Paying Attention To The Sky

Wallace Stevens House in Hartford CT

The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm by Wallace Stevens

The long rhythmic lines arranged in couplets and the frequent repetition create songlike quality that draws us into the poem. We settle into a moment of tranquility, a sense of perfect fulfillment. The work of a master.

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be 
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom 

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page. 

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself 

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.  

The Emperor Of Ice-Cream by Wallace Stevens

The two stanzas represent two rooms, one with pleasurable activity the other with death. In the kitchen a strong man is asked to make ice cream by hand, the old fashioned way. In the bedroom lies a woman who has died. All those k sounds in “kitchen cups concupiscent curds” seemingly whip words into ice-cream This was a Steven’s personal favorite; it was “an instance of letting myself go,” written during a time of his “pure poetry” period.

The idea behind “pure poetry” is a poetry which should depend for its effectiveness on its rhythms and the tonal values of the words employed with as complete a dissociation from ideational content as may be humanly possible. Those who have argued for such “pure poetry” have frequently, if not always, been obsessed with some hazy notion of an analogy between music and poetry. His book of poems, Harmonium, was criticized as a tour de force, a “stunt” in the fantastic and the bizarre. The NY Times critic wrote:  “From one end of the book to the other there is not an idea that can vitally affect the mind, there is not a word that can arouse emotion. The volume is a glittering edifice of icicles. Brilliant as the moon, the book is equally dead.”  

The Emperor of Ice Cream remains a favorite of mine, however. Despite the restrictions placed on the poet, an inventiveness dominates that stretches the mind of the reader and affirms Stevens’ greatness. 

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. 

Take from the dresser of deal.
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

From Harmonium | Written c. 1923

Tea At The Palaz Of Hoon by Wallace Stevens

Stevens once admitted that “Poets are never lonely even when they pretend to be. Watching a sunset the speaker felt as large and magnificent as the sun itself. But he knew that the beauty and wonder he experienced really came from within his own imagination. That made him less lonely, more truly himself and more mysterious.

Not less because in purple I descended
The western day through what you called
The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?
What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?
What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

From Harmonium | 1923

Anecdote Of The Jar by Wallace Stevens

A curious contest between a jar and a hill; an object made by people, the other by nature. At first the jar seems to tame the wilderness, but then it seems lifeless. The jar makes and takes; the hill gives. 

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

From Harmonium | 1923