Uni-verse

I.
You write a poem. You have made the universe’s ridge,

a purple turning violet, an uprisen lark bellishing in blue

jubilation, who swings a single wing against the tyrant sun

and swipes away the light. When the skylark starts to soar

it means the coming wraith of war. When the sky implodes

in rage, it means your blood dies dry on page. Hush

little poet, don’t speak a word. Under charnel vaults

not a gasp is heard. All time is silent where your corpse

rots interned. And if that risen lark should sing, just strive

within the milky edge of wing, the forge-wrought flail

of feathers flaking flames and flinging fire. The world falls

to different rebels now, as maelstroms of whitened hail

shatter air to whiter hail in shrapnelled apogee, a flash

of dawnblasted ice that lashes nerve from bone, a fresh

apotheosis of fluttered cries dissolved to sovereign sound.

II.
It is a theater of solar wind and crumbling cloud, a play

with no proscenium, no final act, and no denouement.

It is pulsing wave on wave through rushing waves

on splurging pips of particles through flowing forms

of forms on metamorphoses of gushing primal light.

It is light transformed to orange churned red by space

expanding, elselands of concealings rippling like sand

made rock turned sand again. It is a remembered time,

a half-time, a para-time, curved by the planetary poem.

It is a poem upon a plate, a pâté of poïesis, fat, fat

poïesis, a giant’s poem, a poem of rumpled plums.

Fie, fie for so much plump poïesis, fee-fie-fo-fum,

such lascivious labials, fie-fum, licentious liquids,

fee-fie, frittered plantain fricatives. Pardon, pardon

such rude and bulging blues, these rustic reds

which ought to be a famished, fusty gold. Forgive

the prinking pinks. Sorry about the orange-vermeil.

A Note on the Interpretation of 'The Snow Man'

This essay is a work in progress. It needs to be revised and extensively expanded, because it's necessarily incomplete, since I'm currently only dealing with half of the propositional content.

‘The Snow Man’ presents a dissolution of the categorical distinction between subject and object. Here we may detect the influence of Heidegger’s In-der-Welt-sein, although we need not restrict ourselves to a Heideggarian analysis, since Stevens appropriated philosophy for his poetry on the basis of aesthetic rather than systematic necessity. As he put it, “I like my philosophy smothered in beauty, not the other way around.” Stevens, was, moreover, too self-deprecating to consider himself a proper philosopher, declaring himself deficient in diligence and memory, a bit of flagrant self-debasement given his prodigious intellectual capacity--nevertheless, we may locate his position very close to the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger. It’s evident from 'The Snow Man' that Stevens held the qualitative content of consciousness to be itself a type of reality, and regarded as false the dichotomy between events in the mind and events in the external world. As we shall see, the titular snow man is by the poem's end both the subject and the object, both the beholder and the beheld.

To understand how Stevens accomplishes this transformation, let us examine the specific poetic choices that inform the semantic, syntactic, and phonological content of this poem. Firstly, the description of the landscape contains finely adumbrated figuration such that the disordering effects of entropy in nature evoke biophysiological analogues, a technique which is not quite anthropomorphization, but the metaphorical implications are clear enough. For instance, the description of the pine-trees as “crusted” is redolent of unshaveness, uncleanliness, bleariness, and fatigue, as well as of a temperamental crustiness, as in cantankerousness or curmudgeonliness. Nextly, the junipers are described as “shagged,” a word whose primary adjectival usage in the 1920s referred to either overgrowth or encrustation, or to hirsuteness (carrying connotations of haggardness, gauntness, and dishevelment), reflecting its derivation from the Old English sceacgede “hairy.” “Rough” has a similar original signification, stemming from the Old English ruh, meaning “rough, coarse (of cloth) hairy, shaggy; untrimmed; uncultivated,” an etymological lineage perhaps reflected in its contemporary dual resonance in referring either to primarily tactile phenomena or to an uncivilized coarseness of demeanor.  

The phrase “mind of winter” is syntactically a generative construction, which given its metaphorical nature may elicit multiple meanings, but which Stevens here employs to simultaneously express both reference quality and compositionality; that is, to indicate respectively that the mind is both characterized by winter, as in the homologous expression “a man of humor” and composed of winter, as in “a ring of gold,” thereby collapsing the Cartesian duality of mind and matter.

Stevens further transfigures the snow man through a felicitous syntactical sleight of hand. “Have” in the first line is used in the present indicative to mean “possess” while in the fourth line the verb is transfigured to become the auxiliary verb to the past particle “been” in a present perfect construction. This tense shift is accompanied by a concomitant transformation of linguistic modality (the speaker’s attitudinal expression towards the propositional content of the speech act) from deontic (the modality of necessity) to epistemic (the modality of supposition), which pendulates on the conversion of the modal auxiliary verb “must.” This amorphous boundary between these two categories of irrealis moods encapsulates Stevens’ conceptualization of the transfiguring power of imagination: that it is a process by which our ideas about necessity morph into our notions about possibility in a seemingly permeable interchange of ontology and epistemology.

