpointing strives to locate emotion exactly – delinieating exactly its location of occurrence (;here in this room’), reducing it to an exact thing ‘it is that’ – however, this attempt to sceintificailly, empically describe emotion is counteracted by the irony that ‘what I feel’ cannot be named or described exactly but only remains a ‘what’; similarly, the ‘you’ to whom the poem is addressed is not named, further lacking specificity
Present continuous tense – an attempt to preserve an exact moment ad infinitum
Peter Quince at the Clavier
The red-eyed elders, watching, felt
The basses of their beings throb
In witching chords, and their thin blood
Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna.
Pun on ‘bass’/’bases’ implies the fundamental link between humanity and musical expression – the need to express thought and feleing in music?
Peter Quince at the Clavier
Soon, with a noise like tambourines,
Came her attendant Byzantines.
They wondered why Susanna cried
Against the elders by her side;
Sussana as attempt to create constant preserved momnt of beauty – thus in facing the ‘elders’ desparis at this counfounded attempt and realisation of morality and decline
Use of myth - link to demystification fo myth in anthropology eg the golden bough
Peter Quince at the Clavier
‘Beauty is momentary in the mind—
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.
The body dies; the body’s beauty lives.
So evenings die, in their green going,
A wave, interminably flowing.
So gardens die…
Irony – inversion of the normal regard of beauty
Beauty is a ‘portal’ - but to what?
Suggests beauty even outlives nature – because it is constant, rather than cyclical as nature is – perhaps suggesting that the constancy of asingle person’s beauty allows it to remain a stable truth
Cycles also implied by ‘evenings’ – points to the cycles of days and seasons, in opposition to the constancy of beauty
Peter Quince at the Clavier
‘Susanna’s music touched the bawdy strings
Of those white elders; but, escaping,
Left only Death’s ironic scraping.
Now, in its immortality, it plays
On the clear viol of her memory,
And makes a constant sacrament of praise.’’
Obsession with ‘elders’ demonstrates concern with time passing which goes against his desire to preserve a moment of beauty
Music as beauty made immortal?
The preservation of music – as it is written – could be realted to the preservation of feeling in written poetry; metaphor for poetic expression
Just as music can be replayed as ‘the selfsame sounds’ by different musicians, as it is recorded in writing, poetry can become a recreation of feeling through expression in writing thus enabling itsrecreation in its audience
Important of ‘constancy’!
This poem as an attempt to create constancy out of the ever=changing cyclicality of life and the waning and passing of beauty
The Silver Plough-Boy [published next to Peter Quince]
How soon the silver fades in the dust! How soon the black figure slips from the wrinkled sheet! How softly the sheet falls to the ground!
No line-breaks – suggesting continuity, causality, chain of events which cannot be halted
When considered in partnership with the poem preceding it, which seeks to ‘make a constant sacrament of praise’, seems to suggest the finitude of objects of beauty
‘softly’ softens the noition of death, but also itself sounds mournful and inevitable
The Plain Sense of Things
After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.
It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.
Although the title’s determiner ‘the’ implies that there is a single ‘plain sense’ to be found, the poem’s body quickly undercuts this assertion – there is only ‘a’ plain sense, suggesting the possibility of multiple other ‘plain senses’ which may exist rather than just a singular possibility
use of ‘the imagination’ Suggests that imagination is singular – thus shared amongst all humans – a illusion which he later shatters by making the verb active, ‘to be imagined’
Association of seasons with cycles of expressiveness – seems to envisage the expression of emotion as cyclical, itself waxing and waning and unable to be totally preserved in writing or by other artistic mediums
Then must question – what is the point of the ‘constant sacrament of praise’ being maintained? This poem seems to answer that each person must have their ‘inevitable knoweldge’, even if it is just an inevitably individual, lest ‘this balnk cold, this sadness without cause’ become the only way of living
‘to choose the adjective’ - potential plurality of expressive possibilities; actue awareness that each potential chosen ‘adjective’ has a subtly different meaning/impliation, and thus choice is important
A ‘structure’, which could refer to many possibilities, is delineated through description and thus reduced to only a ‘house’
The Plain Sense of Things
The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.
Impossibility of literary recreation of feeling through direct expression – each person must reinterpret poetry individually, just as Stevens himself reinterprets Peter Quince’s signficiance
Repetition – or attempts to recreate original feeling expressed – become literally rotting, as implied by the ‘flies’
The Plain Sense of Things
Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence
‘to be imagined’ asserts the individuality of imagination, as ct to the ‘the imagination’ singular declared at start
Each individual must reinterpret in order to seek clrity – as opposed to this ‘mud’
The Plain Sense of Things
espressing silence
Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.
However the ‘inevitable knwoeldge’ is individual as based upon imagination, what each person ‘imagined’
a necessity requires - not the person actively requiring, but the necessity itself?/
Asides on the Oboe (1942)
The prologues are over. It is a question, now,
Of final belief. So, say that final belief
Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.
Structure of a book – implied by ‘fiction’?
Moment of poetic crisis and urgency
Asides on the Oboe (1942)
That obsolete fiction of the wide river in
An empty land…
The philosophers’ man alone still walks in dew,
Still by the sea-side mutters milky lines
Concerning an immaculate imagery.
In the end, however naked, tall, there is still
The impossible possible philosophers’ man,
The man who has had the time to think enough,
The central man, the human globe, responsive
As a mirror with a voice, the man of glass,
Who in a million diamonds sums us up.
The ideal of being ‘summed up’ - but impossibility of ‘in a hundred diamonds’ inidcating refraction and infiie possibilties etc
The poet as a ‘man of glass’ demonstrates the need for each person to interpret poetry according to their own situational concerns - contradicts possibility of a single meaning which ‘sums us up’
