eNOTHING Audio Series "Sunday Morning" classic poem -- read by Wallace Stevens

The poetry of Wallace Stevens is featured on our blog with 12 different posts or articles.  One of the great romantic Modernist poets of the 20th century, Wallace Stevens poems are such interesting compositions of words presented with such uniqueness -- as word pictures -- and in format -- that I find it impossible to ignore his work.

Wallace Stevens was a corporate Vice President at "The Hartford" insurance company in the mid 20th century.  For many of us who have studied the beat movement and grown up in and through the sixties, this fact sometimes gives him an instinctive negative label - which makes his poetry even MORE interesting.  

I find his lyrical voice and imagery almost psychedelic in nature, and as such - a generation-bending glue that binds creative souls of all types together, despite the surprising cover that surrounds his spiritual book.

Even more amazing, Stevens poetry comes through as obtuse, complex - and he is one of the most analyzed poets of the 20th century (in my mind, second only to Cummings); yet if you look closely he rarely abuses his knowledge of language and words with pretention and complexity of words.  A poet of the common man, using words that everyone can understand (I employ this technique myself as a direct result).

Here, for your pleasure, is one of Stevens more famous poems, "Sunday Morning" -- as read by the poet himself in the mid 1950's, shortly before his death.

His tone, rhythm, cadence and pace are awe-inspiring.  Enjoy this addition to our audio series:

Poem of the Day -- "Sunday Morning" by Wallace Stevens

This is one of Wallace Stevens earliest poems - at the time it was an early breakthrough for Stevens; the poem was published in an early edition of "Poetry" magazine.  This poem is atypical of a Stevens poem; it is very structured and rhythm is just as important as his choice of wordplay in the abstract..in fact rhythm is far more important.

This emphasis on structure and rhythm is not really unusual though; many poets can look back at their earliest works and see more traditional approaches to the art, as they find their "wings" so to speak.

Stevens deeply contemplative, philosophical vision is there, though.  A poem about (and of doubt) the existence of God, paradise and the world of man that challenges traditional assumptions...it's a beautiful piece of work by a monumental poet!

Enjoy!

Sunday Morning

By Wallace Stevens

 

I

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late

Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,

And the green freedom of a cockatoo

Upon a rug mingle to dissipate

The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.

She dreams a little, and she feels the dark

Encroachment of that old catastrophe,

As a calm darkens among water-lights.

The pungent oranges and bright, green wings

Seem things in some procession of the dead,

Winding across wide water, without sound.

The day is like wide water, without sound,

Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet

Over the seas, to silent Palestine,

Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

II

Why should she give her bounty to the dead?

What is divinity if it can come

Only in silent shadows and in dreams?

Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,

In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else

In any balm or beauty of the earth,

Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?

Divinity must live within herself:

Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;

Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued

Elations when the forest blooms; gusty

Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;

All pleasures and all pains, remembering

The bough of summer and the winter branch.

These are the measures destined for her soul.

III

Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.

No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave

Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.

He moved among us, as a muttering king,

Magnificent, would move among his hinds,

Until our blood, commingling, virginal,

With heaven, brought such requital to desire

The very hinds discerned it, in a star.

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 a part of pain,

And next in glory to enduring love,

Not this dividing and indifferent blue.

IV

She says, “I am content when wakened birds,

Before they fly, test the reality

Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;

But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields

Return no more, where, then, is paradise?”

There is not any haunt of prophecy,

Nor any old chimera of the grave,

Neither the golden underground, nor isle

Melodious, where spirits gat them home,

Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm

Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured

As April’s green endures; or will endure

Like her remembrance of awakened birds,

Or her desire for June and evening, tipped

By the consummation of the swallow’s wings.

V

She says, “But in contentment I still feel

The need of some imperishable bliss.”

Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,

Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams

And our desires. Although she strews the leaves

Of sure obliteration on our paths,

The path sick sorrow took, the many paths

Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love

Whispered a little out of tenderness,

She makes the willow shiver in the sun

For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze

Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.

She causes boys to pile new plums and pears

On disregarded plate. The maidens taste

And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

VI

Is there no change of death in paradise?

Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs

Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,

Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,

With rivers like our own that seek for seas

They never find, the same receding shores

That never touch with inarticulate pang?

Why set the pear upon those river banks

Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?

Alas, that they should wear our colors there,

The silken weavings of our afternoons,

And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!

Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,

Within whose burning bosom we devise

Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

VII

Supple and turbulent, a ring of men

Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn

Their boisterous devotion to the sun,

Not as a god, but as a god might be,

Naked among them, like a savage source.

Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,

Out of their blood, returning to the sky;

And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,

The windy lake wherein their lord delights,

The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,

That choir among themselves long afterward.