Stevens also creates an appositional identification of the sound of the wind with the sound of a few leaves, and then equates the unity of this appositional identification with the sound of the land (containing the wind blowing within that land) by specifying it as the referent to the following non-restrictive relative clause. We may also note that Stevens conceptually synthesizes the wind, sound, land, and mind through the phonemic echo /nd/. In effect, he equates the medium of perceptual transduction with the perception itself, again subverting the dichotomy between mind and reality. The enjambment of line seven has a similar effect, permitting the expression of both the intransitive and transitive senses of the verb “think,” a tactic which allows Stevens to emphasize the inseparability of consciousness from its phenomenological intentionality, signifying the interdependence between object and subject.

Notice how in this poem metaphor supplants metaphor: the artificial, particularly human interpretation of winter as misery yields to the metaphor of winter as purification and purgation. Even phenomenological reduction, the quest to perceive without presupposition things as they really are, zu den Sachen selbst in the words of Husserl, let’s see the very thing and nothing else in the words of Stevens, is a particularly human endeavor, mediated by the same interpretation. This is why ‘the snow man,’ who hears no misery in the sound of fallen leaves, perceives among the landscape not barren trees but rather pines, spruces, and junipers -- all evergreens -- and why, furthermore, human temporal divisions are indicated by the location of the winter in January, the calendarical new year. The evergreens and the January sun in which they are illuminated are significant in that firstly, they are symbols of rejuvenation, in particular a poïetic rejuvenation; that is, they represent the generation of a new fiction to displace the existential nihility created by Nietzsche’s gott ist tot. Secondly, the presence of such symbols signifies the projection of phenomenological content onto inhuman reality. For the author of Harmonium, there is no facet of the object that is untouched by the subject, and no aspect of the physical world unpermeated with the qualitative subjective experience of human consciousness.

Pater Peccavi

Peccavi. Forgive not the flavid afterbloom of my sins

as blue as forget-me-nots. I am not the one who breathed
the wind into my breast, not the one who beat

my battered heart to death. What else, what else could I do
if I flared like sempiternal light? Would I only knock
some sense to your damned skull, and you would open

your mouth and teach me, saying: I am not the one

who said I had a name, not the one who kneaded flesh

to leavened bread, who came immaculately, and filled

the sky with clocks to keep the pulse of pre-eternal time.

The Quintessence of Color
For the Emperor of Green ¹

Conceived in green's green pedigree, the quetzal   
is the pip of primogeniture, whose ruddy underside   
is overseen by greedy sight, mustering for the bright
emplumed panache. It must be green. It must belong   
amidst the ritz of regent paradise. It needs perpetuate
the green regime. Such red-red-ruby-rosy-rusty-red
pertains to parvenus: It is a flit of figuration, a frill 
on the primal metaphor, just the trope of glitz
one would expect, had one a mind in monochrome.

¹Viridis XI, who ruled as Holy Emperor of Semprepace (the capital city of the universe) from 411 C.E. until 434 C.E. when he was removed from power by the Blue Rebellion. Viridis XI, whose name by birth was Jarocus Axdarus, extended the promulgation of green's chromatic singularity that his predecessor, Viridis X, had initiated, purportedly erecting jade monuments at each of the city's four cardinal gates which bore the following inscription:

Everything pertains to green, all-seeding and all-ceding hue, most primitive thing, progenitor of muskmelon green, jade green, pistachio green, jacamar green, beryl green, quetzal green, pakchoi green, puka green, feijoa green. All non-green things are statements about non-greenness and therefore exist only in relation to green.

A quetzal, the necessarily green bird

O Boneco de Neve

O Boneco de Neve
de Wallace Stevens

Deve-se ter uma mente de inverno

Para olhar a geada e os galhos

Dos pinheiros incrustados com neve;

E se ter sentido frio muito tempo

Para observar os juníperos desgrenhados com gelo,

Os espruces ásperos no lampejo distante

Do sol de Janeiro; e não pensar

De nenhum miséria no som do vento,

No som de umas poucas folhas,

Que é o som da terra

Cheia do mesmo vento

Que está soprando no mesmo lugar vazio

Para quem escuta, que escuta na neve,

E, nada ele mesmo, observa

Nada que não está lá e o nada que está.

The Snow Man

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.

North of the earthenbloom ran the land where every rose 
was not a rose was not a risen knot of wreathing prose,
where moonblood oozed holy flesh upon the frozen moor
and every quark aligned in paradox that spliced the past
to futured ossuaries in my mind. The particles of para-time
bred breathless beneath my breast an underland of heartbeats
that struck the sunset dun and strung the broken covenant
across the Arc of time. I felt the crescent's curve carve up
the State of Stalemate, felt the whiteheaded statues turn
their transfixed eyes to the umberland drumming underneath.


Essentially, this poem seeks to refute Gertrude Stein's remark, "A rose is a rose is a rose" by asserting that a rose is not a risen knot of prose that wreathes in rings around the rosie rows amid the knobby knolls where knotgrass grows.