It was Wallace Stevens’s birthday, so I let myself wander back through the poems of his that have been living, quietly, in my pockets. I’ve written about a handful on my site over the years—how the worldly and the otherworldly pour through him like light through colored glass.
There’s the wry funeral hymn of “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”, where pleasure and mortality sit across the same kitchen table; the little fable I once called “proof that life continues after death”, which is really about how imagination won’t stop working even when the world says stop; the bright elegy “Mozart, 1935”, where music keeps the window open; a few philosophical miniatures that felt like stones in the pocket; and the mountain that got traded out for a poem, “The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain.”
There are three additional ones that I like but I haven't posted yet: Sunday Morning, Anecdote of the Jar, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. I have posted those below,
Every birthday is an excuse to reread, but this time two small tributes found me—poems written for him, or to him, or in his neighborhood. Reading them was like bumping into a friend of a friend who not only remembers your favorite stories but tells them in a new key.
Here’s the first, by David Ignatow:
In Memoriam, 1879–1979
On an Ordinary Eveningby David Ignatow
I am back to walking alone
through silent streets lit by colorful windows
of the homes of responsible men and women,
and I refuse responsibility.
I am weeping without tears,
with hands jammed into pockets
under trees smelling of leaves
and grass of the gardens—
smelling the silence of stolidity
and peace and wanting no peace
until it is written in my poems.
And here’s the second, printed in Mānoa:
Wallace Stevens Walks by the Sea
And now it is that it rises.
Beyond what we can hear,
the whole ocean as a hand
across a mouth. I walk
and it is only this thought.
And it is only this darkness that
lies on the eyes like two coins.
Everything beautiful is also in motion,
isn’t that a curious thing.
If you look closely enough
you fall down a flight of stairs,
the constellations on their little wheels,
the ocean everywhere.
Why do these feel so Stevensy without ever dressing up in his vocabulary? Maybe because they step onto his stage—the everyday world—and speak his verb: to make. Stevens kept reminding us (with the gentle stubbornness of someone who knew both premiums and poems) that art is not something pinned under glass; it’s a present-tense action. In “Of Modern Poetry” he names it plain: “the poem of the mind in the act of finding / what will suffice.” Ignatow’s ending—“wanting no peace / until it is written in my poems”—is that same ethic in work boots. No peace until the making happens.
Ignatow also borrows Stevens’s sidewalk: the city block, “silent streets,” windows lit up with the lives of “responsible men and women.” It’s hard not to hear the long, lucid walk of An Ordinary Evening in New Haven pacing under his lines—the way Stevens tests thought against stoops and hedges, how the metaphysical keeps glancing off a literal windowpane. (If you want just one page to keep by your tea, the Poetry Foundation bio and the lovely Stevens 101 sketch this late style well.)
The sea-walk poem turns the compass the other way—back to water, the great theater of “The Idea of Order at Key West.” In Key West, the ocean makes “the constant cry,” and a human voice arranges that noise into something like song; here, the ocean becomes “a hand / across a mouth.” It’s a gorgeous reversal: the inhuman doesn’t shout; it hushes. When the sea covers the mouth, thinking has to sing. That’s Stevens all over—the pressure on the imagination to answer the world, not by escaping it but by answering it in kind.
Then there’s that line, “Everything beautiful is also in motion,” which, if you’ve read Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, feels like a friendly paraphrase of the rule that beauty (and truth) must change. Stevens writes somewhere that reality is the activity of the mind among its images; the tribute poem gives us the mind’s balance problem: look closely enough and “you fall down a flight of stairs,” past the bannister of the visible into “constellations on their little wheels.” That drop—from close domestic detail into starry scale—is a trick Stevens loved, whether in “The Auroras of Autumn” or the sea-mirroring stanzas of “Sea Surface Full of Clouds.” The last line here—“the ocean everywhere”—reads like a one-line biography of his imagination.
I keep circling back to the mood both tributes share: a kind of lucid sorrow. Ignatow calls it “weeping without tears,” and in Stevens’s own late work the weather is similar—“The Plain Sense of Things” has “this blank cold, this sadness without cause.” But notice what both tributes inherit besides the weather: the remedy. Not denial, not grand consolation—just the honest labor of making. Walk. Look. Think. Make. If there’s peace, it only arrives after the poem, not before.
So on his birthday I end up where I usually end up with Stevens: grateful for the way he lets the ordinary keep its ordinariness while asking it very large questions. Grateful for the brisk hand he lends to newer poets who want to think in the open air. And grateful for how his poems, even when they face the cold, keep a stove going. If the mountain can be replaced by a poem, as he once wrote, maybe a little of the sea and the street can be, too—not to erase them, but to meet them with a music we ourselves make.
More -
A documentary on Wallace Stevens:
A good lecture on Wallace Stevens:
Lovely picks. Here are concise notes plus full texts (all public-domain) for each.
Anecdote of the Jar
A tiny parable about art’s power to impose order: a plain jar “takes dominion” over a “slovenly wilderness,” raising questions about whether culture clarifies or colonizes nature. Stevens keeps the diction bare—“gray and bare”—so the form enacts the idea. Many readers hear echoes of modernism’s cool confidence (and its limits): once the jar arrives, everything rearranges itself around it, yet the jar “did not give of bird or bush.” Control isn’t the same as life.
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.
Sunday Morning
A meditation that begins with “coffee and oranges” and opens into the big argument of Harmonium: can earthly beauty and mortal joy suffice without Christian transcendence? Across eight cantos, Stevens contrasts churchly “ancient sacrifice” with a pagan fidelity to the here-and-now—“Death is the mother of beauty.” The poem’s music moves from lush description to metaphysical clarity, ending not in despair but in a luminous acceptance of a world “Unsponsored, free, / Of that wide water, inescapable.”
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 fulfillment 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 willows 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-plucked 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.
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.
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.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
A prism of 13 tiny visions, each tilting the world a degree. The blackbird becomes a device for seeing how perception makes reality—sometimes comic (“O thin men of Haddam”), sometimes crystalline (“I was of three minds”). Its spare lines and musical pauses (that famous “or just after”) show Stevens testing how much meaning can live in minimal images. The result is both playful and philosophical: a manual for attention.
Text
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.
Singing oneness!