They shall know well the heavenly fellowship

Of men that perish and of summer morn.

And whence they came and whither they shall go

The dew upon their feet shall manifest.

VIII

She hears, upon that water without sound,

A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine

Is not the porch of spirits lingering.

It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”

We live in an old chaos of the sun,

Or old dependency of day and night,

Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,

Of that wide water, inescapable.

Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail

Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;

Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;

And, in the isolation of the sky,

At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make

Ambiguous undulations as they sink,

Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Top 100 or so POEMS -- "The Snow Man" by Wallace Stevens

There are several poems by Wallace Stevens in our little anthology.  There are many poems by Wallace Stevens which are in the "Top Poetry" anthologies of others.  "The Snow Man" belongs in mine.

Poetry should not always be about form.  We really should read a poem with no interuption or outside stimuli; read it carefully.  Then, come to instant grips with the feelings that a work gives to you - what are you imagining and what are you feeling?

Then, look at the form.

This poem is a Stevens classic.  It seems to be an expression of Stevens' outward objective perspective of a winter scene to a relatively subjective emotional response (thinking of misery in the sound of the wind), to the final idea that the listener and the world itself are "nothing" apart from these perspectives.

Anyway, don't think too much.  Just enjoy the poem.  

The Snow Man
 
by Wallace Stevens
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

POEM OF THE DAY -- "Tattoo" By Wallace Stevens

It's been a long time since we've published an entry featuring
Wallace Stevens. He was one of the greatest and most influential Modernist Poets of the 20th century. Juggling a career as an attorney for a Life
Insurance Company and a poet?

Here's a little one of my favorites.

Was he on acid?

Tattoo

by Wallace Stevens

The light is like a spider.
It crawls over the water.
It crawls over the edges of the snow.
It crawls under your eyelids
And spreads its webs there--
Its two webs.

The webs of your eyes
Are fastened
To the flesh and bones of you
As to rafters or grass.

There are filaments of your eyes
On the surface of the water
And in the edges of the snow.

POEM OF THE DAY "Valley Candle" by Wallace Stevens

I love the poetry of Wallace Stevens.  Classic American poetry so obtuse, so strange -- I find it difficult to find the meaning - yet as a poet, after reading him, I tend to understand each poem on some sort of sub-atomic or spiritual level.

He was an enigma.  He cannot be labeled.  He was a lawyer, and worked for an insurance company, owned a big house in Connecticut.  He wore a suit and splashed on aftershave before he shuffled off to work each day - to live a life of policy and memo.

Although he advanced through business, he continued to write and publish books of poetry and essays.  Bizarre.  For example, as a Vice President of Hartford Insurance, he wrote "The Rabbit as King of Ghosts" while walking to work.

Enjoy "Valley Candle" as it is presented below.  Perhaps we don't know what it means -- even so, understand it.

That's the way it works.  The beauty of Wallace Stevens.

Valley Candle  

by Wallace Stevens

My candle burned alone in an immense valley.
Beams of the huge night converged upon it,
Until the wind blew.
The beams of the huge night
Converged upon its image,
Until the wind blew.

-

POEM OF THE DAY -- "The Planet On The Table" by Wallace Stevens

The creative world of American poet Wallace Stevens is an interesting place where spirit, intellect, the universe, abstractions and reality intersect.  This particular poem -- "The Planet On The Table" -- is often perceived as a set of instructions from the poet to his readers as he publishes his final collection of poems and places them "on the table".

Spiritually created, Stevens is indicating that his poems are a result of and a part of eternity...yet somehow, in today's perspective, they are as much a physical creation as our planet.

But our planet, as we know - is actually NOT eternal.  So is this a disappointment?  (You're supposed to be thinking here)

No.  The poems live on in the collective soul of all who have read them and been touched by them.  They are eternal, and so are we.  They are as much a part of infinity as a great song, such as "Imagine" by John Lennon.

Anyway, enjoy.  This poem is part of the wonderful Stevens collection shown at the link below and to the right.  Add it to your collection - no poetry collection is complete without the great American poet, Wallace Stevens.

Tomorrow, stay tuned for some Carl Sandburg - anti-war sentiment. 

The Planet On The Table  

by Wallace Stevens

Ariel was glad he had written his poems.
They were of a remembered time
Or of something seen that he liked.


Other makings of the sun
Were waste and welter
And the ripe shrub writhed.


His self and the sun were one
And his poems, although makings of his self,
Were no less makings of the sun.


It was not important that they survive.
What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament or character,


Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part. 

