Monday

2 October 2017

— right this second the eastern sky eight shades of peach and orange with the dawn

Good Morning All,

I may be taking my life into my hands, but after sending you yesterday one of my all-time favorite poems too big to squeeze into the Day Book columns, here comes another.

It’s by Wallace Stevens, born today in 1879. He spent most of his life as an executive in an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut, but he still managed to knock down a Pulitzer in 1955 for his Collected Poems a couple of months before his death.

His short poem Anecdote of the Jar which is in the Day Book is also dynamite. Being a card-carrying Romantic following in the muddy boot steps of good old Bill Wordsworth, I was at first shocked by this poem, which certainly made me sit up and take notice. I mean, already by the third line, the persona is referring to “the slovenly wilderness”! My first reaction was: “Well, Jeeze, what can you expect from a death-better from Hartford?” 

But then I read it again and it seemed to me that Stevens (or at least the persona) was saying something positive about art (the jar), human imagination, and the value of human-made things. He seemed to be asserting  that art is more beautiful than nature, which seemed to me to be overdoing things a tad. My own aesthetic sense of things is that both nature and art have equal beauty and power. But maybe the speaker is just overdoing his assertions to get my attention. 

My fourth time through it, it seemed that somehow John Keats--his Grecian Urn under his arm--had quietly slipped in through the back door of this poem. I did my best to fiddle with that some,  but ultimately decided I was not bright enough to make any coherent connections.

Anyway, here’s my favorite Stevens poem. Only Theodore Roethke’s The Waking contains for me more buoyant mystery:

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Wallace Stevens

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II

I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV

A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI

Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII

O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII

I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X

At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI

He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII

The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

Go and Stay Well,

Bhekaron

P.S. Two Holly snaps:

1263: Battle of Largs on the Firth of Clyde, Scotland, Norwegian and Scottish armies tussle indecisively.

1470: Richard Neville, the Warwick Kingmaker, starts rebellion that forces King Edward IV of England to scamper off to the Netherlands, thus restoring Henry VI to the throne.

1535: Jacques Cartier discovers Montreal before it was there.

1552: Ivan the Terrible beats up on the people of Kazan.

1789: George Washington sends the Bill of Rights to the states for approval.

1864: Rebels win one against the Yanks at Saltville, Virginia.

1919: U.S. President Wilson suffers massive stroke, leaving him partially paralyzed.

1928: "Prelature of the Holy Cross and the Work of God" (Opus Dei) founded by Josemaria Escrivá.

1937: Dominican Strongman Rafael Trujillo executes 20,000 Haitians living within the country's borders.

1941: World War II: Operation Typhoon; Nazis make all-out push towards Moscow.

1950: Charles Shultz publishes his first Peanuts.

1958: Guinea to France: Au revoir.

1959: Twilight Zone premiers.

1967: Thurgood Marshall sworn in as first African-American Supreme Court Justice.

1980: Michael Meyers, U.S. Rep. from PA, becomes first member of Congress to be expelled since Civil War; caught taking bribes during Abscam scandal.

1996: President Clinton signs Electronic Freedom of Information Act Amendments.