-

POEM OF THE DAY -- "Of Modern Poetry" by Wallace Stevens

Of Modern Poetry  

by Wallace Stevens

The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one. The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark, twanging
An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives
Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly
Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,
Beyond which it has no will to rise.
It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind. 

-

POEM OF THE DAY "The Planet on the Table" by Wallace Stevens

"The Planet on the Table" is a brief introspective on Stevens own journey into the world of Modern Poetry, highly experimental at the time of writing. He is justifying the difference and hence the combination of imagination and spirit that were so revolutionary at the time, and sometimes so hard to understand. eNothing recommends the following collection of Stevens poetry - read a little at a time:


The Planet On The Table

by Wallace Stevens

Ariel was glad he had written his poems.
They were of a remembered time
Or of something seen that he liked.

Other makings of the sun
Were waste and welter
And the ripe shrub writhed.

His self and the sun were one
And his poems, although makings of his self,
Were no less makings of the sun.

It was not important that they survive.
What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament or character,

Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part.

-

POEM OF THE DAY "Domination of Black" by Wallace Stevens

Domination Of Black

by Wallace Stevens

At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.
I heard them cry -- the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

-

Top 100 or so Poems - POEM OF THE DAY "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" by Wallace Stevens.

It would not be possible to include only one of Stevens' poems in our Top 100 anthology (the other being his "Anecdote of the Jar"). Wallace Stevens was one of the most influential and important of the American Modernist poets. Stevens was an officer of a prominent insurance company (now known as The Hartford) and worked in relative anonymity as a poet for most of his career. In his fifties, he published his famous "Collected Poems" won him the coveted Pulitzer Prize in 1955.

Stevens, as a poet (remember, according to William Carlos Williams all poets are damned) was not always the genteel insurance vice-presodent which is portrayed today; famous Key West altercations included drunken fighting with Robert Frost and a fist fight with Ernest Hemingway in which he broke his hand on Hemingway's jaw an act which was quickly followed by Stevens being pummeled several times into the street.

Blurring the line between imagination and reality, this breakthrough Wallace Stevens poem appears to be about death, cold death. Masterfully constructed, this is an American masterpiece in clever word-play, so enjoy! And comments, please.

The Emperor Of Ice-Cream

by Wallace Stevens

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.

POEM OF THE DAY "A Rabbit As King Of The Ghosts" by Wallace Stevens

This is yet another classic by Wallace Stevens -- one of the more popular Stevens pieces with so much study and analysis out there for all to see. eNothing would love to hear some of what you "feel" this poem is about, so please share on this one.

This poem was picked for today's Poem of the Day entry by Mary Karr - author and poet - who has studied Wallace Stevens extensively. Thanks so much Mary; this is a wonderful piece.

A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts

By Wallace Stevens

The difficulty to think at the end of day,
When the shapeless shadow covers the sun
And nothing is left except light on your fur—

There was the cat slopping its milk all day,
Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk
And August the most peaceful month.

To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,
Without that monument of cat,
The cat forgotten on the moon;

And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light
In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained;

Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of it-
self;
And east rushes west and west rushes down,
No matter. The grass is full

And full of yourself. The trees around are for you,
The whole of the wideness of night is for you,
A self that touches all edges,

You become a self that fills the four corners of
night.
The red cat hides away in the fur-light
And there you are humped high, humped up,

You are humped higher and higher, black as
stone—
You sit with your head like a carving in space
And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.

-

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POEM OF THE DAY "Poem Written at Morning" by Wallace Stevens

Poem Written At Morning

by Wallace Stevens

A sunny day's complete Poussiniana
Divide it from itself. It is this or that
And it is not.
By metaphor you paint
A thing. Thus, the pineapple was a leather fruit,
A fruit for pewter, thorned and palmed and blue,
To be served by men of ice.
The senses paint
By metaphor. The juice was fragranter
Than wettest cinnamon. It was cribled pears
Dripping a morning sap.
The truth must be
That you do not see, you experience, you feel,
That the buxom eye brings merely its element
To the total thing, a shapeless giant forced
Upward.
Green were the curls upon that head.

-

Top 100 or so Poems -- POEM OF THE DAY "Anecdote of the Jar" by Wallace Stevens

12/1/2011

An obvious choice as one of the classic (and most analyzed) poems of all time, this Wallace Stevens poem is thought to be one of the most influential pieces with regards to the comparison of the human -- to nature.

Using confusing metaphor and word play and a unique form which creates tension (without resolution), I urge you to read the poem as an attempt to understand the human condition and result -- to the steadfastness of Mother Nature. See what you come up with!

There are a million other analyzations and twists and turns -- all resulting from these 3 apparently simple stanzas.

Wow.

Anecdote of the Jar

By Wallace Stevens

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

-